r/SaaS

Still a small number, but seeing 400+ people sign up for something I started building from scratch a couple of months ago feels pretty special.

I built a design tool, basically a visual playground for creating cool effects like ASCII, dither, halftone and a lot more, all in the browser.

I've mostly been building by listening to users, shipping quickly and sharing the journey online.

If you're curious, this is what I'm building: https://ditther.com

No big launch or paid ads so far. Just sharing content on X and improving the app every week.

On to the next milestone: 1,000 users.

I'm starting to focus more on marketing now. For other solo founders, what channels actually worked for you when going from a few hundred users to your first 1,000?

Back in June I got my first paying customer after months of $0 MRR.

$9.99. $10.49 with VAT.

I know that's not a lot, but that "Woohoo! You made a sale!" email after staring at $0 for months felt insane. Still one of the best feelings I've had building this.

I've been trying to make SaaS work for almost a year. Cloakly is a 1-click screen hider. You hit a hotkey and it hides your windows and desktop icons so you don't share something private on a Zoom call. Simple idea, but I overbuilt it for months.

Windows version, blur modes, selective hiding. I kept telling myself "one more feature then I'll market it" while analytics showed barely anyone visiting. Way too much time building, not enough talking to people.

At some point I realized I was hiding behind dev work, because coding is easier than asking people to use your stuff.

So I started posting on Facebook, Instagram, Reddit and TikTok about screen-share fails. No product pitch, just relatable pain. That's how people found it.

One person signed up for free, actually used it, and gave me feedback on what was broken for his setup. I fixed it. Then I asked him directly if he'd pay once I fixed it. He said yes.

June 12th: first payment - Lemon Squeezy "wooooooo! You been paid!"
Today, Aug 19th: $420.58 total from June 1 to Aug 19

No huge launch. No viral tweet. Just one person with a real problem, talking to him, fixing what he needed.

Biggest lesson: I spent months worrying about SEO, landing pages, pricing. Getting one person to care taught me more than all of that.

Still very early. $420 doesn't mean I figured out SaaS. But it's a start after $0. Now I just need to do it again. And again.

If you're stuck at signups but no pays, talk to those people before building another feature. I wish I did earlier.

How did the rest of you get your first paying users? Was it one conversation like this or something completely different?

Proof: Theres a website where you can upload a read only stripe key, heres mine

The build for this was actually a ton of fun - its an all in one cold email outreach tool. You use AI to filter my hundreds of thousands of leads and then AI generates and starts sending a cold email sequence.

For the lead gen im basically basically mapping LLC filings to contact information I find on the internet, trying to find websites, getting domain registration information etc. At the end the leads are pretty solid and so mapping someones ICP to a few thousand leads becomes pretty easy. It's not cheap to run at this scale but i'm fortunate to have a pretty high paying tech job to fund it for a while.

Im building this solo so it gets lonely sometimes. Basically building and talking to customers every waking hour I have of free time but the $1000 threshold is a little more fuel on the fire.

I love building but dont have a ton of people to share my wins with so posting here to share instead :)

Let me know if any builders out there want to connect I love chatting about SaaS startups and respect the hell out of people seriously trying to create and build.

I got tired of choosing what to listen to, so I built a radio that chooses for me. 🌍📻

At some point I realized I was getting bored with YouTube Music.

Every time I wanted music, it was the same routine:

Find a song → add it to a playlist → choose another song → skip something → search for something else → repeat.

The feeling of just turning on the radio and letting it play.

You don't know what's coming next.

You don't have to build a playlist.

You don't have to pick the perfect song.

You just let it play.

There's something about that random, slightly unpredictable 90s or 20s radio feeling that feels completely different from listening to an algorithmically perfect playlist.

I wanted something you could leave open while you're:

💻 vibecoding
🧑‍💻 working from home
🎮 gaming
🚗 driving
📚 studying
🎙️ streaming

So I built Audioo.

It's a free internet radio player where the main interface is a globe.

Pick a country and a radio station starts playing.

You can jump from USA to France to Brazil to UK and discover hundreds of stations around the world.

And the globe keeps slowly rotating while you're listening. There is a toggle for band where you can drag the band and change the station for that particular country.

It's completely free. I just wanted to build the kind of radio experience I wanted to use myself.

Spin the globe.

Pick a random country.

Don't choose the song.

Just let the radio decide what's next. 🌍📻

And tell me: what country did you land on?

Classic tech founder mistake 101.

We spent a lot of time building. The product kept getting better, but traffic stayed more or less where it had always been.

"If the product was genuinely useful, people would eventually find it", we kept telling ourselves. In the process of building, we were also obsessed with perfection. Till few months before, we had a decent product, occasional organic purchases, use/purchases from people whom we initially interviewed before building, manual reach-outs (non-scalable) to new potential customers, lot of free/discounted offers to make people use. We clearly had signs of people wanting it, willing to pay for it but nobody knew us and there was no trust.

At some point I had to accept something I had been conveniently avoiding, distribution. Something that didn't come naturally to me.

So I started doing work I never imagined myself becoming obsessed with. SEO. Search Console. Keywords. Blog topics. Search intent. Landing pages. Internal linking. Content structure. Competitor pages. What questions potential customers are actually typing into Google. Why one article gets impressions and another disappears into nothing.

Approaching marketing like how I approach coding was a huge blunder on my part. Thankfully, realisation came just in time. Built an internal CMS on our admin panel and started writing & publishing blogs consistently along with clear topic pillars, manual value driven write ups, AI for structural improvements. No AI automation in article creation and posting. The GSC ticker slightly started moving after 1 month of consistent efforts (which I will be continuing).

