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Great breakdown — LinkedIn outreach is tricky for SMBs too. With Finsight AI, I’ve found that clarity in targeting matters more than volume. Curious how you balance automation with staying authentic?

That is a smart approach

Thanks for sharing this. The approach of identifying high-intent prospects through real-time LinkedIn engagement signals is interesting and much more targeted than traditional outreach. I’ll definitely take a closer look at IbexAI.

This is a really interesting approach. The engagement signal is much more valuable than just filtering by job title — someone actively commenting on a competitor’s post is already showing intent. I think the challenge is separating genuine buying intent from people who are simply engaging because they’re interested in the topic. Curious how you handle that distinction?

Thanks for the useful info

Lists like this are great for backlink SEO value, but I wouldn't count on them for real conversion, directories index you, they don't sell for you. In 20 years running an MSP, the channels that actually moved revenue were referrals and partner relationships, not being listed somewhere. Treat this as a one-afternoon SEO task, then spend the real hours on the two or three channels where your actual buyer already spends time.

the list is nice to have, but i find only 76 useful to drive traffic or worth having the backlinks.

This is excellent.

IbexAI - This is an awesome tool. I have been requesting people on LinkedIN to review the product and give feedback. No cost to it. The averages are so poor that makes you demotivated.

This is good.

this kind of list always ends up way more valuable than people expect going in, the domain rank sorting is a nice touch too since most of these lists just dump links with no way to prioritize

It is a helpful resource, especially as distribution can often feel much more complex than it is. ~

I have found that the hard part is not finding places to submit a product. It’s figuring out which ones are worth your time.

One easy way to prioritize things is look at 3 things: is the audience relevant, is there actually activity happening there? can you add value besides just dropping a link?

A checklist of places to post is not going to help you. But something that can act as a starting point for that kind of judgment is more useful.

man 330 places sounds like a lot of work. i barely have energy to list my startup in one place lol. good for those who need it though. whatever.

I'll bite — early-stage tools site here (free calculators/converters), currently in the "built it, now need real distribution" phase. What's the free thing you're offering?

Interesting. Could you share more about how your approach differs from standard SEO or content marketing? Always curious about new growth tactics.

Thanks!

I'm curious: what was the biggest difference between the leads IbexAI surfaced and the ones you were finding manually before? Was it mainly lead quality, timing, or the amount of time saved?

I actually need this right now. But how can I find it?

good

This is useful. The more useful and funny advises are from the commenters.

The list is useful, but the real value is in prioritization.

As a founder, I’d rather submit to 20 places where my ICP actually hangs out than 300 directories that generate impressions but zero users.

Distribution is not about being everywhere. It’s about finding where your buyers already have intent.

This is genuinely useful. The fact that you’ve included whether each platform is free/paid and the domain rank makes it much more actionable than a generic “startup directories” list.

Curious — which 5–10 platforms from the list would you prioritize first for a brand-new SaaS with very little traffic?

How can we get the access to it buddy ?

That’s a great feeling. One of the best signals when building a product is seeing that the work is actually starting to compound whether that’s users, feedback, revenue, or simply knowing you’re solving a real problem. Congrats, and hope you keep sharing the journey.

The 9/11 IT migration story in the replies is doing a lot of work here — it's basically the missing "when free actually works" caveat to your bit. Free-with-no-recurring-hook on a business where the marginal cost per customer is real (fabric, chemicals, a guy's actual time pressing shirts) isn't a growth hack, it's just going out of business faster with extra steps.

Also, "I'd raise $30M for a laundromat" is genuinely the correct pitch for at least three YC batches in 2021.

The joke lands, but free actually was my growth engine once. After 9/11 I did free IT migrations for companies rebuilding out of lower Manhattan, and those became the customers who paid me to run their infrastructure for the next twenty years. Free works when the free thing is the painful part and the recurring work is the business, which dry cleaning does not have, so the police response was fair.

The 'personalize 20 strong prospects over 200 generic blasts' point matches what I just lived through on the email side: I sent 31 fully hand-researched cold emails for my product launch - each opened with something specific the person had actually written. Within hours I had a warm reply from someone whose blog I'd read for years. Genuinely-researched outreach is a different sport from template outreach. One thing I'd add: those 31 emails took two evenings to write, and that cost IS the moat - anyone doing 200 a day can't fake it.

