Feels like we’re entering the “AI wrapper” saturation phase.Curious what people think:
What actually makes an AI SaaS defensible now?
Interested to hear different perspectives.
Hop through startup landing pages effortlessly, vote and leave feedback for the founders so they can improve their landing pages and products, no account required to leave feedback and vote. Just hit “Start Hopping” to see it in action https://buildhop.io
Or if you want to submit your product… Account creation is easy and submitting a product doesn’t require a ton of writing, product images, or time.
First time founder here, just realized that uilding the product was the easy part. Actually bringing in traffic and getting eyeballs on it is a completely different beast.
I recently launched PopVot.com, a social voting platform where people can discover, vote, and debate on various topics. I’m struggling to move the needle and get consistent organic visitors to the site.
For those who have been through this, what actually worked for you in the early days? Was it slow SEO, cold outreach, viral social media hooks, or something else entirely? Any advice or reality checks would be massive.
Hi Guys, ı am an indie dev. and developed a subs. tracker app. There is an algorithm app that uses math rather than ai. The app Basicly does everything a subs. app does and additionally gives real saving advices according to your spending habit. ı havent been succesfull so far and need feedback from you guys.
Can you check and give feedbacks?
here is the link: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/yula-subscription-tracker-ai/id6759402076
NoThink is my second iOS app. 7 weeks live. Total revenue: $10. About 6–20 App Store impressions per day. One subscription. I'm a solo indie dev with a full-time job and studies, English isn't my first language, and I need to share something honest.
This week I sat down and audited my own ASO from scratch. It was bad.
My title was "NoThink: Pause, Reset, Unwind" — three emotive verbs, zero high-volume search keywords. My description never named a single one of my actual features (Box Breathing, Panic Relief, Do Nothing, Deep Thinking, Binaural sounds). My Turkish title had a typo — "Anskiyete" instead of "Anksiyete" — that one transposed letter was blocking the entire Turkish App Store from finding me for 7 weeks.
So I rewrote everything from scratch:
- New title: NoThink: Anxiety & Breathing
- New subtitle: Panic Relief & Mindfulness
- Keyword field: 14 single words tuned to actual search data (meditation, stress, calm, box, breathwork, binaural, sleep, focus, zen, deep, reset, nothing, grounding, detox)
- Description rewritten naming every feature
- Fixed the Turkish typo
- Optimized listings for UK, AU, CA, Spain, Sweden, Traditional Chinese — instead of 5 markets falling back to English
What floored me in the research: the top result for "anxiety" in the US App Store is Rootd, with only 10K ratings. Apple's algorithm rewards topical relevance, not just rating count. The wellness category looks impossible because Calm and Headspace dominate, but at the body/long-tail keyword layer it's wide open.
I'll come back to this subreddit in exactly 2 weeks with real numbers — impressions, conversion, revenue, win or lose.
Side note on the $10 story: a few days ago I posted here and accidentally wrote that the "lifetime" purchase was $6.99, but App Store was showing $6.99 monthly. One redditor pointed it out. I felt horrible. He was incredibly kind, accepted the corrected price, and bought lifetime. Next morning I woke up to my first real subscription notification. After months of nights and weekends, that "cha-ching" felt huge.
If you've ever struggled with overthinking, racing thoughts, or panic — free 3-day trial, no signup:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/nothink-pause-reset-unwind/id6759533620
If it helps even a little, an honest App Store review would mean the world. And if you have ASO ideas I missed, please tell me — I'd rather hear hard truths now than learn them at $20 in revenue.
Thanks for reading. Have a calm day 🌿
Quick question for founders and builders.
After launching your product, how did you get your first users to actually visit and sign up on your platform?
Did you use:
- Facebook/Instagram ads?
- Google Ads?
- TikTok content?
- SEO?
- Cold outreach?
- Referrals?
- Reddit and community posts?
What worked best for you?
And for those who ran ads:
- How much did you spend?
- What was your cost per user?
- Did the users actually convert and stay?
- Was it worth it?
I’m especially interested in learning:
- How to onboard the first users
- How to get visibility when nobody knows your startup
- Which marketing channels delivered the best ROI
Would love to hear your real experiences, lessons, and mistakes to avoid.
Hey guys,
In 2014 I was hospitalised for five days after collapsing from drinking 30+ beers a day for nearly a year. I'm British, mid-40s, based in Asia. I run a digital marketing agency by day. My agency is feeling the AI squeeze right now and a year ago I started looking for something new to retool into.
