r/micro_saas

After selling both my extensions for a humble amount of money, I thought i would relax because it was my first time making money but i was still hungry to build. So now, I'm building an extension that hides your geolocation from websites. I just want to say to those who are working, don't stop. Keep it up

Edit: I have to say, I did take motivation from GeoSpoof so props to the builder

I kept finding myself repeating the same setup whenever I started a new Next.js project, so I decided to turn my usual workflow into a CLI.

It generates a monorepo with pnpm, Turborepo, Drizzle, PostgreSQL, Supabase Auth, and testing already wired up.

pnpm dlx u/clubedge/create-clubedge-app my-app

I also made the starter versioned so projects can be generated from a specific release.

It's still evolving, and I'd be interested in feedback from other developers: what do you usually include in your Next.js starter, and what would you do differently?

You can explore the project here:
CLI: https://github.com/Clubedge/create-clubedge-app
Starter: https://github.com/Clubedge/clubedge-starter
Website: https://starter.clubedge.live

Like a lot of traders, I wasn't happy with TradingView this year. For a while I'd been running a pile of my own tools locally: backtesting scripts, a trade journal, alert scripts, a bridge to MT5, market data I'd downloaded. Each one lived in its own folder and half of them only worked on my machine.

So I put them together into one web project, Deepwick. Right now it has charts on its own engine, a Pine Script v6 compatible editor, backtests with an optimizer and walk-forward analysis, screeners, alerts (email, Telegram, Discord or webhook), paper trading, a journal and an MT5 bridge.

To be upfront: it's early. Most of these tools were built for me alone, and moving them to the web surely left bugs I haven't found yet. Pine support runs most scripts but not import, matrix.* or typed array.new<type> yet. Forex and gold history only goes back to September, so long forex backtests aren't great for now. Crypto has 700+ spot pairs.

It's free while in launch, no card needed. There will be paid plans later and I'd rather say that now.

What I'm after: what breaks, what's confusing, and what you'd want added next. I'm building from feedback, so every suggestion goes onto the list.

I’m a solo iOS developer, and my previous project, LoroNote, turns speech into text entirely on-device.

While building it, I learned that having a good AI model isn’t enough. If the audio experience is unreliable, the app becomes difficult to use regardless of how well the model performs.

So for my next project, I decided to build the reverse: an app that turns text into speech.

That became Local TTS, an offline document reader for iPhone and iPad. The goal was to let people listen to documents and books without uploading their text or keeping the app open on screen.

Three product decisions shaped the app.

1. Use two speech engines instead of forcing one model to do everything

Kokoro-82M provides natural voices for its supported languages, while Supertonic 3 expands the app’s offline coverage to 31 languages.

Using two engines created more work, but it allowed me to focus each one on what it does well rather than accepting the limitations of a single model.

2. “Offline” had to include generating new speech

Some apps can play previously generated audio offline, but still need a connection to process new text.

With Local TTS, speech is generated directly on the iPhone or iPad. You can switch to airplane mode, add new text, and continue using the core feature.

3. Background playback had to be part of the product, not an extra feature

A document reader isn’t very useful if you have to keep staring at it.

Playback continues when the screen is locked or while another app is open. It also supports Lock Screen controls, so a long document can behave more like a podcast or audiobook.

The app currently imports PDF, EPUB, Word, TXT, and Markdown files. It can also recognize text from printed pages and photos, highlight the current text while reading, and adjust playback speed.

The biggest lesson was that the AI model is only one part of an AI product.

Most of the product work happens around the model: document importing, long-text processing, audio sessions, background behavior, device performance, and making everything feel like one consistent experience.

I’m now working on improving pronunciation across languages, reliability with longer documents, and the overall importing and listening experience.

Here’s the project: Local TTS on the App Store

If you were positioning this product, which benefit would you lead with: natural voices across 31 languages, fully offline processing, or background playback with the screen locked?

A few days ago I posted here after making $492 in a day.

Yesterday I hit $927 in sales in a single day.

A lot of people asked me how I'm doing the outreach, so here's the scale behind it:

I currently have 150+ domains and 450+ mailboxes.

Each mailbox sends around 30 emails/day, which gives me capacity for roughly:

13,500 cold emails/day
405,000 cold emails/month

That's the part I underestimated for a long time.

At this volume, you don't need some insane conversion rate for the numbers to start getting interesting. Even tiny improvements in targeting, deliverability, copy and conversion compound pretty fast.

For perspective, 0.1% of 13,500 is 13.5.

