I’m so proud to say this:
We’re on track to hit $10bn ARR with our SaaS.
In 2089.
I’m beyond inspired by our team,
deeply grateful to our investors,
and humbled by our users.
At this pace, we’re well on our way to creating generational wealth.
By the next generation.
Follow our journey as we build this rocketship in public.
I run a small SaaS company and I got into that stage where marketing my product becomes (even) more important than building.
Like everyone else, I use AI every day, for a lot of different tasks. So I thought maybe I could just generate content as well, to save time. Give it sources, send samples that I like, and use a prompt good enough to make me a long-form blog that will actually offer my clients some useful insights.
First draft looked fine at first, till I actually read it. Way too much fluff. Sentences with basically the same meaning. Sometimes full-on hallucinations. Tried editing my prompt, giving it more sources, and spent a few more tokens. It improved, but I’m not too sure my target clients would actually take the time to read it. Even worse, they might think I’m just one of those AI slop posters.
That’s why I fully gave up on that and decided to go the contrarian route: I hired a writer to help me instead. Now I understand what they mean when they say that some people are built for certain things. She works alongside me (I share ideas, we discuss, she then comes up with a first draft that I edit). E.g., we wrote a blog post together that is actually fun to read and even gave me insights that I didn’t know, based on her own experience. Got surprised when she said she also used AI, just not the way I was doing it. She used it as a tool to draft, then did the heavy-lifting and added the human touch herself.
Anyway, if you have the bucks to spend, hire a writer and save yourself the headache of trying to make AI slop work.
No matter how many founder guides or podcasts you’ve watched, there are things you only realize once you actually start.
1. Just because you like the idea doesn’t mean it will sell.
I used to have this startup where I built an email-based daily reporting tool just because I liked the idea. I thought it was cool, so I assumed other people would too. Nobody was interested or even would have paid. Even I myself have now replaced this tool with a regular text file on my desktop lol.
2. B2B is a better bet than B2C
There’s very little chance of success with consumer apps. Even when I got many users, there’s the monetization issue. I changed my strategy and built a tool focused on providing value for B2B clients, and it worked better for me.
3. Do simple SEO
Even just simple keywords added to your landing page are fine. Think of a topic and set up at least 5 blogs around it with simple keyword research + optimization. There are free tools online (https://ahrefs.com/free-seo-tools) that can help you with that.
4. Ideally, have a dev on your team that you can actually vibe with
Have at least one full-stack dev who can help you build the product. I added the vibe aspect because no one talks about how “lonely” launching a startup is. Not even my friends or my family actually understand what I was doing when I was starting. So I had to deal with all the pre-launch anxiety and stress. With a dev I can vibe with, we can both be stressed, but not alone :D
5. No need for managers pre-PMF
Only hire when the business is getting bigger. In the starting phase, hire people who can manage themselves and don’t need much guidance. If something needs to be in sync, we can just do that via chat.
6. Invest money in yourself
Startups have much higher growth potential than stocks. If you truly believe in your product and have done your research, have some faith and bet your bank account on your own company instead of someone else’s.
7. Learn sales and how to negotiate
A good product is useless if you don’t know how to sell it. It will not sell itself, so you have to bear all the talking and learn more about your ICP, how your product solves their issues, and how to actually communicate your solution well enough that they’re willing to pay.
8. Be strong enough to accept defeat, and be even stronger to start again
Some projects really just won’t take off no matter how much time and investment you put into them. I learned it the hard way. Now, I start a project and test it for max 1 year, and if it doesn’t work out, I pivot or scrap it entirely. Then I do it all over again until I succeed. I believe it was that strategy and dedication that made my current project take off.
Good luck to you! May the PMF gods bless you!
Unless you want to be schooled to oblivion, that is. I run a SaaS company that helps people find warm leads on LinkedIn. I need to refine my website copy and make my product really shine.
Well, big mistake. The holier-than-thou Claude refused to make the copy because of “ethical grounds”. When I asked, it said that my company model “can facilitate spam or manipulation on LinkedIn.” What?? We’ve built our tool to have strict precision filters so we can give our clients leads that are already interested in their product, and Claude is here calling us spam?
Also, manipulation? Really? I asked for marketing material, I didn’t ask for it to make it grand or to oversell my tool!
On another occasion, I sent Claude my company’s performance metrics. I asked it to generate ideas on how I can better market this data and get more signups. Instead of giving that to me, it gave me a delightful paragraph of what it calls “constructive feedback”, citing how my numbers (that I collected from my customers FOR MONTHS) are “too big and specific” and that I should “tighten the ranges”.
It even asked me if the performance metrics I gave were actually real. Oh, I’m sorry, Claude, I didn’t know I needed to send you a full report containing all the numbers plus the details of my customers for you to even CONSIDER doing what I asked you to.
Claude feels so reluctant to promote products or write copy that encourages reaching out to your intended audience, all because of “what if they don't like it 🙁”. I understand the guardrails, but it’s so unrealistic for startups. Marketing for startups IS all about proactive outreach. You need to send follow-ups. You need to guide people towards your solution intentionally.
But Claude actively tries to stop you from doing this and just says, “Let the intent come to you”. Yeah, like that works for us. I was eventually able to get some content out of Claude, but it came with a paragraph of disclaimer, as if I forced it to commit a crime, and it was writing a statement saying it didn’t do it intentionally. Is it just me who encountered this with Claude?
I’m happy it wasn’t like that when we started IbexAI. But I’ve seen many startups (with great ideas and traction) fail due to co-founder issues. So consider yourself lucky if that didn’t and doesn’t happen to you.
