r/microsaas

Getting here took way more work than I expected when I started.

There were weeks where almost nobody cared. I’d ship something, post it, refresh analytics… nothing.

more than once I wondered if I was just building a tool for myself and calling it a product.

I’m at ~700 signed-up users and about $1,200 in revenue now.

Not “made it.” Not even close.

But it’s the first time the numbers feel real instead of imaginary.

What actually changed for me:

• People started finding it without me begging every day

• Some came back after I fixed stuff they complained about

• A few strangers paid for something built by a random guy on the internet

• Revenue stopped being $0 for long enough that I stopped checking Stripe every hour

When I started, I knew nothing about marketing.

I just kept thinking: founders shouldn’t have to guess why their landing page isn’t converting.

Building the product was hard.

Learning how to talk about it without sounding like a spam bot was harder.

If you’re in the quiet phase right now — yeah, it sucks.

Sometimes progress is invisible right before it isn’t.

Happy to answer anything about what worked / what was a waste of time.

ps. the tool is Landing Boost(https://landingboost.app)
would love your feedback too.

One of the first people to sign up for my SaaS recently created an account using Google, then deleted it about 15 minutes later.

Since they signed up with Google, I have their email address. I'm curious about what made them leave so quickly and was thinking about sending a short, friendly email asking if they would be willing to share some feedback.

But they never explicitly asked to be contacted, so I'm wondering where the line is here.

Would you consider it okay to send one short, non-promotional email in this situation, or would you leave them alone?

I'm mainly interested in understanding what went wrong rather than trying to win them back.

I actually asked the question here because another SaaS founder mentioned that they had done exactly that, which is what made me wonder whether it was actually okay to do so.

WARNING, LONG POST!!! (gotta make my first one a banger lol)

From lurking to posting, yikes its a scary change! I’ve been building a project called RamenSplit, and I wanted to share to the community what it was. I keep posts and realize i havent contributed anything to the sub yet 😅

For a while, I was trying to figure out how to get leads for projects without spending ridiculous amounts of money on ads. As a small (indie?) builder, it’s frustrating to see how expensive customer outreach can be.

You can have a useful product, but getting it in front of the right people often requires paying for clicks, impressions, or lead lists before you even know whether the audience cares. It feels like one must throw money at an idea without having a guarantee that the right people will see it. At the same time, I kept seeing different “idle-pay” or “passive income” software products promising that people could make money while their computers sat unused on X.

A lot of those products felt fake, or designed more around hype than trust. Most of their websites looked low quality, and while they boasted about hundreds of users It was difficult for me to understand:

- Where the money was actually coming from

- What users were agreeing to

- What data was being collected

- Whether the earnings were real

- Who ultimately benefited

That made me think about whether there was a more transparent version of the idea. I really wished passive income could exist, and wanted to see if I could make something that rewards all participants.

Instead of pretending that people are earning money from invisible background activity, what if users were rewarded for something they are visibly doing, like spending time waiting for an AI response?

That became the starting point for RamenSplit.

The goal is to build something community-sourced for the community:

- Advertisers (indie devs or small startups trying to drive first users) get a more affordable way to reach people actively using AI who would be interested in their products.

- Users who view an ad make a small cut of the revenue the advertiser paid to post the ad (50%-75% split among all viewers)

- A platform that allows advertisers to track metrics and see what they need to work on before they start paying for more diverse ads.

The current product is a Chrome extension that shows a small sponsor card while ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek, Perplexity, or v0 is generating a response.

It does not read prompts, responses, page text, or code. It only observes whether the interface appears to be generating. Users explicitly authorize the extension, complete onboarding, and can pause or disable it at any time.

I’ve built the extension, account pairing, user earnings dashboard, advertiser dashboard, privacy controls, offline event queueing, campaign attribution, and production site.

But I’m still very early and nowhere near finished.

There are no impressive traction numbers to share yet. The payout system still needs to be fully activated and tested. There are currently no active production advertiser campaigns. I’m still trying to figure out whether this is a real business or just an interesting idea I got emotionally attached to.

So I’m sharing this before it’s fully polished and released because I want feedback from people who have built websites and platforms with users.

The questions I’m trying to get some help answering are:

1. Would you install something that monetizes the time you spend waiting for AI?

2. Does the model feel more trustworthy than typical “idle income” software or methods?

3. Would a small sponsor card during AI generation feel acceptable or annoying?

4. Can this actually help small companies get leads without huge advertising budgets?

5. Is there a real community benefit here, or am I just creating another piece of bloatware?

I’d especially appreciate criticism from people who think the idea is flawed. If you made it this far, congratulations, you have my respect. Apologies about the long post.

Disclosure: I’m working with Parallel AI on marketing, so I’m affiliated with the product.

Running a small SaaS often means the same person is handling product, support, marketing, sales, and day to day operations.

