u/dooddyman

My SaaS is both B2C and B2B, but mainly B2B.

I used to consider B2C marketing and B2B sales as two separate channels and ICPs. Reddit, SEO, and community content were for self-serve users and enterprise deals were supposed to come from outbound, demos, partnerships, and sales calls.

After launching, I started posting useful content on Reddit, joining relevant conversations, and writing content around the questions based on SEO keywords.

It brought in B2C users, but it also created enterprise demand. One of our biggest enterprise customers found us through a Reddit post, and organic/AI-search discovery now brings us roughly 2-3 enterprise enquiries a week.

It's surprising that major partnerships were made through 'marketing' and content posting. They found a useful tool, followed the trail back to us, and then needed the product for a bigger team.

My takeaway is that don’t assume community, content, SEO, or even Reddit are only B2C strategies. Enterprise buyers are still people and they search Google, ask AI, read Reddit, and look for useful answers long before they book a sales call.

Outbound still matters, but helpful public marketing can make the eventual B2B conversation much easier!

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Edit: my product is called SocialCrawl (https://www.socialcrawl.dev/)

I built 7 projects over the past few years as a founder, working full-time. I shipped quickly, launched quickly, and iterated quickly. But nothing gained much traction or produced meaningful revenue.

Looking back, the pattern was obvious: I was lazy with distribution.

Last month, we passed $12k, and the difference was not a new feature or a clever growth tactic. I started taking distribution seriously and early.

That meant having a clear ICP, finding where my ICPs hang around, and showing up every day. I joined WhatsApp groups, grew social accounts (X, YouTube, LinkedIn..), went to in-person events and did cold outreach.

The hardest part was (sounds simple but) showing up every day when nothing seems to be working. I felt like I was posting content into the void and shouting at a wall. Nothing really happened for the first few months (as you can see in the revenue image above).

However, consistent distribution accumulated and built momentum. Here's few other things I've learnt and what worked:

• I started with my own problem, then validated it through conversations and community research.
• Work on blogs, backlinks, and SEO from day one
• Consistently post cringe posts
• Stop adding features to chase growth - the product can become too confusing and users won't buy something they can't understand
• Paid ads, content promo, paid influencers didn't work well for my case (if you have established a substantial audience yourself, organic marketing can work 100X better)

I still don't think I have distribution 100% figured out, and I'm still learning.

In case you're curious, I'm building SocialCrawl https://www.socialcrawl.dev/

If you're early and it feels slow, keep going, it compounds.

I worked on 7 projects over the past few years. None of them really took off or made much revenue.

My usual approach was to build fast, launch fast and iterate fast. Looking back, it was fun and comfortable shipping like this. I realised I was not doing any 'real work' for distribution.

I launched my latest project a few months ago (socialcrawl), and this month it crossed $11K in revenue.

The biggest thing I did differently was work on distribution even before building.

I started posting on every single social media platform you can think of, replying to relevant conversations on Reddit, grew followers on X, and built in public.

Reddit has been particularly effective. It brought direct traffic, helped me understand how users described their problems, and contributed to both SEO and GEO over time.

A few lessons I wish I had learned earlier:

• Distribution is just as important as building.
• Start with one simple function whose value is immediately clear.
• Product quality still matters. Distribution might bring someone in, but the product has to keep them.
• Respond to questions and feedback fast
• SEO and GEO are slow, but the work compounds.
• Long-form YouTube has given me better reach than TikTok or Instagram.
• Posting consistently matters. Most posts go nowhere, but you never know which one will introduce you to a user or create a new opportunity.

I still don’t think I have distribution completely figured out.

But I'm still learning and curious how you're tackling distribution for your project.

Over the last few weeks, my Search Console metrics have started moving in opposite directions: daily impressions are falling, while clicks continue to increase.

My first thought is that I may be losing broad, low-intent impressions while gaining better rankings for queries that actually generate clicks.

But I’m not sure whether that fully explains the change.

Before making any changes, I’m planning to compare:

• Queries and pages at the impression peak versus now
• Pages losing impressions but gaining clicks

Would you consider this healthy consolidation, or a warning sign?

What would you investigate first?

tldr; Know exactly who you’re building for. Find where they already spend time, solve a painful problem with an obvious payoff, and keep showing up.

My first SaaS failed badly.

Looking back, so many things went wrong. 

• no clear ICP
• built what I thought was ‘cool’
• no solid distribution channel

 

For my second SaaS, I reversed the order: distribution before product.

Today, it crossed $10K for July. 

I summarised what I think worked and didn’t. 

