r/indiehackers

Most founders build first, then ask if anyone wants it. I did the opposite.

Here's my checklist:

1. Would I personally use this every day?
2. Does this solve a real painful problem?
3. Are people already searching/discussing this problem online?
4. Will users pay for this solution?
5. Does it create repeated value or is it one-time use?
6. Did I talk to real communities before building?

Another thing that helped me:
Build a small community/waitlist before fully building the product.

If nobody cares before launch, growth after launch becomes much harder.

I used this approach while building DropFix. Ran a private beta first, kept talking with users daily, improved based on real feedback, and focused only on whether it genuinely solved the problem. In 4 weeks of running private beta, users recovered around $2k+ MRR they would’ve otherwise lost.

Still early, but validating the problem before scaling the product changed everything for me.

Curious how other founders here validate ideas before spending months building.

Hi everyone, i just want give you update about my Saas.

In context, i build trunktransfer (trunktransfer com), alternative to wetransfer but allow user to whitelist with their own domain.

Previously i post here > https://www.reddit.com/r/indiehackers/comments/1t1rg6l/how_do_you_get_customer_from_cold_dms/

Recently my co-founder and i’ve been sending cold DMs, and so far we’ve sent around 500+.

We manage, there is no product works except on Friday. so we do marketing activity together everyday. (Except bug fix it happen sometimes, we need to fix fast)

Right now, we still far from product-market fit, which is why we’re testing a few things:

1- Niches

2- Channels

3- Messaging angles

We want to figure out which niche, messaging angle, and channel fit the product best.

1. Niche : We’ve gone from targeting general photographers, wedding videographers, all the way to creative directors.

So far, creative directors who work at or own studios have been the most engaged users. Some of them have started trials and become customers of Trunktransfer

2. Channel : We experiment Cold DMs in Instagram before since we target freelance videographer and wedding photo/videographer. however seem they are not engage with product and we move to creative director, we will try back to Linkedin again for Cold DM.
   Meanwhile we DMs people, we also prepare for SEO, that;s why we create some blog post like alternative to [competitor], etc, only few posts and few resources.

3. Messaging agles : This is should be the hook for our target audience, currently what make us different is we allow customer to whitelist delivery, not only background, logo and color, we also allow customer to whitelist domain, so they can use their own domain like files[dot]theirownstudio [dot] com/abc

But I still need more numbers to be sure. We still lack enough data, which is why we keep doing outreach.

It’s challenging because it’s closely tied to finding product-market fit.

i’ll keep sharing updates on what we discover.

By the way, now we have 2 customer. if 1 another trialing user convert on this saturday, we will have 3. Hopefully

But the funny is, my 2 customers not come from cold DM, i dont 100% sure where it come from either Google, chatgpt, reddit or something else beside DM

So the lesson so far :

- Our assumption about niche market, could be wrong sometimes. I previously thought that freelance videographer as target market, but it was not, then we move to other niche until we think it fit.

- With doing marketing together with co-founder, it avoid us from over engineering. together we focus on distribution. Even both of us also doing customer support, help our customer when they have the problem. it make us faster despite i think it too slow, but compare to my previous saas, now is the best whhich we have real customer and revenue

So, i'm eager to learning from you guys, so every advices are welcome

Last week we launched on Product Hunt and somehow finished #5 for the day.

Causo is an AI fundraising tool that helps founders find relevant VCs, generate investor matches, and run outreach without spending weeks manually researching funds and writing cold emails.

It’s been live for about a week now, and I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time refreshing analytics trying to separate real signal from launch hype.

So here’s the honest breakdown so far:

First 7 days:

• 295 visitors
• ~500 pageviews
• 250+ investor matches generated
• 19 fundraising campaigns launched
• 1,000+ investor emails generated
• 300+ emails sent
• 18 investor replies received already

The biggest milestone for me personally though:

complete strangers paid for it.

Not friends. Not people from our network. Random founders finding the site, trying the product, and trusting it enough to put in a card.

That was the moment where it stopped feeling like a side project.

What’s interesting is that the problems became obvious almost immediately.

The users who finish onboarding and launch campaigns usually get value pretty fast.
Most drop-offs happen in a few very specific friction points.

Which is honestly encouraging.
Fixing UX friction feels a lot better than “nobody wants this”.

Also learned something very quickly:
founders absolutely hate fundraising outreach.

Not because they don’t understand it.
Because it’s emotionally draining, repetitive, awkward, and incredibly easy to procrastinate.

That’s basically the whole reason we started building Causo.

Still very early.
No massive ARR screenshots or “we scaled to 7 figures in 14 days” nonsense.

