u/appbuilderdaily

Early on with Valycode someone left a comment on one of our posts that essentially said the product was solving a problem that didn't need solving. That people who are bad at prompting AI tools don't need a structured framework, they need to just use the tools more until they get better. That we were adding process to something that should just be intuitive.

It annoyed me for about a week. We'd been building for months, had real users, had people paying for it. The idea that the core premise was flawed felt like something to dismiss rather than engage with.

But it kept coming back. Mostly because I couldn't fully argue against it. There is a version of our user who would outgrow the product naturally as they got more experienced. If that was most of our users the ceiling on retention was built into the product by design.

What it actually forced us to do was get much clearer on who the product is genuinely for. Not people who are new to AI tools and will eventually not need us. But people who are building complex things regularly and need structured thinking not as a crutch but as a consistent part of their workflow. The distinction matters a lot for positioning, for onboarding, for what we put on the landing page.

We'd been a bit fuzzy on that before the comment. After it we weren't.

The feedback that's easy to receive is the feedback that confirms what you already think. Someone saying the product is great, that it solved their problem, that they told a friend. That feels good but it doesn't move anything. The comment that made me defensive for a week changed how we think about the product permanently.

What's the sharpest criticism your product has received and did you end up acting on it or dismissing it?

Not because we pivoted. The core idea is the same. But almost every specific decision we made at launch turned out to be wrong in some way.

The name stayed. The problem we're solving stayed. Everything else about Valycode has changed at least once. Onboarding, pricing, the primary workflow, what we put on the landing page, which features we lead with, how we talk about it.

What's strange is that none of those changes felt like failures at the time. Each one felt like a correction based on something we'd learned. The product got iteratively less wrong rather than dramatically better.

I think this is probably how it works for most products but the building in public narrative tends to skip the middle part. The posts that do well are launch posts and milestone posts. The quiet months of finding out you were wrong about most things and adjusting don't make for great content.

What's the biggest thing you got wrong at launch that you only understood much later?

Before Valycode I'd shipped side projects that got users. Traffic, signups, people using the thing. None of them made meaningful money and I told myself that was fine, it was about learning.

Getting to $500 MRR with actual recurring revenue from people who chose to pay changed something. Not because the number is life-changing but because the feedback loop is completely different. A signup tells you someone was curious enough to try it. A recurring payment tells you it's worth something in their actual life.

It's made me much more interested in the monetisation question from day one on anything new. Not in a mercenary way, more that willingness to pay feels like the most honest signal of whether you've actually solved something versus just built something interesting.

Has crossing that threshold changed how you approach new ideas? Or do you still treat early projects as learning exercises regardless of whether they make money?

Early on with Valycode we'd get occasional feedback from users who wanted more features, more complexity, more customisation. We'd take it seriously, discuss it, sometimes build it.

Over time we noticed something. The users asking for the most were almost never the ones paying. The paying users rarely asked for anything. They just used what was there and renewed.

It's made us a lot more selective about which feedback actually drives product decisions. Vocal users and valuable users are not the same group. The ones who engage with you most are often the ones with the most friction with the product, which is useful to know, but it doesn't mean their version of the product is the right one to build.

We now pay more attention to what paying users do than what any users say. Not because feedback is worthless but because behaviour is harder to perform than words are.

Has anyone else found a way to weight feedback more systematically? How do you decide which voices actually shape the roadmap?

Before Valycode I had a reasonable model of effort. A feature like this takes a day. A redesign like that takes a week. I could estimate with some accuracy.

Building a real product with real users has broken that completely. The technical work is almost never the bottleneck. It's the decision before the technical work. Should we build this at all. What version of it. What does done actually mean. What are we trading off.

Those decisions take longer than the building and I had no framework for estimating them. I still don't really. The other thing that's impossible to estimate is how long it takes to learn something. You can decide to do user research in a day. Actually changing your model of the user based on what you hear takes weeks of it quietly settling.

Anyone else find that the meta-skills of building, deciding, prioritising, learning, are the ones that take the most time and have the least visibility on a roadmap?

We’re at $500 MRR with Valycode and 2,200 users, and the behavioural gap between free and paid is one of the most useful things we’ve observed this year.

Free users explore. They click around, try different things, generate something once, maybe come back a week later, then disappear. They’re in discovery mode. Paid users are almost the opposite. They arrive knowing exactly what they want, do the specific thing they came to do, and leave within minutes. They’re not browsing features. They already made their decision before they logged in.

What this changed for us is how we think about onboarding. Our instinct was to show new users everything the product could do, the full feature set, all the use cases. But paid users didn’t convert because they understood the breadth of the product. They converted because one specific thing solved one specific problem and they trusted they’d need it again.

So we’re now building two essentially different journeys. One for people still figuring out whether this is for them, and one for people who already know.

Curious whether others have hit this split and how you’ve handled it. Did you lean into one audience or try to serve both? And at what point did it feel worth the investment to actually separate the experiences?

A year ago we launched Valycode, an AI toolkit for people building software with tools like Cursor, Lovable and ChatGPT.

Current stats:

• $360 MRR
• 2.2k users
• Acquisition primarily through TikTok and Reddit
• Very simple operating model (a few hours per week)
• Documented marketing process that can be learned quickly

The challenge is that we've recently started building another product that has our full attention.