1. Built what I would actually use: I’m a developer, I started with a problem I had, then validated it through conversations and community research, which became SocialCrawl. And now I'm one of the heaviest users.
2. Distribution before building: I already knew where potential users spent time and built my audience there. 
   • Grown to 1,700+ followers on X
   • Grown to 5,000+ followers on Threads
   • Joined communities where my potential users already spent time
3. One clear ICP: A clear ICP improved the product, messaging, content, and roadmap.
4. A USP connected to real value: People don’t pay because a feature sounds interesting. They pay because it saves them time, helps them ship faster, or helps them make money.
5. Fast replies, fixes, and implementation: When a user reported a problem, I tried to respond and fix it quickly, ideally within 1-2 hours. 
6. SEO and GEO: I wrote blogs, built backlinks, and worked on domain authority early. About 30% of our traffic now comes from ChatGPT, so appearing in AI answers has become almost as important as ranking on Google.
7. Posting consistently even when it felt cringe: I posted product updates, metrics, lessons, and failures. Most individual posts didn’t contribute significantly, but consistently showing up compounded into traffic, trust, and conversations.

What didn’t work

1. Adding features to chase growth. It blurred the ICP and made the product harder to understand.
2. Building for an imaginary user. “This seems cool” isn’t validation. A specific person with a repeated problem is.
3. Treating SEO as "finished". Seeing rankings rise and then slowing down was a trap. Content, backlinks, SEO, and AI visibility all need consistent work!
4. Being inconsistent with distribution. Whenever I stopped posting, the pipeline slowed down too.
5. Paid ads, promoted content, and influencers. My existing organic audience performed far better at this stage.

If you’re early and it feels slow, keep going, it will compound! 

I launched an online SaaS in April.

Like most launches, I assumed the process would be fairly simple:

Build the website, publish some articles,submit the sitemap and wait for Google.

For most of the first 3 months, almost nothing happened. Impressions moved slightly, but the overall trend was flat.

The chart only started changing recently. By July, the strongest days were approaching 40K impressions.

Looking back, I don't think there was a simple SEO trick. It was several boring changes compounding together.

Here’s what worked:

• Listening before writing: I stopped starting with keyword tools. Instead, I looked at real conversations across Reddit, YouTube, X, and TikTok. I searched for repeated questions, objections, comparisons, and the exact language people used. I used socialcrawl for this because it let me research several platforms for real life discussions.
• Building topic clusters: Instead of publishing unrelated articles, I chose one problem and covered it properly. One main guide/supporting tutorials/comparison pages/troubleshooting content. And important to have clear internal links between them.
• Answering the question immediately: Every page now gives a short answer near the top. Keeping the introduction super short. Each H2 handles one follow-up question.
• Making claims easier to trust: I added examples, limitations, source links, dates, and specific numbers where I had them. This made the content more useful for readers and easier for an AI answer engine to understand or cite.
• Updating instead of endlessly publishing: I revisited existing pages using new Search Console queries and questions found in social conversations. Often, adding one missing section was more useful than publishing another generic article.
• Fixing the boring technical details Crawlable text,, correct canonicals, clean sitemaps, accurate structured data and better internal links.
• Building backlinks: I uploaded my site to 100+ directories, this took the longest time as it was all done manually..

Here’s what didn’t work:

• Chasing broad, high-volume keywords
• Publishing generic 2,000-word AI articles
• Creating separate pages for tiny keyword variations
• Stuffing pages with weak FAQ questions
• Treating schema or llms.txt as a substitute for useful content
• Checking rankings every day and reacting to every dip

The SEO is still volatile, and I can’t attribute every spike to one change. Some of the growth may simply be delayed indexing and accumulated authority.

As a solo-founder, SEO and GEO had a bit of learning curve, it was not easy and took a lot of work and patience. But when it's done right, it can become the best marketing channel.

My first SaaS failed badly.

I added features to chase users. I didn't have a solid distribution channel. The product became confusing, traffic fell, and I still didn’t know who it was for.

The second time, I reversed the order: distribution before product.

Before building, I:

• Grew to 5,000+ followers on Threads
• Grew to 1,000+ followers on X
• Joined communities

As a developer, I chose to build a dev tool. Essentially I tried to leverage my already established network and communities.

I started with my own problem, then validated it through conversations and community research.

That became SocialCrawl, an API for accessing social media data through one integration.