Just real founders using the product, real investor conversations starting, and a very clear list of things to improve next.

Here is what most founders do when they suspect someone is about to churn.

Open the database. Query who hasn't logged in for X days, who never used the core feature in X days, which trial user hasn't done hit core action in X days. Export to an Excel. Find their emails. Write something personal. Send it. Hope they reply.

That takes hours. Most founders never do that 3-4 hours task. So the user quietly leaves and Stripe tells you later that they cancelled.

Last week one of my users had a $99/month customer go quiet for 8 days. DropFix flagged it automatically. Personalized Email written by Dropfix. He hit send. They replied in an hour. Still on the plan.

3 minutes. Not 3 hours.

The hard part was never writing the email. It was knowing who needs attention, Why and When. That is what DropFix solves.

You don't even need to check the dashboard daily. DropFix brings the right user to you. In your email, Slack, or wherever you are, the moment they need attention.

Acquiring a new customer costs 5x more than keeping one. DropFix makes retention easy and affordable for solo founders.

dropfix.in - 14 days free

What it does

WTFood is a smart macro tracking companion that helps users understand what they eat and surface eating patterns they didn't know existed. Not another calorie counter, a food behavior intelligence tool that identifies trends in your diet and turns raw logging into genuine insight.

The numbers (screenshots available)

• 1,500+ registered users — every single one acquired organically, zero paid ads
• 26K site visitors YTD, up 60.4% year-over-year
• Google Search Console (last 3 months): 691K impressions, 13.2K clicks, avg position 7.3
• Estimated traffic value: $5,000+/month (Ubersuggest) — meaning advertisers are paying to show up for keywords we already rank for, for free
• ARR: $1,160
• Asking: $11,000

The real asset here

The revenue multiple looks high on paper (~9.4x ARR). It isn't, once you understand what you're actually buying.

Ubersuggest values this site's organic traffic at $5,000+ per month, that's what it would cost in Google Ads to buy the same clicks we get for free. The SEO foundation is built, the rankings are real, and the keywords are commercially valuable. Someone who knows how to monetize a health and fitness audience doesn't need to build any of that from scratch — it's already here.

The monetization gap is the opportunity. Display ads alone on 26K monthly visitors in the health/nutrition niche could cover meaningful revenue. Add a premium tier, nutrition brand affiliate deals, or meal kit partnerships and you're looking at a very different ARR number within months.

Why I'm selling

Serial solopreneur, 11 exits over 10 years. Right now I'm running two significantly larger projects that are pulling my full attention. What The Food is growing on its own, 60% YoY without me pushing it — but it deserves a focused owner who'll actually capitalize on what's been built. I'd rather exit cleanly now than let it go stale.

What's included

• Full codebase and IP transfer
• Premium 32 DR domain (whatthefood.io)
• 1,500+ registered user database
• Google Analytics + Search Console with full historical data
• 3-month handover support

Who this is for

A solo founder, indie hacker, or small team in the health/fitness/nutrition space who wants an SEO-ready, organically grown user base without spending a dollar on acquisition. The expensive, time-consuming part — getting Google to trust your site — is already done.

The app is B2C, but has a B2B functionality that allows nutritionists and food bloggers to embed our widget on their site, hassle-free. This alone can boost revenue drastically, or they can use the free version and you can get a free backlink from the "powered by What The Food" widget text, which can be removed with the premium plan.

It's worth mentioning that the brand is very viral-friendly, means that the name (WTF/WTFood) strongly resonates with Tiktok and its audience. By expanding there with UGC content of real humans using the app, the site traffic, authority, use base and revenue can be multiplied or even tripled in no time as we are seeing ridiculous apps are being heavily promoted using the same method are making BANK every single month.

DM me to see the full data room.

I did not hate marketing because it was hard. I hated it because it was alot time consuming, took a lot of effort, and didn't give enough back.

10 hours building a product is different from 10 hours marketing it. In 10 hours, I can ship new features. In 10 hours of marketing, I cannot get even 3 users.

And I didn't build my app to become a full time marketer.

What I always wanted was something that could take my product, understand the brand, and do the marketing for me like find users on Reddit and Hacker News, write replies, generate posts that sound like me, and show analytics so I know what is actually working.

So I built it.

Vibe Promote it automates SaaS marketing so you can keep building without worrying about promotion. It finds relevant users, helps create posts that sound like you and your brand not gpt and give replies, gives you proven viral post templates that already went viral so you can just click on button and make it for your brand, and have analytics where you track everything. And making a buddy which improves or changes your marketing strategy based on your growth

Vibe Promote goal is simple make marketing as easy as vibe coding. So you can keep building great things without ever worrying about how you will market it.

