r/saasbuild

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?

I built tryproduck.com/audit, it walks your app like someone opening it for the first time and sends back every bug and confusing bit it hits. Over 650 startups have run it so far.

Wir bauen seit ein paar Monaten zu zweit an Scibly.

Die Idee ist eigentlich relativ simpel. In Unternehmen gibt es schon unglaublich viel Wissen in PDFs, Dokumentationen oder irgendwelchen internen Wikis.

Das Problem ist eher daraus etwas zu machen mit dem Mitarbeiter wirklich lernen können.

Genau dafür bauen wir Scibly. Man gibt bestehende Inhalte rein und erstellt daraus kurze interaktive Lernerfahrungen.

Wir haben uns jetzt auch entschieden Scibly komplett Open Source zu stellen und Self-Hosting anzubieten.

Hier sieht man in 54 Sekunden ganz gut was wir bauen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcpLUNBRhQw

Github: https://github.com/scibly-dev/scibly

Wir sind gespannt auf euer Feedback

I am so happy rn! the last few days were the best days ever for my consumer App. 10 Downloads a day with 21+ trials/subscirpitions

If I can help anyone out just ask and i will share everything!

If you can help me tho I would be open to chat about Marketing :)

Hi all,

As i'm working on growing launchpact.io i'm seeing a lot of unprepped launches and as the day unfold they don't get much visibility and end up with a failed launch.

This is one of the reasons i build launchpact.io, if you have an upcoming launch do check it out and prep ahead of time, i also added this checklist that can give some hints too, have a read.

Good luck everyone!

I've been using Claude Code quite a bit and realized I was constantly looking back at my screen to see whether it had:

• finished the task
• stopped and needed my input
• was still working

So I built BrainSnack, a VS Code/Cursor extension that handles this for me.

While Claude is working, it opens a small panel with something short to read — AI news, technical articles, interview questions, output-based questions, etc.

And when Claude finishes or needs my input, it plays a sound so I know I can come back.

The interesting part is that it doesn't monitor the screen or scrape terminal output.

It's free and open source.

I'd really appreciate some honest feedback from other developers.

I also shared the build/story on LinkedIn. If you'd like to see it there (and help a small indie project get a little more reach), here's the post:

👉 Linkedin post link

Download links -
VS Code - https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=shikhargupta.brainsnack
Cursor - https://open-vsx.org/extension/shikhargupta/brainsnack

Thanks! Would love to hear what you think.

Hey all,

Sharing a project I have been working on, it's a jurisdiction focused open evidence/ uptodate solutions. https://primaryai.world/ A few points:

1. Answers in local units and guidelines unless US ones are more relevant.
2. Shows resistance patterns local to you for ID questions
3. Auto generates patient handout
4. Qualifies for non accredited CME credits
5. Setting awareness inpatient/ outpatient/ long term care
6. Local drug formularies awareness

Hey people,

If anyone saw my other post about converting scanned PDFs to EPUB, welcome back. I implemented a lot of features based on the feedback I got from the users, so check it out if you want. Anyways,

After building that, my friends said to me that they read a lot of stuff online[articles, newsletters, blogs] and bookmark them. They wanted a tool to read them offline, just the way they read their book, with a clean structure.

So I built a Chrome extension.

https://www.convert2epub.com/extension/

FEATURES

• Add the current page from the toolbar popup or the right-click menu
• Keep a running reading list; pages stay queued until you're ready to save
• Drag to reorder chapters before you export
• Give the book a custom title, or let it use the first page's title
• Cover image and in-article images are pulled in automatically
• Everything runs locally in your browser, no account, no external server
• Works great with long-form articles, blog posts, and documentation pages

HOW IT WORKS

1. Browse to a page you want to save and click "Add this page"
2. Repeat for every page you want in the book
3. Click "Save as EPUB"; your browser downloads a ready-to-read .epub file

Please try and tell me if you like it.

Maker here. Everything I have built before this was workflows and processes, useful but invisible. This is the first thing I have made that is an actual app, and it went into Open Beta this week, which is why I am posting.

It is called GenieOS. Give it your URL and it extracts two layers. Your brand, so voice, tone, palette, logos. And your business: what you sell, who to, how you are positioned, who you are up against. Brand alone gets you copy that sounds right and says nothing. Knowing the products and the competitors is what gets you copy with a claim in it.

Add your social handles and it pulls your back catalogue, sorting your imagery into illustrations, infographics, human and so on.

That context becomes a constant, so the ask can be one on-brand image, one social post published across every platform, a full onboarding email flow, or an entire multi-channel launch from one prompt. Then you edit it properly, with real editors for all four surfaces, which is what makes handing more of it to an agent sensible rather than a gamble.

What I most want tested: whether the context layer actually pays off in the output. Did it get your business right, not just your voice? Did the emails come out on-brand? Was the tone right on the social posts? Did it categorise your imagery correctly? That is the part I cannot judge from the inside, because I know what we fed it.

There is a free tier so you can use it without paying anything. First 100 Open Beta users also get 3 months of the paid tier: gogen.ie/r_alphaandbetausers

Drop your project below and I will test it back this week, same detail I am asking for.

I built Sitemapper after getting tired of checking a sitemap, then checking pages, then checking robots, then trying to remember what changed after the last deploy.

It does that in one pass. Give it a public site and it reads robots.txt, discovers XML sitemaps, checks live pages, and keeps a snapshot so later runs can tell you what actually changed.

The part I care about most is not an SEO score. It is catching boring regressions like a page turning noindex, a canonical moving, a URL disappearing, or the sitemap suddenly shrinking.

Free first scan, no account: https://sitemapper.oortstack.com/

If you try it on something weird or messy, I would like to know where it falls over.