What worked:

• Distribution before building
• A clear, single ICP
• Blogs, backlinks, and SEO from day one
• Consistently posting cringe posts
• Talking to users and fast feedback

What didn't:

• Adding features to chase growth - the product became too confusing, ICP was too abstract and unclear
• Building without a clear ICP (eg. building sth you 'think' is cool or without a specific persona)
• Being lazy with distribution and content posting
• Cold outreach (maybe I didn't do enough..!)
• Paid ads, content promo, paid influencers (if you have established substantial audience yourself, organic marketing can work 100X better)

Summary of everything that worked: know exactly who your ICP is, find where they already hang out, and show up there consistently.

Summary of everything that didn't: being unclear on who you're building for.

If you're early and it feels slow, keep going, it compounds.

I wanted to build a social dashboard to track creators and analyse their reels.

Instead of asking Fable 5 to design and code everything from scratch, I split the process into a few steps.

The workflow:

1. brain dump every feature I wanted to Claude Design and created a dashboard wireframe and exported the design.md file
2. used ChatGPT to generate a one-shot prompt
3. connect to SocialCrawl to scrape live Instagram data
4. gave Claude Code Fable 5 the design.md and prompt

What worked well:

• Fable followed the design blueprint closely, almost identical to the wireframe
• all the functions I specified in the prompt was working

Where it struggled:

• a few small UIUX issues
• costed $33 (i don't think it's worth this much..)

Claude Design and Fable 5 work really well together when visual accuracy matters. But I don’t think Fable 5 is a cost-effective choice for everyday coding.

Once the prompt and design file are detailed enough, I think the actual implementation could be handled by Codex or even Grok.

I’d probably save Fable for the design-heavy work, then switch to a cheaper model for the rest.

Happy to share the design.md file and full prompt if anyone wants to try the same workflow.

tldr: My first AI SaaS failed because I built blindly, outsourced marketing, and had no clear ICP. My second product hit $5k/mo in 3 months because I built an audience first, obsessed over SEO and distribution, and targeted a specific niche.

I launched my first AI SaaS last year, kept it alive for about a year now. It's making less than $50 mrr and i'm thinking of closing it.

Here's what went wrong:

• I just built what I thought was cool and useful without confirming any traction.
• Biggest regret is outsourcing marketing and distribution. I wasn't an expert and thought outsourcing was the best way.
• The product didn't have a clear ICP at all. I kept adding more and more features, hoping to get more users but it just led to confusion and reaching absolutely no one.
• Didn't solve my own problem. I wasn't using it daily, which made me lose motivation, and that carelessness was reflected in the product.
• I didn't prioritise SEO and GEO. Never really studied how it works, didn't think it was important.

For the second one, I changed everything.

SocialCrawl launched in April this year and it's already making $5k a month in revenue and en route to $10K this July.

Here is what actually worked this time around:

• I figured out distribution and marketing before I even decided what to build.
• I built an audience first, growing to 5,000+ followers on Threads and 1,500+ on X.
• Being a developer myself, I chose to build an API dev tool that I could easily market to my own community.
• I built something that solves my own problem and was also validated by talking to my ICPs and researching communities.
• My ICP was specific (developers building something based on social media data) and I knew where they were hanging around
• I focused heavily on SEO, posting blogs and building backlinks from day one.

Overall, failing the first time taught me you have to know who you're selling to, show up where your users hang out and be obsessed with distribution.

I've been a Claude Code guy for a while, but I ran a controlled test this week and it flipped me.

The test was:

• Claude Code Fable 5 vs Codex GPT-5.6 Sol (extra high)
• Same task for both: build a live social dashboard that pulls top Instagram reels from competitors and analyses them. I used same design.md (from Claude Design), same prompt, same skills.

Both shipped genuinely good dashboards. The outputs looked almost identical. The difference was everything around the stats:

• Cost: Codex ~$12 vs Claude Code ~$33 for the same build
• Usage: Codex used 2% of my weekly limit; Claude Code used 20% and maxed out the session
• Time: 39 min (Codex) vs 33 min (Claude Code)
• Code quality: Codex on extra-high followed the prompt precisely and wrote clean code

Honest thoughts:

• Claude Code Fable took more initiative. Regarding parameters not specified in my prompt, Fable took on more extra work on its own to complete the details.
• Codex GPT 5.6 followed the instructions and produced what it was supposed to.
• Codex gets the job done with third of the cost and a fraction of the usage. The math is too big to ignore.

I'm thinking of keeping Claude Code for now but go down to 5x plan (from 20x), use it to plan and brainstorm. Then use Codex GPT 5.6 to execute and write all my codes.

(For anyone curious about the dashboard part, I used a SocialCrawl skill and happy to share prompt I used to generate the dashboard!)

Curious how other's experience has been with Codex GPT-5.6 compared to Claude Code!