r/SaaS

I finally got my SaaS to a point where I'm happy with it, and now I'm realizing building the product was the fun part lol.

SEO just feels like an endless rabbit hole. Keyword research, metadata, backlinks, writing content, getting pages indexed... every time I think I'm done there's something else.

For people who've launched a SaaS from zero users, did you actually bother with SEO early on? Or did you focus on getting your first users elsewhere?

Curious what's actually worked for you guys

Curious to know millennials or older genz ciders' opinion of people who have claude code everything for their applications. Do they develop a good sense of code via that and does that have a future?

If debugging the best when they don't know how to write code in the first place?

I have mixed opinions myself but would like to be challenged and change my view/reservations about this.

I have been through multiple payment gateways and all of them had unique problems. Razorpay was the first where I came to know that paypal is needed to accept international payments as the platform doesn't allow it.

Then I tried Paypal. While the development process, all of a sudden, they ban my account citing that I was doing some suspicious activity. While I clicked the link to open the sandbox checkout page at that time. I do not whether opening the sandbox checkout page was the reason of banning or something else.

Then I thought of using Stripe payments. Unfortunately, stripe is invite only for India. Stripe has a product Lemonsqueezy. This is the platform whom I clearly don't remember why I felt the need to leave it too.

Then, finally, I came with Dodopayments. There were people who recommended the platform and AI too recommended it. But, recently, I came to know about people on reddit complaining that dodopayments is holding their payment by some means and not allowing them to withdraw their payments. I still haven't got monetized, and now I am a bit skeptical about it.

I also thought of Gumroad for digital product but, gumroad has does not allow direct bank transfer but it only has paypal linkedin options.

I was currently working on a digital product and wanted to launch and market it. But, I have experienced different problems with all the big ones.

I need your advice, for now, I want to launch my digital product and later would be my saas or more digital products.

What payment gateway to choose for accepting payments?

Is dodopayment really holds payments or was it something like a bug?

I've been curious about something and wanted to hear from people who are actually doing it.

With tools like Claude Code, Cursor and other AI coding tools, it seems much easier to get a first version of an app or SaaS up and running.

But I'm wondering what happens after that initial stage.

For those of you who have tried building a product with AI:

• Did you manage to go from an idea to something you could actually launch?
• If not, where did you get stuck?
• Did you figure it out yourself, hire a developer, get help from someone more technical, or just abandon the project?
• Are there already good services or people who help non-technical founders get from an AI-generated prototype to a working product?

I'm particularly interested in the experience of people without a software engineering background.

I'm trying to understand what people currently do when they hit a technical wall, and whether there's still a gap between what AI tools promise and what people can realistically build and launch with them.

Would love to hear about your actual experiences, including things that worked and things that didn't.

I'm adding Arabic language support to my form builder, MyKayd

I'm a native Arabic speaker, and I've already had a few potential customers reach out on LinkedIn asking about it

I'm curious if anyone here has tried expanding their SaaS into the Arabic-speaking market

How was your experience? Anything I should watch out for beyond just translating the UI?

Most SaaS advice says: get the email first, everything else later. We went the opposite way with our side project and I'm curious what you think.

What we built: a browser game site (pp2hub.site) – 9 games so far, multiplayer included. Zero signups, zero downloads. You open a game and you're playing.

What "no account" forced us to solve:

1. Multiplayer without users. No friend lists, no profiles. Instead: one person creates a game, gets a 5-letter code, friends type it in. The server only handles the code, the game itself runs between browsers. Turned out to be simpler than accounts ever were.

2. Progress without a database. Scores and unlocks live in the browser's local storage. Downside: switch devices and it's gone. So far nobody has complained.

3. No email list = no retention channel. This is the real cost. We can't ping anyone when a new game drops. Our bet is that people come back through the games themselves and short videos, not through newsletters.

4. Every extra click hurts more. Without a signup wall there's no "sunk cost" keeping people around, so the first 10 seconds have to deliver. We cut menus down to one button.

What I'm unsure about:

- At what point would you add an optional account (sync progress, friends)?

- How do you build retention without collecting emails at all?

Would love to hear from anyone who's run a no-signup product – did you regret it later?

A little over a year and a half ago, my life changed pretty drastically. This week, I launched my first SaaS.
I’m 27 years old and an airline pilot.

In February 2025, I ended up in the ICU with diabetic ketoacidosis and was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. My blood sugar at the time was in the 700s. They told me I was in the verge of slipping into a coma. Prior to this I have always been an active, fit, and healthy person.

For anyone unfamiliar with aviation, pilots have to maintain an FAA medical certificate to fly. Certain medical conditions, including insulin-treated diabetes, require a lengthy review and special authorization from the FAA.
So, almost overnight, I went from flying airplanes for a living to being grounded.

I spent the next 11 months trying to get my medical certification back. It involved countless doctor’s appointments, medical records, paperwork, and trying to understand exactly what the FAA needed from me.
It was honestly one of the most stressful periods of my life. I had worked incredibly hard to become an airline pilot, and suddenly my entire career was uncertain.

Fortunately, I eventually received my special issuance medical certificate and returned to flying.
But the experience left me thinking about how unnecessarily complicated the entire process was.