Since the 2014 incident I have continued to have issues with alcohol, and for the past couple of years I have been trying to use the Sinclair Method (a medication-assisted approach to drinking less) and getting frustrated that no iPhone app handled the medication side properly. Most drink trackers either treated me as a problem to be fixed, paywalled the useful bits, or required me to sign up to a community before they'd do anything. None of them actually understood the drinking habit as a serious habit-tracking problem the way fitness apps understand workouts.
Six months ago I decided to build the app I wished existed. My entire career has been in the SEO space, not a developer. I taught myself Swift in evenings and weekends. Roughly 350 hours of actual coding. The data layer, the AlcoScore math, and the UX I designed myself. Used AI tooling for boilerplate-heavy parts where it helped, but the architecture/perfectionism choices were mine.
What ended up in v1.0:
🍺 273 branded drinks across 9 regions, 60 alcohol-free swaps, auto-calculated ABV, calories, units, cost.
🎯 Five goal types: cut back, stay under a limit, build sober days, quit entirely with sober streak, or just track.
📊 AlcoScore: a six-pillar habit score over a rolling 28-day window.
⌚ Apple Watch app with 15 complications. Log without touching your phone.
📱 22 home-screen widgets, 6 Lock Screen, Dynamic Island, Live Activity, 10 Siri Shortcuts.
👁️ On-device drink recognition via the camera, plus a 5-source barcode scanner.
🔒 No account. No signup. No subscription wall. Nothing leaves the device by default.
Free, with optional Pro tier. Core tracker is free forever.
Eight days in. The honest reality:
The technical build was hard but doable, and more importantly fun (as i developed my skills and saw my creation taking form). The marketing has been humbling. Three real warm leads from 30 cold outreach emails. Apple Search Ads are doing ok, but i have a limited budget. Reddit posts mostly landing in single-digit upvotes. Consumer iOS launches are genuinely different from anything I've done before.
Two things I'd love this sub's input on:
App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6762422391
Site: https://alcolog.app
30-second preview: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/e5mdVLo4LQI
Looking for any insights, thanks for reading 😄
I see many sellers offering genuine and high-quality products on online marketplaces, but one question keeps coming to mind:
How do sellers make sure buyers actually receive the products safely, and how do both sides avoid being scammed?
Some common methods I’ve seen include:
- Physical meetups
- Payment on delivery
- Buyers sending someone to inspect and collect
- Visiting a physical store
- Paying upfront and hoping everything goes well
But each of these options still carries some level of risk.
For sellers:
- What if the buyer refuses to pay after delivery?
- What if someone uses fake payment confirmations?
For buyers:
- What if they pay and never receive the item?
- What if the product delivered is not what was advertised?
Would you use a service that acts as a trusted middleman (escrow)?
For example:
If there is a dispute, the platform holds the funds until the issue is resolved.
Would you be willing to pay a small convenience fee for this kind of protection?
I’d love to hear from both buyers and sellers:
- How do you currently protect yourself?
- What has worked well?
- Would you trust an escrow service for marketplace transactions?
Most websites don’t fail because of design
they fail because users don’t understand what to do
I’m a UI/UX designer and I help fix:
• low conversions
• confusing layouts
• weak messaging
I don’t just “review design”
I show you exactly what’s stopping people from converting and how to fix it
Portfolio:
If your site isn’t bringing results, DM me 👍
I spoke to someone last night, and he was doing 100% video content, not just through your usual suspects, but also through forums and other communities like Facebook. It was interesting because his product is 100% B2B. Like heavy, B2B, and he is roughly getting 1-2 leads per day with no budget.
Now I'm curious to know what you doing with your marketing? Not the polished stuff, or the Gary V BS playbook you'll use once you have budget and a team. Right now, today, with whatever scrappy setup you've got. How are you getting people to notice what you're building?
I ask because every early-stage founder I talk to is figuring this out differently. Some are going hard on Reddit and getting banned from subreddits. Some are doing cold DMs and cringing through every send. Some have found a weird channel that shouldn't work but does. And a lot are just winging it hoping something sticks.
What's been your move? What's actually working right now, and what did you try that was a total waste of time?
I’ve spend the last 6 months trying to build a website to solve one of my problems.
I feel like the product is fine, but I’m not necessarily good at marketing which I feel like is probably more important than the product itself these days.