It's free to try. lmk your feedback guys

Vibe Promote

Hey IH,

I got tired of the same problem every team has: you assign a task in Slack, it gets buried in threads, the person never saw it, nothing gets done. You follow up. Repeat forever.

So I built Qevo — an inbox-style task manager where tasks are pushed directly to people's personal queues. No searching, no missed assignments, no "I thought you were handling that."

• Everyone has their own task queue (like an inbox for tasks)
• You push tasks to specific people. They land in their queue, guaranteed
• They manage their own queue and work through it at their pace

What I built in ~3 months:

• Personal task queues (free forever, no limits)
• Email-to-task: forward any email → instant task
• Slack integration: /qevo in any message → task created (Still pending their final approval)
• Chrome extension for one-click task capture from any webpage
• Team plan for pushing tasks across teammates
• Shareable queues + productivity stats

Why another task app? Most task managers are project centric (Trello boards, Jira backlogs). Great for planning, terrible for the actual handoff. "I assigned it to you" means nothing if it's buried in a 200 card board. Qevo is person-centric - each person has their queue, and things land there directly. You can also see how busy someone is if they share their queue.

Where I am:

• Launched about a month ago
• Free plan for individuals, Team plan at $3/seat/month
• Have a Chrome extension live on the Web Store

What worked:

• The email-to-task feature gets the best reaction. People immediately get it
• Starting with a free personal plan (no credit card) removes signup friction completely

What I'm struggling with:

• Getting the first paying teams (individuals love it, converting to team plan is harder)
• Finding the right channel to reach project managers and team leads

If you manage a team and hate losing tasks in Slack/email, I'd genuinely love feedback. Happy to give anyone here extended trial access.

Link: http://www.getqevo.com

"Why would I pay if discovery is random?"

I answered this question roughly 40 to 50 times across 450 comments on my Wandoria launch posts. The answer that kept landing was not about the randomizer at all.

It was about the three things that are not random - the SEO page, the weekly email, the category filter.

Reframing from "you might get lucky" to "here are three concrete outcomes" changed everything.

The lesson: if the same objection keeps coming up your positioning has a hole. The objection is showing you exactly where to patch it. And to identify these holes, Reddit has been awesome.

127 founding spots still open at wandoria.io - first year free if you want to claim one before launch.

What objection keeps coming up for your product?

A self-serve SaaS platform that helps small hotels go online and start getting bookings fast.

Think of it as:

>

I love building, fixing bugs, and getting feedback. I'm able to pump out a decent looking website in probably 2-3 days.

Whats killing me is trying to make content for my brand and watching it get stuck at 200 views (or just 0).

Ngl after a couple weeks I was burnt out, I did thinking about marketing agency but my god they cost so much. 

Instead I outscored the marking to small UGC creators like really small. I looked for everyday consumers who would do quick, 30-second authentic videos for ($20-$50 yes they do exist haha). I found them mostly on tiktok, insta, reddit and jrivecontent. From these videos I was able to generate my first sale for my app! (Still unprofitable but at least something is working lol) 

Just wanted to share my journey with marketing with everyone! 

After conferences, I’d always end up with a bunch of names and no real memory of who was who a week later.

I tried notes apps, taking photos of business cards, and even just relying on LinkedIn requests, but it always turned into a mess. I’d have scattered info everywhere and still couldn’t connect names to conversations or where I met them.

So I built something for myself. Quickly capture people you meet, add context like where you met them, and keep everything in one place offline.

Planning to launch next week and curious how other people handle this at conferences right now, and would love any feedback before I go live.

Hey guys!

Hope you all had a good weekend! As promised, continuing our Causo.ai saga here.

Small recap if you didnt see my last posts:
- We soft launched 2 weeks ago
- Already reduced price and switched model to fremium
- Did a ProductHunt launch and secured top 5 spot
- Had 110+ visitors on the day, 68 signed up, OK conversion to paying users (TBD as not enough data to draw meaningful conclusions)

Still very early, but some interesting patterns already showing up.

Over the last 72 hours:

• ~250 people visited the site
• 90+ signed up for the free product
• traffic is still 2-3x higher than the weekend before PH
• a few users came back today (Monday) and converted after trying the product over the weekend

What’s becoming clear:

1. Conversion to free users is actually pretty solid
2. Conversion to paid is slower than we expected (idk what we expected though...)
3. A Product Hunt launch gives you attention, but not trust overnight

Current hypotheses for why paid conversion is slower:

• We have basically zero brand recognition yet
• Campaign setup is still too hard/confusing
• Timing is brutal because you need to catch founders exactly when they start fundraising

So this week is mostly about testing and iteration:

• keep momentum going (Reddit/socials/follow-ups)
• simplify campaign setup
• collect real reviews/testimonials
• prep another PH launch later this week
• keep building a side/extension product using the same tech stack

Honestly though, seeing people still come back 72 hours later feels way better than the initial spike itself.