Not yet cracked SEO. Not even close but favourable results motivates. Content is actually teaching us things about the product too.

Zero ad spends so far though we intend to take that route. But before, next thing to get obsessed about will be Instagram content creation and building product trust. (where bulk of our customers hang-out)

Looking to read experiences from founders/marketing teams on how you approach (read as 'get started with') Instagram content creation and distribution for a SaaS tool. Lot of our competitors have taken a traditional route of professionally crafted premium informational content, something I'm not fully aligned with.

What sort of content do you plan and execute for your SaaS tool on Instagram and what is working?

No Promoting here. Not a AI slop :)

I’m the person building FastQRMenu.

A friend of mine owns a restaurant. During busy hours, his problem wasn’t getting customers. It was handling all their orders without putting too much pressure on the waiters.

They had to move between tables, explain menu items, take orders and make sure nothing was missed.

Printed menus were another problem. When he wanted to change a price, add a new item or remove something unavailable, updating every menu wasn’t simple.

I didn’t start with a big SaaS idea. I first wanted to fix this one workflow.

I built a system where every table has a QR code. Customers scan it, see the menu and place their order from their phones. The restaurant can receive the order through a dashboard or WhatsApp.

The owner can update the menu without reprinting it and customize the QR code with the restaurant’s logo and colors.

The most interesting decision wasn’t actually the QR code. It was deciding how much new software a restaurant should need to learn.

A dashboard gives the restaurant more control, but WhatsApp is already familiar and may be easier for smaller restaurants. I’m still trying to understand which workflow restaurant owners would actually prefer.

For anyone who has built or sold restaurant SaaS: did owners prefer using a dedicated dashboard, or did adoption become easier when you integrated with tools they already used?

I started Seamless.ai back in May 2026 since they promised me the whole world with their lead generation services. I made an appointment to get subscribed with them and waited for the Zoom call.

On the Zoom call back with one of their salesman in May I said "I want to try this out for a few months before fully committing to this and if anything changes I'll just call to let you know if I'll continue with Seamless in a few months". The salesman on that call even said he's not going anywhere and here to help me with anything I needed.

He made no mention of the annual "contract" I made with Seamless even after I made the comment: I'll just try it for a few months.

In mid-July I decided NOT to continue with Seamless.ai and thus my nightmare negan

• I called the their "Customer Success team" to cancel, no one answers and left a voicemail. No one responded.
• I called a few more times in the days after and left messages again- still no reply.
• I emailed the same Salesman from the Zoomcall- He emails me back saying he doesn't work their anymore (which is Strange) and someone else takes over the emails me and he tells me to contact billing.
• There's a Cancel Subscription link on their website but it's only after the 1 year is up. Againn, I DID NOT sign up for the one year contract
• I was then instructed to email their billing - It gets even worse from here: 2 people CC'd to the email respond to the email "We're sorry all contracts with seamless are annual and it will cancel when my year is up"- WHAT!!!
• I checked my bank statement and they charged me via Direct Bank Transfer for the this month (August) and made no mention of a refund.

Can anyone here help?

Is there a way to cancel and delete my account immediately?

What can I do to stop them from charging me now?

Hey guys!

This community has been great!! I would watch people making money from SaaS from the side lines until end of last year then I decided to do something about it.

Since I watched Social network I wanted to build a massive startup of my own. A unicorn.

I would fail everytime as I would focus on things like market size, moat, trends etc, but would not account for the most impressive thing - which is solving a real problem and building something people want.

I was accepted into an accelerator program beginning of this year ( similar to YC ) but ended up leaving because it felt more like I am back in school trying to impress my teachers ( VCs in this scenario ) than actually building something worth while. - but that’s on me, smarter people than me navigated that environment better, raised money and now are doing bigger things.

Anyways, I launched my SaaS ( built it for a hackathon to win open AI credits and maybe a job too ), didn’t even make top 10.

Launched the platform a month after the hackathon anyway with the prototype and to my surprise someone bought a subscription.

Put in more time - used claude for SEO, posted on X, reddit and made videos on Instagram and now 4 months later the platform is at $500 MRR and $1.7k in gross revenue.

I work full time, work on my project after work and on weekends!

VC’s said no
Lost 2 hackathons with this idea

And I can see the platform grow every day.

Don’t listen to anyone else but your customers, keep your head down and work! Something will happen.

Major thing that has worked for me is - not quitting too early, I tried building a SaaS over 6 times before this and would quit too early, sometimes even before launching it.
Shiny object syndrome was a real problem for me.
I still go through it time to time, but have learned to manage it.

Wishing everyone here massive success!! 🚀🚀

PS: My SaaS is shipnative - it’s a no code mobile app builder for iOS and Android

Hey everyone! Would love if you checked out our vlog!

https://youtu.be/ECVOIIDHSgA?si=Sp-uiOynOBcuXrl4

Solo dev here. I kept owning things and forgetting where I put them, so I built Store & Forget.

The whole point is zero effort to catalog: you don't type or tag anything. Snap a photo and it auto-fills what the item is (the photo scan uses a cloud AI service). Later you find it by searching names, descriptions, or which box or room it's in, or tap "Smart Find" to search by meaning.

Local-first: everything sits in an on-device database, no account, no sign-up. Optional backup to your own Google Drive.

It's free, Android only. Would love feedback from other builders.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dev.koalalab.storeandforget