I've been exploring where AI agents can realistically help with the repetitive parts of that workload. Parallel AI is one platform I've been looking at in this area, particularly around using AI employees for recurring business tasks.

I'm more interested in the practical side than trying to automate everything. Some tasks seem easy to delegate to AI, while others still need human judgment.

For those running a micro SaaS, which repetitive task would you be most comfortable handing over to an AI agent?

I've been scraping for years, mostly freelance and side stuff. Eventually thought - I clearly enjoy this too much, might as well productize it. So I started shipping data APIs on a marketplace.
Built 20+ over time. Same effort, same code quality, same setup across all of them. Figured a handful would land.

What actually happened: 19 make near zero. One does ~$1k/mo, fully organic - never ran an ad, never posted anywhere, never did outreach. People just found it through marketplace search and subscribed.
The part that still bugs me as a builder: I can't cleanly explain why that one. It's not more polished than the others. My best guesses are (1) it sits in a niche with real recurring demand where the official access is painful, and (2) it happened to match what people were already searching for. But that's post-hoc reasoning.

Takeaway I'm sitting with: distribution is way more lopsided than effort. You don't get 20 small wins, you get 19 zeros and one thing that pays for everything. Maybe the game is just shipping enough shots to hit the one, rather than trying to make each one work.

Anyone else running a portfolio of micro-products - is the 1-out-of-20 pattern normal, or did I just spray too wide instead of doubling down?

Hey guys, hope you guys can help me! I started my first startup online (website only). I am so grateful that I have made money within the first 2 months. I market via my Instagram account and have gotten over 1000 users and about 18 paying customers. I experienced a “high” from getting a stretch of a paying customer basically every other day (sometimes two days in a row) I recently had about a 5-6 day stretch with no purchases, but did get user sign ups. I know I’m being super ungrateful but coming off that hgih and then having a drought of 5-6 days (happened twice) really feels like shit and so demotivating to the point you want to give up. Maybe it’s a mix of burnout and also competitors being so much more massive than I am. Anybody been through this? Figured out what caused the drought and how? How did you get through period like this? How did you find the motivation and not get burnt out?

Hi guys, I'm currently looking for a partner to build a saas, I've been in the field for about a year, I'm looking for someone who is good at creating content and who would be comfortable in front of a camera

The goal behind it is also to go far together and to be able to celebrate victories together!

Users are trying my app online, I have their email and most often their name, is it creepy to connect with them on linkedin? Or on the opposite is it a welcome pro active step?

thanks

built a gamified todo app over 3 months. quests, xp, streaks, levels. released it, made a landing page, sat back. nothing happened for like 2 weeks.

so i stopped building and started talking. commented on posts where people complained about productivity apps, answered questions, shared what i was learning. no links, no pitch. just being around. thats when the installs started trickling in.

funny thing is the app barely changed. i thought i needed more features. turns out i needed to show up where the frustration was. i used todoist for years before building this so i keep comparing everything to it in my head lol.

the app is beedone, a gamified task thing. the distribution lesson hit harder than any feature lesson though.

for other solo devs here: how much time did you spend on distribution vs building in the first month?

One thing I’ve noticed with Micro SaaS is that getting the product to work can sometimes feel easier than getting the right people to actually discover it.

You can have a useful product, a decent landing page, and a solid onboarding flow, but that doesn't necessarily translate into consistent users.

I’ve been thinking about this while following the growth of developer-focused products like OfoxAI, particularly because developer tools seem to have an interesting distribution problem: the audience is relatively specific, but they're also exposed to a huge number of new tools every week.

So I'm curious how other Micro SaaS founders approach this.

I spent like 3 weeks adding stuff to our product because signups were slow added two features cleaned up onboarding and fixed a bunch of little things nobody had complained about. Then I changed the landing page copy to explain one use case way more clearly and that did more than all the product work.

Kind of annoying because building features felt like real progress while changing a few lines on the site felt too small to matter so I'm starting to think I should be spending way more time testing how we explain the product before deciding the product itself needs more work

the whole product is one field everybody else throws away

every company job board hands out an exact publish timestamp on every posting. greenhouse, lever, ashby, all of them, free, no auth. and basically every job site strips it and shows you "posted recently" instead.

i kept it. 998 boards, 47,297 open roles, every one with the real minute it went up.

turns out 22.9% of those open roles were first posted six or more months ago. 10,926 of them. that number only exists if you kept the dates, which is the entire moat. someone funded copies my search in a weekend and still can't tell you that.

cost me a month of polling before the data was worth anything. no way to shortcut it either, you just have to start early and wait.

47.9% publish a salary too, which i only get because i parse the description text rather than the salary field. greenhouse doesn't have a salary field at all.

link - firstin-delta.vercel.app happy to get torn apart on the parsing