What are people doing to find users, to learn marketing and to improve as a whole?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated, cheers!
Background : I am an engineer with little experience in computer vision who recently learned about motion magnification (MM) from videos. This technology is useful in non invasive sensing like vibration analysis, medical monitoring. I noticed that the most used MM software is by RDI technologies and the state of the art algorithms are patented by MIT. RDI's software is expensive (>1000s of USD per year) and licencing MIT's algorithm is expensive too. This seems to be something that only MNCs or large scale businesses can afford.
I created an algorithm that is not as robust as MIT's but can get the job done. I aim to target small and medium scale businesses and to that end I created a waitlist website page. The plan is to patent my algorithm and write a desktop app (it is computationally high) if I see the demand.
Question:
How do I attract SMB's to my waitlist? What platforms or companies can I reach out to? How would or did you do it?
How do I determine the pricing of this software? I don't know how much SMB would spend on this kind of analysis or how much it saves them or how they would determine if the price is high.
Many thanks in advance.
One thing we noticed: small businesses usually don’t need overly complex enterprise systems. They mainly want:
What actually worked better for us was using conversational flows that felt more human instead of static scripted responses.
Another big factor was whether the chatbot could adapt to different business needs without needing constant setup changes.
What others here are using right now for AI customer support. Are most people prioritizing automation, lead gen, or just reducing support workload?
Early testing phase.
The goal is to let users configure and manage trading bots simply by chatting with an AI assistant instead of using complex dashboards.
Still rough, but improving every day.
Feedback is welcome.
Imagine having one person who actually gets what you're building. Not a community. Not a course. Not another framework. Just someone who knows your situation and tells you the truth.
Yesterday I started talking with a solo founder. Here's what he told me:
"I'm a person who needs to build that relationship before I can fully commit to sharing my plans and ideas."
They can't open up to someone and tell them what's keeping them awake at night. Even when they want to. And honestly I don't blame them.
Because after all these online communities and accountability partners that don't actually help they start to lose trust in everyone.
I learned that myself after I offered help too early. Even when they were telling me exactly what they needed I moved too fast.
What I needed to do first was talk more. Build that trust before anything else.
Has trust ever stopped you from being fully honest about where you're actually at?
I’d love to provide honest feedback on your SaaS landing page. In the last few days, I’ve come across many terrible, heavily vibe-coded landing pages that don’t effectively communicate their value proposition. With seven years of experience designing websites, I’m well-versed in what works and what doesn’t, and I’d be happy to offer my insights to help you improve your landing page. This feedback can then be used to increase your conversion rate.
Drop your SaaS landing page in the comment section and I’d give a you honest feedback
I always wished real life had RPG stats.
Strength.
Discipline.
Knowledge.
Consistency.
So I built Ascend — an app that treats self-improvement like a progression system instead of a checklist.
The whole idea was inspired by Solo Leveling / RPG grind mechanics:
I wanted the feeling of:
“logging into your character every day.”
Still evolving the system, but honestly this made me more addicted to improving myself than any normal habit tracker ever did.
What RPG mechanic do you think real life is missing?
I’ve been building a timeline-based storytelling app where you can create interactive timelines for history, travel journeys, projects, personal stories, fictional worlds, and basically anything that happens over time.
Main thing I want right now is feedback — usability issues, confusing parts, ideas, features you want, things that feel unnecessary, anything.
App:https://timeline-creator-pi.vercel.app/
I recently added:
A Guide section for first-time users
Docs in the navbar so people can revisit instructions anytime
A feedback option directly inside the app
AI Assistant Mode to quickly generate timelines using Gemini models
The AI mode is probably the easiest way to explore the app. You can just describe something like:
“Create a timeline of World War 2”
“Japan trip itinerary”
“Story of Shivaji Maharaj”
“Startup journey timeline”
and it generates events automatically which you can edit further.
You can also create timelines manually with maps, locations, dates, event descriptions, images, and connected story flow.
I’m currently working on a more cohesive timeline system where a person can have one complete evolving timeline containing all journeys, places visited, projects, milestones, etc.
Please explore it, break it, experiment with weird ideas, and give honest feedback. That would help a lot at this stage.
A lot of startup advice sounds obvious in theory but feels completely different while building.
For me, one big realization was how much operational clarity affects execution speed.
Curious what lesson other founders or builders learned later than expected while growing a startup.