The dry cleaner is wrong and you're right, he just needed a comparable. MoviePass sold 15 USD /month all-you-can-watch tickets below cost, went from about 20k subscribers to over 3M in under a year, and was shut down by 2019 with its parent company in bankruptcy. So the model works beautifully right up until the part where it doesn't 😉

Hi, I've just tryed the free version.
From my point of view, I've spent only few minutes on the software, but I could say to you to ask a feature in the initial research.
In my case I want leads from Italy (because my Saas now it is only in italian language), but I get lead from every where.

Maybe you could add this select box in the initial page.

thank you

This is really great insight!

This is gold. Point #1 and #4 hit hard.

Quality > Volume and Profile actually matters more than the message.

I'm building AI Agents for BD businesses and struggling with LinkedIn outreach.

Question: When you research those 20 prospects, what's the 1 thing you look for to personalize the first message?

The finding that requests without a note performed about 25% better is especially interesting. I’ve been assuming that a short, personalized note would build more trust, but it may also make the request feel like an immediate sales pitch.

I’d be curious about the metric behind the comparison: did no-note requests only get a higher acceptance rate, or did they also produce more replies and qualified conversations afterward? Acceptance can become another vanity metric if the connection never turns into a real exchange.

LinkedIn outreach takes a lot of time. Have you tried combining your outreach data with automated multi-channel follow-ups? I recently hooked up an automated notification system via Pabbly that syncs e-com actions directly to custom WhatsApp webhooks. Streamlining the backend makes outreach so much easier.

The data point on connection requests without a note is something I had to learn the hard way. Spent about 3 months adding a note to every single request because it felt more professional, before I actually ran the test. Same pattern as what you found.

The reason makes sense once you see it: the note implies you're pitching before you've earned the right to. People check the profile first anyway, so let the profile do the selling.

The ICP specificity point is where most people go wrong before they ever get to message copy. Watched teams spend weeks on a perfect message when the list was the actual problem. Right people at the right time, an average message still converts.

What's your experience been with engaging existing connections vs new outreach? In my experience the second bucket converts at 3-4x but almost nobody works it deliberately.

The data point on connection requests without a note is something I had to learn the hard way. Spent about 3 months adding a note to every single request because it felt more professional, before I actually ran the test. Same pattern as what you found — and the reason makes sense once you see it. The note implies you're pitching before you've earned the right to. People check the profile first anyway, so let the profile do the selling.

The ICP specificity point is where most people go wrong before they ever get to message copy. I've watched teams spend weeks on a "perfect message" when the list was the actual problem. If you're reaching out to the right people at the right time, an average message still converts.

One thing I'd add: what's your experience been with engaging existing connections versus new outreach? In my experience the second bucket converts at 3-4x but almost nobody works it deliberately.

The data point on connection requests without a note is something I had to learn the hard way. Spent about 3 months adding a note to every single request because it felt more professional, before I actually ran the test. Same pattern as what you found — and the reason makes sense once you see it. The note implies you're pitching before you've earned the right to. People check the profile first anyway, so let the profile do the selling.

The ICP specificity point is where most people go wrong before they ever get to message copy. I've watched teams spend weeks on a "perfect message" when the list was the actual problem. If you're reaching out to the right people at the right time, an average message still converts.

One thing I'd add: what's your experience been with engaging existing connections versus new outreach? In my experience the second bucket converts at 3-4x but almost nobody works it deliberately.

One thing that's worked well for me is creating genuinely useful content before doing outreach. When the landing page solves a very specific problem, reply rates improve because you're sharing something valuable instead of just asking for attention. Curious—what kind of reply rate are you seeing from this approach?

The missing layer is measurement at each handoff. Track connection acceptance, reply rate, qualified conversations, and booked calls separately. If acceptance is low, fix targeting or the profile. If replies are low, fix the opener. If calls are low, fix qualification and the offer. That makes outreach a controlled learning loop instead of a volume contest.

My problem is that I have an old LinkedIn account with approximately 2000 followers.
But none of my connections are my ICP, they're just local random people, connections of connections.

I am struggling to get out of that hole even if im trying to connect with my ICP, LinkedIn is still hardly suggesting not relevant posts.

The "no universal script" one is the myth people resist hardest, and I think that's because a script is a way of avoiding the actual work.

The only personalisation that survives contact is the kind that can't be faked - something you could only know by having actually used the thing. "Congrats on the launch" and "saw you're in the X space" are mail merges with extra steps, and everyone can smell it. Compare that with: I opened your signup form on a phone with a Lithuanian keyboard and the price field rejects a comma decimal. You can't template that, and the recipient knows it in one second, which is the entire point - it proves you spent your time before asking for theirs.