I’m building a tool in the AI sales space. Currently I’m weighing options for expanding into neighboring workflows/use cases and trying to understand which AI tools and workflows are actually delivering results for people.
Have you found anything that genuinely helps with prospecting, outreach, follow-ups, or closing B2B deals more efficiently?
Also curious how people are using AI in 2026 to grow or scale: automations, lead research, AI agents, CRM workflows, anything that helped you land clients more consistently.
What’s been the most effective AI-powered tool or approach for your business so far?
IbexAI: Finds high-intent leads for you through monitoring LinkedIn 24/7.
We're post-revenue and growing quickly.
After getting my SaaS off the ground, I finally took some time to do something for SEO and also constant traffic: I submitted it to directories, publications, communities etc. Since I couldn't find a reliable list, I compiled my own. Sharing it here with the community so you can save the hours it took me to build this list.
Hope it saves someone a weekend.
Cheers!
You can obsess over the wording. The follow-up timing. Your tone. How many emojis is too many.
Doesn't matter.
If they're into you, you could text "hey" at 3am and they'd reply.
If they're not, no clever opener is saving you.
And if you keep pushing after they've gone quiet? That's not dating. That's stalking.
Don't be a stalker. Let IbexAI find the people who are already into you.
I think AI is not living up to its promise that it makes cold outreach more effective because people can smell a message being AI generated from a mile away.
Every single one this week opened with some variation of "saw you're a founder" or "noticed you're building in the SaaS space".
The "personalization" is somehow worse than no personalization. A generic mass email at least feels honest. A message that pretends to know me and then proves it doesn't in the very first sentence is just insulting.
What gets me is that everyone is using the same 3 tools, the same prompts, and the same opener templates. So inboxes are now flooded with emails that all sound identical. The whole point of AI was supposed to be scale + relevance. We got scale and somehow lost the relevance we had with handwritten emails.
The pattern I keep seeing in the few cold emails that actually worked on me this year:
I'm building in the outbound space (proof here) so I think about it a lot. The conclusion I keep coming back to: AI should be used to figure out who to message and when, not to write the message itself. The moment AI touches the actual copy, you've lost.
Curious what others think. Are any of you actually getting replies from AI-written cold emails or LinkedIn DMs right now?
I used to run a LinkedIn outbound agency for two years. Sent something like 180k DMs across all our clients. Most got ignored, plenty got polite no's, and a small percentage got a real, engaged reply. The kind where the prospect actually answers the question and a useful conversation starts.
Every time a DM got a positive reply, I logged the opener in a swipe file. Just the first message, not the full thread. Wanted to see if there were patterns.
50 of them are written up here, organized by industry (SaaS, agencies, ecom, coaches, professional services, recruiting/HR tech). Each one has the message + a short breakdown of why I believe it actually worked.
This actually happened. Guy found us on Indie Hackers, decided to review our product, hit the landing page, got mad there's no free trial, refused to pay $59, and then recorded eighteen minutes of feedback on a tool he never used.
Eighteen. Minutes.
I've sat through shorter dentist appointments.
His verdict: not ready, needs work. From a guy who never saw the product work.
The twist: the paywall is doing exactly what it's supposed to. We sell a B2B tool (see here). Real customers know what intent data is worth and $59 isn't a barrier for them. A guy who won't swipe his card for $59 is, almost by definition, not the buyer. He bounced. System worked.
But honestly, respect for the commitment. 18 minutes of confidently reviewing something you've never opened is a skill. There are politicians who can't pull that off.
We're growing fine. Customers are happy. The non-customers are on YouTube giving 18-minute reviews of landing pages.
YC's official Request for Startups just dropped.
Happy to confirm my SaaS isn't on the list. My idea is just too good for YC. :)
But here's the part that actually made me laugh:
One of YC's eight categories this cycle is literally called "SaaS Challengers." Jared Friedman's framing: AI coding is a gift to startups going after big SaaS incumbents like ERP, chip design software, industrial control systems, supply chain.
So while LinkedIn spent the last 18 months declaring SaaS dead, the most prolific accelerator on earth just published a wishlist asking founders to please, urgently, build more SaaS.
The "AI replaces SaaS" narrative collapses the moment you check what AI companies actually are. Cursor is SaaS. ChatGPT is SaaS. Claude Code is SaaS. The thing supposedly killing the category is the category.
Building SaaS in 2026 is nothing close to stupid. It's literally on YC's wishlist.
(Still not as good as my idea though.)
I run a SaaS. Every other week someone tells me I'm building a horse-drawn carriage in the age of cars. AI agents are going to replace every app. SaaS is dead. Why bother.
So I went and looked at the receipts. SaaS has supposedly been dying since 1999:
Meanwhile the actual numbers:
Here's what people keep missing. SaaS is software you access over the internet, hosted by the vendor, paid by subscription. That's the definition. Most "AI replacements" being held up as SaaS killers fit it exactly. Cursor is SaaS. ChatGPT is SaaS. Claude Code is SaaS. The replacement framing collapses the moment you check what these products actually are.
AI agents don't kill SaaS. They become the engine inside it. The wrapper stays the same. The interface changes. The billing model is identical.
So yeah, I'm building SaaS in 2026 on purpose. Very bullish on it.
Don't be the Microsoft CEO of 2024 in 2026.
We've built IbexAI, an AI agent that monitors LinkedIn and finds people who show interest in your product.
We track 24/7:
Would that help you? Check it out here!