How do you guys deal with all the hate around AI products?

Every time someone launches something with AI, people instantly say:

(saved quite a few but these are the repetitive ones )

“Just another AI wrapper with a fancy UI.”

“AI products are replacing people’s livelihoods.”

“People spent years mastering these skills, and now AI making them irrelevant.”

“You’re automating work real humans used to do.”

“Most AI startups are solving fake problems.”

“Everyone’s just adding AI because it’s trendy.”

“AI is lowering the value of skilled work.”

“This feels more like a replacement than innovation.”

“Builders are profiting while others lose jobs.”

“Why use AI when a human can do it better?”

And honestly, I kinda get both sides.

AI already affected my own career negatively, and now I’m learning it and trying to build something useful for myself first. But seeing so much negativity around AI builders sometimes makes me hesitate.

How do you guys process the criticism, and what keeps you motivated to continue building?

I started a business and while building out my sales team, I realized I did not actually have reliable leads to give them.

I looked into buying leads, using platforms, scraping directories, and all the usual stuff people recommend, but could not shake the feeling that most of it was either outdated, overpriced, or being sold to everyone else too.

It started as a rough MVP, but after about a week of vibe coding, it turned into a full-stack app running in custom Docker containers on my VPS.

If anyone here has built something similar, I would love to hear your thoughts. I am not sure if I am overengineering it, but so far it is actually pulling in some solid leads.

https://preview.redd.it/31470rvvuh2h1.png?width=1360&format=png&auto=webp&s=e2505bd9854a4c4fc879e1433fba4593d803a9d3

If your interested in a copy of the repo and know how to run docker compose, hit me up.

Founder here
spent a few weeks going through postmortems of failed SaaS products
the cause of death was almost always the same
not bad code
not bad design
not bad marketing
they built something before confirming anyone actually wanted it
the founder had a hypothesis and treated it like a fact
the scary part is how rational it felt to them at the time
"i have this problem so others must too"
"i got positive feedback from friends"
"there's no competition so the market is wide open"
all of these feel like validation
none of them are
real validation is finding strangers who are already suffering through a bad solution
not friends who say "yeah that sounds useful"
what's the closest thing to real validation you've seen work before building?

You must ignore everything else and focus entirely on that single channel.

Which would you choose?

• Cold email
• LinkedIn outreach
• Reddit engagement
• SEO
• YouTube
• X/Twitter
• Facebook groups
• Referral programs
• Partnerships

And why?

The goal is simple: get your first customers as quickly as possible without spending money. I'm interested in hearing which strategy gives the best return on time and effort for someone starting completely from zero.

Hello!

Do you hate this too?

I am a SaaS founder. I like building apps , make them work perfectly, fix bugs and errors but I hate managing all the business finances. I am running ads too. Would you like if there would exist a tool that over analyse all the finances for you?A business to run and grow profitable needs an analyst and at the beginning there are not enough funds for that.

Do you believe a tool described above would help you?

Edit: for those that asked me, i am gathering information for https://usefold.io

Hey guys, I'm currently building a global marketplace MVP. I've done some research on payment processors and it seems Stripe Connect is not recommendable for countries outside of US / Europe. Another thing is that a lot of the posts I've been looking at for alternatives seem to be a bit outdated (>1 year ago).

Open to any suggestions, thanks.

Quick story: my buddy is a SOC2 consultant. One day he goes “hey, what if I sell a Trust Center CRM to my clients?” Cool idea. I build the whole thing. It works. It’s clean. I’m proud.

Then comes the fun part: actually selling it.

Turns out B2B is a sport where you do a great demo, everyone nods, says “wow super interesting, let’s stay in touch”… and then disappears into a black hole somewhere between their inbox and the next quarter. We can’t even get people to test it for free. FREE. I’m basically out here giving away SOC2 candy and nobody wants the candy.

Almost a year now. Not a single POC. Not one. I checked twice.

So if you’ve been through this swamp — how did you crawl out? And if you’re currently stuck in it like me, come say hi in the comments, at least we can suffer together 🫂

500 signup and 14 paying users, isnt there something wrong in thid conversion ?

I've been thinking about this because I talk to a lot of founders and the small business path always sounds simpler than it really is.

On paper it's great. You can reach the owner directly. No procurement hell. Decisions happen in days, not months. But the reality is way messier. One slow month and they cancel. They need more support than you planned for. Sometimes they don't fully understand what they bought and you end up being part consultant, part therapist.

I've seen founders stack up a bunch of small business clients and still feel like the whole thing could collapse any week. Others have figured out how to make it work and love it.

Where are you at? Are you targeting small businesses with what you're building? What's been harder than you expected and what's actually working? Would love to hear from people in the trenches on this one.

Does anyone have any creative marketing strategies or fun ways to increase downloads? My first app ever got approved a few days ago and I am so excited about it, but I just don't know where to start! I'm a software engineer so I have no background in marketing. Thanks in advance!!

Telegram is basically a huge part of my life at this point.

Thats my main source of inf my workplace and pretty much way of communicating with friends,girls, clients and customers. Im a designer and do some programming work remotely, so most of my work happens there.

And lately, clients have become...kinda sneaky.
they edit messages, delete messages...
Then act like “nah, that’s exactly what I said...”

At first it was just annoying. But once this stuff starts affecting how much money you make every month, you slowly start going insane. May 8, I randomly saw a Telegram update notification and discovered their new Chat Automation feature. I started reading about it and realized TG already had some similar functionality through Telegram Premium before. Long story... realized this could actually solve my problem.

Basically, you can connect a bot to your account through Telegram settings(yes, this is a real Telegram feature and it works without Premium), and the bot can monitor message updates and conversation history.