There was no single place where I could easily organize my medical appointments, track important dates, keep my documents together, or understand the FAA’s published requirements for different medical conditions. And it wasn’t just people with diabetes. Thousands of pilots deal with medical certification requirements, whether it’s sleep apnea, high blood pressure, ADHD, heart conditions, or simply keeping up with their regular medical renewals.

That’s where the idea for Crosscheck came from.
I’m not a professional software developer. I’m an airline pilot who started experimenting with AI-assisted coding and gradually realized I could actually build something useful.

What started as an idea turned into months of learning, building, breaking things, fixing them, and spending way too many late nights working on a project I wasn’t even sure anyone would use.

The result is Crosscheck, a web-based platform designed to help pilots manage their FAA medical certification.
It includes:

-A free FAA medication lookup tool.
-A search function of every FAA doctor (Aviation medical examiner) in the country where you can leave reviews and pricing information for the next person in a map/list view
-A free database of FAA medical conditions and published certification guidance.
-Medical certificate tracking and expiration reminders.
-A place to organize doctor visits, medications, and medical documents.
-A MedXPress helper to make preparing for renewals easier.
-A Certification Assistant to help pilots organize the requirements associated with their medical conditions.

The medication and condition lookup tools are completely free and don’t even require an account. The organizational features have free and paid tiers.

The goal isn’t to replace doctors, Aviation Medical Examiners, or the FAA. It’s simply to make an unnecessarily confusing process easier to navigate. A lot of the FAA guidance on a specific condition is spread across multiple pages. For example type 1 diabetes has about 7 different pdfs across multiple pages. The goal here was to simplify that. Overall the website monitors over 300 FAA documents on a weekly/ monthly basis looking for updates on specific conditions, medications etc.

I officially launched Crosscheck this week.
I have no idea whether it’ll become a successful business. It’s an extremely niche market, and I’m learning the business side of SaaS as I go.

But there’s something pretty surreal about looking back at where I was last year, wondering whether I’d ever fly again, and realizing that experience ultimately pushed me to build something of my own. I’m still flying full-time, and this has become my passion project outside the cockpit.

Now comes the part I’m probably least experienced with: getting people to actually discover and use it.

For those of you who’ve launched niche SaaS products, especially without a traditional software development background, I’d love to hear how you approached finding your first users. Did you focus on SEO, communities, partnerships, or something else entirely?

And if anyone wants to check out what I’ve built, it’s CrossCheckMed.com.

Appreciate any feedback, especially from those who’ve been through the early stages of launching their first SaaS.

https://preview.redd.it/uirzi760ctuh1.png?width=311&format=png&auto=webp&s=f41b0b09da5b0e77b68f4d3d15a55d40c9b96d43

I'm feeling pretty low right now and just needed to get this off my chest.

Within 2 days of launching, I got two paying customers. Complete strangers, with zero promotion. I had only posted about it on Reddit. I was over the moon.

Since then, complete silence.

I have around total 30 installs now, and 2 of them are paying customers. Installs kept growing through September, and this October I'm still getting 1–2 installs a day, but not a single new paying customer since last 3.5 weeks . I honestly don't know what these numbers mean. It's just demotivating, because those first two customers gave me so much hope, and three weeks of silence after that is making me feel worse every day. Sometimes i feel it would have been better if nobody had paid for it

Has anyone else been through this? How did you get past it? Any advices ?

How are people deciding whether a cheaper LLM is good enough for a feature? because saving on tokens makes total sense but less so if it takes three attempts to get a usable answer. Are you testing it against your current model on real requests or just checking a few outputs before switching?

Hi guys,

I'm a solo founder. About six months ago I started building a SaaS, and I've been working on it and trying to get it in front of people ever since.

I haven't made a single cent yet.

I'm honestly disappointed, and I don't know what kind of marketing I should be doing that would actually work. I don't have an ad budget, so it has to be something I can do on my own with limited time.

For those of you who got your first paying customers: what worked for you? And what would you do differently if you were starting from zero again?

Thanks, any advice is appreciated.

Curious what actually tipped it for people - a personal intro, a free trial, a demo call, something else? Would love to hear what worked and what didn't.

Onboarding is where most SaaS products lose people. For the past few months I’ve been building an AI layer for the SaaS I work on, so users can describe their history or drop in photos instead of filling out forms. Here’s what I learned.

1. Fewer flows beat more features

I merged three separate flows into one experience and deleted over 20k lines of code. Less to maintain, and users only learn it once.

2. Speed is an activation metric

The first reply used to take 2m18s. Showing replies instantly and running searches in the background cut it to about 48s. Two minutes of silence is where people leave.

3. The most expensive model isn’t the best one

The app was silently running a premium model and one reply took 105s. A faster, cheaper model fixed most of it. Check your AI cost per user.

4. Never let AI touch customer data without approval

The AI once saved 9 entries to someone’s profile without review. Now it only creates drafts, and saving is always a button the user clicks.

5. Your AI will claim it did things it didn’t

It would say “added that” when nothing was added. Now the server checks every reply against what actually happened.

Biggest takeaway

Let AI remove effort, not control.

Question for founders: Where do you draw the line between what your AI does automatically and what needs user approval?