The cost is exactly the 20-vs-200 trade you described. Done properly that's maybe fifteen minutes a prospect, so twenty of them is most of a working day, which sounds terrible right up until you compare it with the reply rate on 200 messages people have already seen three times this week.

A question, since you ran the agency: where does specificity start working against you? I'd assume there's a line past which "here's a concrete flaw in your product" reads as criticism rather than homework, and my guess is it depends more on how the ask is framed than on the finding itself - but you'd have seen the pattern across far more sends than I have. Did the sharp ones convert better, or just get remembered?

The 'no note' stat is the one that surprises people the most, but it tracks — a blank request feels lower-pressure, and the curious prospect checks your profile instead. Also completely agree on pending invites killing your reach. I clean mine weekly and the algorithm rewards it. Solid breakdown.

Effective LinkedIn cold outreach is less about sending a large number of messages and more about reaching the right people with relevant communication. Start by clearly defining your ideal customer profile (ICP), including their industry, job role, company size, location, and specific needs.

Personalization is also important. Instead of relying on a single message template, research each prospect and explain why your offer may be relevant to them. A professional and complete LinkedIn profile can also improve credibility because prospects often check your profile before responding.

Automation can save time, but excessive automation and generic messages can reduce engagement. It is better to focus on a smaller number of well-targeted prospects and build genuine professional relationships.

Finally, maintain a clean and relevant network by reviewing pending invitations and connections regularly. LinkedIn outreach works best when it combines clear targeting, useful communication, personalization, and consistent relationship building rather than simply focusing on connection numbers.

Completely agree with #1 and #2. In the age of AI-generated spam, blast tools have made inboxes almost unusable. Doubling down on a razor-sharp ICP and reaching out with actual context beats 1,000 generic touches every single time. Quality > quantity is the only sustainable way forward.

thanks for sharing this I never realized why pending invites should be withdrawn! I am struggling to draw engagements on my posts despite so many connections.

This is useful — I've been thinking about how to get in front of freelance clients without cold DMs feeling spammy. Do you find LinkedIn outreach works differently for service-based offers versus SaaS, or is the approach basically the same?

The biggest takeaway for me is quality > volume.

I’d add one more: even a highly personalized first message can go nowhere if there’s no thoughtful follow-up behind it.

Getting the right person to notice you is step one. Managing the conversation after that is where most systems break.

The no-note finding matches my experience: a note turns a connection request into a pitch, and a pitch invites a no. What I'd add after years of posting daily on LinkedIn is that your last five posts are the real cover letter, because people check your activity before they accept. Targeting plus a credible profile beats any message template.

The point about quality over quantity is probably the most important takeaway here.

Too many people focus on sending more messages instead of understanding the people they're trying to reach. A well-researched list of prospects will almost always outperform a large list built without clear targeting.

Great insights.

The best outreach usually feels relevant because it’s based on who you’re talking to, not because you found the perfect script.

Great breakdown of what actually matters. 👏

I would love to work with you

I think I may have found the kind of founder I’d actually enjoy working with.

I’ve been reading through your IbexAI journey, and one thing kept standing out to me.

You seem to be doing a little bit of everything.

From figuring out how to get the first paying users, to getting 42 beta testers in two weeks, to writing about finding high-intent prospects, testing distribution channels, and even putting together that list of 60+ subreddits for founders.

And honestly, I thought: someone has to be making sure all the things around the founder don't start becoming another full-time job.

That’s where I think I could fit.

I’m an Executive Assistant, but not the “calendar and reminders” kind of EA.

I’m the person who likes taking the loose ends off a founder’s plate keeping things organized, following up on people and opportunities, handling research, staying on top of moving pieces, supporting customers when needed, and making sure things actually move from “we should do this” to “this is done.”

I know you’re not currently advertising for an EA, and that’s actually why I’m writing to you.

I’d rather start the conversation before there’s a job description telling you what you need.

So, Matt…

When do I start?

What are the intent signals you're seeing the most success with? Don't see any in this post, and don't see any on your website.

What stands out to me is that avoiding a LinkedIn ban is less about finding the “perfect” automation setup and more about making outreach behave like genuine networking.

The biggest mistake I see is optimizing for volume before optimizing for relevance. If the targeting is weak, even a perfectly written message becomes spam. A smaller list of highly relevant prospects, personalized around their role, business, or an actual pain point, will usually create better conversations than hundreds of generic connection requests.

I’d also add that engagement quality should be treated as an important signal. If people are accepting requests but never replying, that’s probably not a volume problem—it’s a targeting or messaging problem.

For me, sustainable LinkedIn outreach comes down to three things: relevance, moderation, and real conversations. Automation can help with repetitive tasks, but it shouldn’t replace the human part of the process.