Obviously, I'm not assuming every campaign will convert at 0.1% directly into paying customers. Cold email doesn't work that cleanly.

But that's the whole idea: build enough outbound capacity, keep improving the funnel, and small percentages can turn into meaningful revenue.

Still completely solo.

My next target is $1,000/day consistently, not just hitting it once.

Happy to answer questions about the mailbox setup, domains, deliverability, costs, conversion rates, or how I manage this much outbound alone.

EDIT: getting a lot of DMs asking what I'm using for all of this 😭 I built it myself: https://getle.ad/

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Today I recieved about a payment from Stripe. But I was not happy. Did you ever get that feeling when you have abandoned project that you did not touch for a while, and a new app that you have just built. And you are waiting your new child to succeed, but Instead you see that your old abandoned not so wanted child brings you a 5 grade. This feels wierd.

Btw the new child is this bad boy. Would appreciate if you try him out.

Happy Sunday everyone!

I've used up my weekly Claude quota, so I have a few hours to kill on this Sunday morning. Honestly that's a good thing. I'm going to spend them on marketing my own product and seeing what everyone here is building.

I'll go first. I'm building Smart Blur - Smart Build Labs, a Chrome extension with power of OpenAI local model that blurs personal info on web pages before anyone else sees it. It turns on by itself when you start sharing your screen from the browser. Everything runs locally, with no account and nothing sent to a server. It's a small utility for live streamers, remote workers, online teachers and anyone who shares their screen or screenshots a lot.

Your turn. Drop what you're working on in the comments and I'll check it out and give you an honest opinion. For context, I've spent 15 years designing and building enterprise software, so I'm comfortable on the product and UX side. Marketing and running a SaaS are new to me, so take my advice there with a pinch of salt.

I am not promising signup or downloading apps, but if I find something useful for my personal or profession life, I am open.

I have been building software on my own for a while, and I want to write down everything that happened between my first real product and my second one, because the gap between them taught me more than anything I have ever read or watched, and I honestly wish someone had sat me down and shown me all of this before I started throwing money at things.

The first one: nine months, £4k, zero payers

The first one was called Ancestorii, a private place for families to keep their memories, photos and stories together. I spent about six months building it with ChatGPT writing most of the code, and by launch day I genuinely believed it was perfect, I thought people would find it and love it the way I did, and what actually happened is nobody came. So I did what I think most of us do and started buying attention. Meta ads, Google search and YouTube ads, Reddit ads, UGC videos from creators, a £70 podcast sponsorship, a £120 post on a family tree magazine's Facebook page, my own podcast on Spotify, SEO pages, and cold messages to genealogy creators where not one of them replied. I even printed physical memory books before a single stranger had uploaded a single memory, which looking back was probably the most expensive mistake in the whole thing.

Some of the numbers are almost funny now. £210 on Meta in seven days brought around 15,000 visits and not one payer. When I took the paywall away the first signup came after £2.80 of spend, and then I sat at about four signups a day on £4 a day of Meta until I had 125 signups and zero people paying. Today it has 177 signups and has never had a paying customer. The worst part is I noticed in the very first week that the signups weren't turning into anything, and I kept spending anyway, on hope, because nobody told me to stop and I didn't want to be the one to say it.

The diagnosis took me far too long to accept. It was a vitamin, not a painkiller. Nice to have, nobody needs it today, nobody loses anything if they never sign up, and no amount of ads fixes that, ads just buy you the bad news faster.

The second one: £25 on ads, and people pay

Prep66 is an exam prep site for the Part 66 licence exams, 13 modules, about 25,000 practice questions with explanations, revision guides, mock exams, the lot. I launched it in the middle of August with one Reddit post in the community where those students hang out, and the first person paid full price nine days later without a discount code.

The only money I've ever put into ads was about £25 on a Reddit campaign, and it brought one signup and zero payers, so I killed it after five days and everything since has been organic. These are the last four weeks straight off the Stripe dashboard: monthly recurring revenue went from about £51 to £171, active subscribers went from 3 to 11, £230 came in gross, zero failed payments, zero refunds. It's not life changing money and I'm not pretending it is, it's less than two days of my shift pay, but the line only goes one way and it's doing that with no ad budget at all, while my first product burned £4k and never moved once.

So what was actually different? I ran both products back through the same questions afterwards and ended up with six things a product needs before a stranger will pay for it. Prep66 has all six. Ancestorii failed five of them.

