u/slinkyrhino

I have too many projects going on and need to divest some, otherwise I will spend too little time across all of them to see any to fruition.

Tavernbuddy.com is a great domain and I think a great idea, to provide deeper analysis of transactions for bar and restaurant owners. The tool integrates with Square and Clover to pull transactions and perform analysis, while giving insights into operations. Bar owners can input costs, and discover a margin analysis on daily/hourly basis that other tools cannot deliver.

The platform is $0 revenue, $0 customers. I can be creative in how we structure the transfer. It could be a great little business with the right person focused on selling. It's ready to go, it just needs a sales person.

DM me offers or more questions.

I keep seeing posts in this community asking "why isn't my SaaS working", "why aren't I getting users". Rather than try and reply to a lot of them, I wanted to just make a post to encompass many of them.

SaaS is sexy, valuation multiples can be juicy. Neither of these are reasons to build something. The Lovable ads and TikTok influencers sharing stories of a vibe-coded platform that hit $5M ARR in 6 months is not realistic, and almost never true of someone without a plug-in customer base and audience.

It is true that modern AI code assistants can make building something quick. Almost too quick and inexpensive that people are skipping the planning phase of building a business. I remember trying to build software companies in 2015 when the path to MVP was either find a talented team who will work for equity alone, or try and raise $250k based on a website and a pitch deck. Either path then required a concrete vision, viable revenue model, and a solid demonstration of product market fit.

I'm victim of this right now too... It's too easy to have an idea, think "hey 5,000 people would pay $99/mo for this" and vibe code it in a weekend. I've done that too, and it's fun, it's exciting, but it is a lottery ticket to build something and hope that it turns into a viral sensation that people will find and pay money to use.

I've been around entrepreneurship since I was 15. I used to show up to a local university asking if I could intern or shadow anyone building anything at their center for entrepreneurship. I went on to build some cool companies doing tens of millions in revenue, with a few almost 9-figure exits. I judge pitch competitions at my alma matter, and mentor dozens of young entrepreneurs while investing in several more. Suffice to say, I've seen and built some great startups, and have seen and built many many more failures.

Almost every post I'm seeing on this subreddit over the past 3-6 months follows the same problem- someone built something cool and doesn't know why it isnt taking off, or is asking for an idea that will instantly print millions.

The roadmap to build a strong business is, and always will be:

Define a problem that costs time, money, creates stress, or impacts a large population
Understand the market maniacally. You must understand the language of your audience, the culture, the persona of the customer, and be able to speak intelligently about every facet of their day-to-day.
Identify a solution that actually fills a gap.
Test the solution. Even if the product isn't built, get as much feedback as possible. Do not critique criticism... Bad founders respond to negative feedback from their market saying "they just don't get it", that's almost never true in the case.
Build to MVP. Yes, it's easy to build more with less nowadays. Resist that. A few clunky components can diminish the real value of what you're building. Start with what works and build upon it.
Understand your distribution model. Creating a LinkedIn company page, blasting 5k cold emails, or burning money on Google ads are not turn key customer acquisition strategies. Each can work, but not blindly.
Listen to the early adopters. Distill individual feedback into macro indicators of what is working and not working. If you adapt the product to make one customer really happy but alienate the broader market, you are a consultant not a vendor.

Building SaaS has never been easier, but building a SaaS business has never been harder. Fierce competition, and the lowest barrier to entry we've ever seen. So my ultimate advice to anyone caring to read this far, think like you're actually building a business and not just building a product. Those are two entirely different things. Start by identifying real problems faced by an audience that you know a distribution model into.

The truth is in the title of so many posts here, and so many "founders". If you're asking "why isnt my SaaS getting any users" it's because you are thinking of it as a product not a business. The answer 99% of the time, is that you have not validated product market fit, do not understand your market well enough to articulate why your product actually helps them, and do not have a distribution model. These are prerequisites for optimizing for conversion and churn.

Go build to build. I felt like I had built 50 companies before I was 20. They never went anywhere and in hindsight were terrible, but they taught me how to diligence my own idea. How to anticipate and fill gaps in my business model. How investors and partners would scrutinize my idea so that the next one would be more ready. It's an exercise and you only get to the point of launching something of meaning after trying a lot. Vibe coding makes it easier than ever but doesnt render the process of building a great business obsolete.

Looking For Fintech Investment

Selling Tavernbuddy.com