Some weekend numbers:

https://preview.redd.it/1xyizz99pv1h1.png?width=2048&format=png&auto=webp&s=f402dbbc341b492a09a9bc1ed10f59990a4e6485

https://preview.redd.it/gtdgppbvpv1h1.png?width=2716&format=png&auto=webp&s=c5536532ed3e2e768f083512a069d2e1ec4eab2b

Hi dear Indiehacker community!

The past 2 weeks or so have been quite a transition for my mindset towards what to build. I used to build something I thought was cool and could "seemingly" solve a lot of problems, but when it came to distribution, I always hit a wall. People would react with nice words, they thought the product was awesome, my builder skills were great, but then... nothing. I realized that all these words of encouragement, all these positive reactions.. they were all lies.

I read "The Mom Test" last week and that was what brought it all together for me. Especially from what I experienced in the past 2 years (see my other post on an app I went to China for 3 times to promote). We talked to our target audience, pitched our app probably 50-100 times over a 4 week period. We refined this pitch and got a positive reaction out of the people we were trying to sell to 80% of the time. Yet after all this efforts, nothing fruitful has come of it. No follow-ups, no callbacks, it was essentially dead again the day I arrived back in my country after the trip.

We built something no one wanted to buy. And that had some good reasons. The problem just wasn't big enough. We had some competitors, but they solved a whole array of problems, all at once, for these Chinese factory owners. Just having 1 problem solved, yet having to do a lot of admin work upfront just wasn't worth it. These are great learnings to have now. But I think I could've learnt these things way earlier, and probably just on 1 trip to China, instead of 3.

If I had just talked to our target audience, without pitching our product, just asking curiously which problems they were currently facing. What their focus was. What was causing their greatest leverage. I probably would've built a totally different product if at all. I think after just 3 conversations, I would've picked up the onboarding admin cost would've been too much. Or even that the problem we were trying to solve (quotation sheets) was very low in their priority list.

But I'm glad I have learnt these lessons now. It made me look very differently at how the world works. Why some problems have been solved, but others haven't. It's all about whether people feel there is enough value in solving the problem, that they're willing to pay money for it. No money is no viable business. I will take these learnings with me on my next startup venture. Talking to our target audience first. Talking until my picture is complete. What problems do they have? What are they spending a lot of time and money on? Is it the same as I thought? Would a product be able to made to solve their needs? Only after answering these questions fully will I build again.

Six months ago I had zero users and a landing page that looked like it was built in 2014. Now I have 47 people who actually use what I built and honestly that feels more real than any milestone I've ever hit.

The thing nobody tells you about the early stage is how personal it gets. I know that Sarah uses my tool every Tuesday morning before her team standup. I know that Marcus signed up because he was frustrated with Apollo and saw my post in a Slack group. I know that 3 of my users found me because I was just hanging out in communities talking about the problem, not even pitching.

I tried the whole "spray and pray" thing early on. Posted everywhere, DMd a bunch of people, ran some ads with like $50. Got a few signups but nobody stuck. What actually worked was paying attention to who was already talking about the problem I solve. Been messing with getcleed for the signal stuff alongside just manually lurking in communities. Between those two things I started reaching out to people who were actively frustrated, not just anyone with a pulse.

The conversations are so different when someone already feels the pain. Instead of "what does your product do" it's "oh wait this might actually help with the thing I was just complaining about."

I don't know if this scales. Probably not in its current form. But right now knowing my users by name means I build exactly what they need and nothing they don't. My retention is way better than it has any right to be for something this early.

Anyone else at this stage? Where you know every user personally? How do you think about the transition to not being able to do that anymore?

My product is Vibe Promote marketing automation tool for app and saas founders who love building but hate marketing

week 1- 4 signups. posted on reddit twice. both flopped

week 2- 9 signups. started replying to threads instead of posting. way better.

week 3: 54 signups. changed my positioning from vague to specific. doubled the weekly rate.

week 4: 61 signups. 7 person DMed me saying "I've been waiting for something like this."

The best part was it was just an waitlist landing page but now I have an mvp and signups are way more now.

How your mvp growth went??

I'll start

Mine is Beatable, to help you validate your project

https://beatable.co/startup-validation

What about you?