The six things a product needs before anyone pays

One, the problem has to be mandatory. Nobody has to save their family stories. Someone sitting a licence exam has to pass it, there's no version of their career where they skip it.

Two, there has to be a deadline. An exam has a date, and a date makes people act this week instead of someday. Ancestorii had no clock on it at all, which is exactly why "I'll do it later" killed nearly every signup.

Three, failing has to cost something real. Fail an exam and you lose money and months, sometimes a pay rise. Not using a memory app costs you nothing today, even if it might cost you something in twenty years.

Four, the alternatives have to be expensive or bad. The other ways to prepare are long paid courses, thick textbooks, or older question banks that look like nobody has touched them in years. When the alternatives are pricey or tired, something cleaner and cheaper sells itself.

Five, it has to look credible the second someone lands. A student can tell in about ten seconds whether a prep site was made by someone who actually knows the exam, from the module names, the paper formats, the way the questions are written. Ancestorii was asking strangers to trust a no name site with their family photos, which is the exact opposite.

Six, you have to be able to find the buyers. Exam students hang out in a couple of subreddits and they search Google for the exact module they're stuck on. Who's the buyer for a family memory app? Everyone and no one, which in practice means you pay Meta to guess for you.

How I picked it and checked it before writing any code

The market research for Prep66 wasn't fancy at all. I picked a world I already knew inside out, so I knew what students complain about and what they already pay for, and then I checked four things. People already pay for this today, not "would pay", actually pay, right now, to someone. The options they're paying for are old and dated. Building it used to be really expensive, because it's a mountain of content, and with AI it isn't anymore. And it's too small for a big company to bother with but big enough to pay one person properly. If all four aren't true, I don't touch it now.

Then the validation was the launch itself. I built it lean, put it in front of one subreddit and watched whether strangers paid, and they did inside nine days. With Ancestorii I had the same kind of signal in week one, it just said no, and I ignored it for months.

What actually brought people in: SEO and GEO

Before anything else I put tracking on every signup, so every new account gets stamped with where it came from, either the UTM tags on the link or the site that sent them. That one decision changed how I saw everything, because of the first 13 tracked signups, 6 came from ChatGPT citing the site, 5 came from Google, 1 came direct and 1 came from the £25 ad. Gemini started showing up as a source not long after. I genuinely did not expect AI answers to be my biggest channel, and I'd never have known without the tracking.

What I learned doing it is that you write your titles and headings in the exact words people type, not the words you would use yourself. AI tools quote facts, not vibes, so the pages that got picked up were the boring factual ones: a glossary, a facts and figures page, a page comparing the ways you can study for the exam that doesn't trash anyone by name, and a features page with the prices pulled live so they're never out of date. ChatGPT leans on Bing, so I submitted the sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools and set up IndexNow so Bing gets pinged every time a public page changes, and the robots file lets the AI crawlers in instead of blocking them.

By late September Google Search Console showed 194 clicks and 6,110 impressions with an average position of 8.5, and about 1,580 of those impressions came from Google's own AI answers. It's not all solved either, Gemini still barely knows we exist, and that's my whole job for October.

Reddit posts written like a normal person talking, plus SEO and GEO, did basically everything.

Where all of this went: AskSami

Once Prep66 started paying I kept thinking about how much of that Ancestorii money I would have kept if someone had looked at what I'd built in week one and told me straight that it was a vitamin and to stop buying ads. Every time I looked at my ad numbers they meant nothing to me, so I'd paste them into ChatGPT or Claude and get the same generic "have you tried different hooks" answers, because they didn't know my product, they didn't know what I'd already tried, and they forgot all of it the next chat.

So I built AskSami. Sami reads your code from your GitHub repo, read only, so it already knows what you've built without you having to explain it, and then it tells you honestly whether you've built a painkiller or a vitamin, who's already selling the same thing, what your edge is if you actually have one, and where your effort and money should go, free channels before paid ones. It ties your signups and payments back to the exact post, page or ad that brought them, which is the tracking lesson from Prep66 done for you, and it remembers everything you've tried so you're never starting from zero again.

You can talk to Sami at asksami.app without even signing up.

If you're sitting where I sat with Ancestorii, with signups coming in and nobody paying, I know exactly how that feels, and I hope something in here saves you a few months and a bit of money. If you want to connect, swap notes or just chat about what you're building, please do, my DMs are always open 🙂

Put together my portfolio with zero code and integrated a personal AI assistant that answers questions about my background. It took literally minutes to get it running. Would love to hear what people think of the concept.