Now we're debating whether it's better to:

1. Continue growing Valycode alongside the new product
2. Pursue an exit and focus entirely on the new venture

For founders who've built and exited micro SaaS products:

How did you know when it was time to focus on one thing?

And how did you think about valuation when the business was still growing?

Would love to hear your experiences.

A year ago we launched Valycode, an AI toolkit for people building software with tools like Cursor, Lovable and ChatGPT.

Current stats:

• $360 MRR
• 2.2k users
• Acquisition primarily through TikTok and Reddit
• Very simple operating model (a few hours per week)
• Documented marketing process that can be learned quickly

The challenge is that we've recently started building another product that has our full attention.

Now we're debating whether it's better to:

1. Continue growing Valycode alongside the new product
2. Pursue an exit and focus entirely on the new venture

For founders who've built and exited micro SaaS products:

How did you know when it was time to focus on one thing?

And how did you think about valuation when the business was still growing?

Would love to hear your experiences.

When we first launched Valycode we priced it at $13/month.

Signups slowed down almost immediately. We dropped the price to $6 and they came back.

At first I thought that meant we'd simply priced too high, but now I'm not so sure. The more I think about it, the more I wonder whether price was just the easiest thing for users to point to while there were actually other objections underneath.

Maybe they didn't understand the value, or they weren't convinced they'd use it regularly, or they just weren't ready to pay for AI tooling yet.

It made me realise pricing isn't an isolated variable. It's tangled up with positioning, messaging and perceived outcomes.

I'd be interested to know whether anyone else has changed pricing and discovered the results weren't as straightforward as they first appeared.

We've now had over 2,200 people create accounts for Valycode.

The biggest surprise is how quickly assumptions break. A feature I thought would be our main selling point barely gets touched. A small workflow we almost didn't build is now one of the things people seem to value most.

Content ideas I thought would flop end up driving signups. Ideas I was convinced would do well disappear without a trace.

The experience has made me much less confident in my own predictions and much more willing to ship something, watch what users actually do and adjust from there.

I'm curious whether other founders become less opinionated over time rather than more. It definitely feels that way for me.

We're sitting at around 2,200 free signups and just over $300 MRR with Valycode.

One thing that's really surprised me is how different the two groups are. Free users often click around, explore different pages, generate one or two things and leave. Some come back weeks later.

Paid users are almost the opposite. Most of them arrive with a very specific job to do, generate exactly what they need and then leave within minutes. They're not trying to discover features. They just want the outcome.

It's made us rethink onboarding completely. Originally we wanted to show everything the platform could do. Now I'm wondering whether we should actually hide most of it and optimise purely for getting someone to their first successful output as quickly as possible.

Interested whether other SaaS founders have seen the same pattern or whether this is unique to AI products.

Been thinking about this while building my startup, Valycode.

Everyone talks about AI making development 10x faster, but honestly I don't think that's been the biggest change for us.

The biggest change is that it exposes bad thinking immediately.

A few months ago I'd spend a week building something before realising the idea didn't really make sense. Now Cursor or Claude will generate it in 10 minutes, and I can instantly see all the holes in my own plan.

Ironically, that's made planning far more important than it used to be. We've actually started spending more time writing specifications and structured prompt frameworks than we do generating code itself, because every hour of planning seems to save multiple hours of rebuilding later.

Curious if anyone else using AI heavily has noticed the bottleneck shifting away from engineering and towards product thinking.

Hi, I've got this exam in about 2 weeks, I've been going through the servicenow university and Udemy content, and using MeasureUp for exam practice. I've seen some posts on here of people saying this is one of the trickier ServiceNow exams.

Anyone who's passed it, any tips/advice would be much appreciated 👍

One thing I didn't expect while building Valycode was how different paying users behave.

Free users often explore. Paid users usually arrive with a job they need to get done immediately. They don't want to browse every feature or click every button, they want to solve a problem and leave. It's made us rethink onboarding completely.

Instead of trying to show everything the platform can do, we're trying to get people to their first useful output as fast as possible.

I suspect most SaaS products would benefit from removing steps rather than adding more.

Curious if anyone else has experienced something similar?

Still at $300 MRR. Not where we want to be but here's what shifted this month:

Reddit is working better than expected. Not from posting links but from genuinely showing up in conversations. The posts that perform best are the ones where Valycode comes up naturally as part of a workflow we're sharing, not as something we're promoting.

TikTok is inconsistent. Some slideshows get decent reach, most get buried. Still haven't cracked what makes one perform vs another.

Paid promotion barely breaks even at $6/month so we've mostly stepped back from it.

Focus for next month: more posts like the ones that worked, Product Hunt prep, and actually talking to our free users about why they haven't converted.

What's working for others at this stage?

I have like 40 ideas in my notes app at any given time. Used to just pick whichever felt most exciting that day and start building. Shipped maybe 1 in 20.

Trying to be more deliberate now, my current filter is basically:

• Can I describe the user in one sentence without saying "people who"
• Can I describe the problem in one sentence without using "and"
• Is there a version of this that's actually small enough to ship in a week
• If any of those fail, I don't open claude code yet. I sit with the idea longer or kill it.

The way I actually run this filter now is I throw the idea into valycode (online PRD prompt generator tool) and see what comes back , if the generated spec is coherent, the idea has bones. If it comes back vague, that's usually a sign the idea isn't formed enough yet and I need to think more before building.

Curious how other people decide what makes the cut.