So me and my friend spent two days hacking together a bot that sends you notifications whenever someone edits or deletes a message. And not just that --> it actually shows what was deleted and what was changed and this is not visible to the person who did it !

I thought I had found a gold mine!

Then we spent a couple more days polishing everything up. DB stuff, deployment, bug fixes all the annoying infrastructure work...

But now it runs and just works. basically ended up building a solution for my own problem. This thread do not allow me to leave a screenshots, so will leave it in the comment.

Of course i shared this bot with my friends and they started using it and they are asking for more... but this is for the next time

I came across an interesting breakdown of how Tibo, the founder behind Tweet Hunter, went from no audience and multiple failed projects to building a SaaS that reached $30k MRR.

The core lesson: he didn’t win because he had a huge audience. He won because he found the right customers, reached them where they already were, and borrowed distribution once the product showed traction.

The backstory

Tibo and his cofounder Tom shipped around 10 apps quickly. None of them worked.

Then they noticed something: some users were coming from Twitter.

So they built a simple tool for Twitter creators. The first version of Tweet Hunter was not a huge platform. It was basically a way to find high-performing tweets that creators could use for inspiration.

1. Get early feedback before building too much

Tibo first offered the product for free to a small group of Twitter users.

Tweet: Looking for FIVE heavy Twitter users to beta-test my latest product

The tweet didn’t go viral, but it got him a few beta testers.

He also engaged with Twitter creators and sent DMs offering free access in exchange for feedback.

The lesson: you don’t need a polished product to start. You need something simple that solves a painful problem.

2. Pick the right distribution channel

Tweet Hunter helped people grow on Twitter.

So Tibo promoted it on Twitter.

That sounds obvious, but it was the key. Even posts with low engagement could get leads because the audience was perfectly matched.

If he had promoted the same product on Instagram, the results probably would have been much worse.

3. Get your ideal customers to raise their hand

One smart move was posting something that attracted exactly the type of people who might need the product.

Tweet: If you have less than 1,000 followers and building stuff, introduce yourself to Twitter

That post got hundreds of replies.

Then Tibo DMed those people and introduced Tweet Hunter.

He also reached out to creators with 1,000+ followers.

A simple DM looked like this:

>Hey [Name], saw you're posting consistently about [topic] and clearly taking Twitter growth seriously. Tom and I are building Tweet Hunter, a tool to help people find tweet inspiration, understand what works, and stay consistent. Still early, but a few people are already paying for it. Want me to send you access? I'd love feedback from someone actually using Twitter seriously.

After about 2 weeks, they had:

• 288 signups
• 28 active subscriptions
• $560 MRR

Tweet: Tweet Hunter beta launched - 288 signups, 28 active subscriptions

4. Borrow an audience once you have proof

After a few months, Tweet Hunter reached around $3k MRR.

At that point, they had proof that the product worked, but they didn’t have enough distribution to scale fast.

So Tibo partnered with JK Molina, a big Twitter creator. JK got equity and revenue share in exchange for promoting the product.

That partnership helped Tweet Hunter grow to around $18k MRR in 3 weeks.

The lesson:

>100% of a small pie is often worse than 70% of a much bigger pie.

Once the product had traction, giving up equity for distribution made sense.

5. Keep stacking growth channels

After the creator partnership, they added more channels:

• SEO
• giveaways
• mini-challenges
• free tools
• more creator partnerships

Tweet: Twitter growth giveaway / challenge

Eventually, Tweet Hunter reached around $30k MRR.

Later, they launched Taplio for LinkedIn, grew both products to almost $3M ARR, and sold them to Lemlist in an 8-figure deal.

Actionable framework

Here’s the playbook in simple terms:

1. Find where your ideal users already spend time.
2. Build one simple thing that solves a real problem.
3. Give it away for free to get feedback.
4. Turn interested users into paying customers.
5. Use content and DMs to reach more of the same people.
6. Once you have proof, partner with someone who already has distribution.
7. Add scalable channels after the manual work starts working.

My takeaway

The biggest lesson for me is that “no audience” is not an excuse.

You can still get early users by:

• going where your customers already are
• making them raise their hand
• sending personal DMs
• validating before overbuilding
• partnering for distribution after you have traction

Most founders want scalable growth too early.

Tibo did the opposite: manual first, scalable later.

P.S. Read this case study on The Marketing OS and thought the growth strategy was worth sharing here.

Hey everyone,

I’m working on a tool that provides an API-first progression infrastructure, gamificiation engine and widgets (XP, streaks, badges, leaderboards) for established SaaS. It saves engineering teams and product managers weeks of building this logic and designing gamification from scratch.

Early startups won't pay for this, so I'm targeting PMs focused on retention. Be brutally honest:

1. Build vs. Buy: If you wanted to add retention hooks (like streaks or levels), would you allocate engineering sprints to build it in-house, or buy a scalable API? Or what makes to you buy decision?
2. Pricing: What pricing model actually fits a product budget? (Per MAU, tiered, or flat fee?)
3. The Dealbreaker: What’s the biggest blocker for you to adopt an external API for user state? (Security, UI flexibility, etc.)

Just trying to validate if this solves a real product headache. Thanks!

Hi everyone! I’m looking for some "real world" insight into what it actually takes to ship a successful product. Specifically, what tech stack did you choose, and how did you get good enough to build it yourself? Also, how did you know your idea was worth building?

I’m currently trying to bridge the gap between "knowing how to code" and "building professional, scalable products." If you have any tips on what to learn—or how to learn it effectively—it would be a massive help to my development.

Thanks!