This is a really interesting idea. I especially like the problem you're trying to solve. If you could improve just one thing before pushing this to more users, what would it be?

The intent-based targeting point is definitely the strongest takeaway here. Reaching out to people who have recently engaged with a relevant problem is much more effective than blasting a broad ICP list. I’d just be careful with the specific acceptance/reply-rate thresholds—LinkedIn doesn’t publicly confirm those as official detection limits. Focusing on relevance, personalization, and genuine engagement seems like the safer long-term approach.

So, Identifying an Intent is the key!

The intent-based approach is interesting. Instead of chasing volume, identifying people already discussing a relevant problem seems much more sustainable. GeekyAnts has also been exploring AI-driven approaches to making B2B outreach more targeted.

Great breakdown on the quality vs volume debate. I've been doing cold outreach for GoldBean API (our AI API marketplace) and personally found that mentioning a specific pain point in the first sentence gets 3x more replies than any template. The hardest part isn't sending messages — it's finding the right trigger. For developer tools, 'API pricing transparency' has been my best opener because every dev has been burned by hidden fees.

Hey John, noticed you’re building AI tools.
I analyzed 500+ AI signals from GitHub, Product Hunt and Reddit this week.
One interesting pattern: AI agents for customer support are showing repeated demand signals.
Thought this might be relevant to your work.

Im in the same boat

Brutal honesty. Most builders focus too much on the product software rather than the raw market psychology. Keep executing. 👑🏁

What makes this post valuable is that the real failure wasn’t building the wrong product—it was confusing product progress with business progress.

Steps 5, 6, and 9 are especially important. You can spend months improving UX, adding features, and polishing the product while avoiding the one activity that gives you the clearest signal: getting it in front of the right people and having uncomfortable conversations with potential customers.

I also like the final point about blaming the idea. “Nobody wants this” and “nobody knows this exists” are two completely different problems, but they can look identical when you're staring at an empty analytics dashboard.

The biggest takeaway for me: validation, distribution, and product development shouldn't happen in separate phases. They need to happen together from day one. Great post—and congrats on turning those painful lessons into a successful second act.

Step 4 and Step 9 are uncomfortably close to home right now. Spent weeks getting the positioning, the SEO, the affiliate program all lined up before publishing a single piece of content anywhere the people who might actually buy this stuff hang out. Zero sales so far — which stings less as a verdict on the idea and more as confirmation that "built it properly" and "anyone knows it exists" are two completely different projects.

The thing I keep circling back to from these comments: the "did anyone complain about this before you built it" test. In my case, yes — the failure modes I built around are ones I'd watched play out repeatedly in enterprise programmes. So I'm fairly confident it's a distribution problem, not a nonexistent-problem problem. Doesn't make distribution any less hard to actually solve, though.

Step 10 jumps out at me.

It's easy to say "the idea didn't work" when it's really too few of the right people ever saw it. But the opposite can happen too. You can keep telling yourself it's a distribution problem long after the market gives a weak signal.

I've run into this with products I've built. The difficult part wasn't just doing more marketing. It was deciding what evidence would actually convince me to keep going, change the approach, or stop.

Looking back at the two SaaS attempts, was there a point where you could have distinguished "bad idea" from "not enough distribution" earlier? What signal would you pay attention to now?

The “marketing starts after launch” point is probably the biggest one here. I’ve seen this happen a lot.

Getting the product in front of the right people early can save a lot of time. You learn what people actually care about, what makes them convert, and what needs fixing before spending too much time building.

Otherwise, you can end up with a polished product that nobody knows about or needs.

Step 6 hit hardest, mistaking building for progress is basically the whole indie hacker trap. I did the exact same thing with my first app, ignored every signal for months. Weirdly comforting seeing it laid out this bluntly, most of us dont admit it this clearly.

Sharing these post-mortems is super valuable! Are you planning to completely abandon these projects, or pass them on to someone with a marketing background? I built Digimarket as a 0% commission marketplace with an AI valuation tool specifically for indie hackers wanting to offload side projects.

This hit hard.

I’m a factory worker in Italy and I launched my first Android app a month ago, built in my spare time. It solves a problem I had personally: knowing how much I can safely spend before the next paycheck, without having to calculate everything manually.

The app works for me, but getting it in front of people who don’t already know me has been much harder than building it. I tried a small launch, X, Hacker News, local press outreach and communities; so far, almost all installs are from people I know.

I’m trying to learn the difference between “the product isn’t useful” and “not enough of the right people have seen it yet.”

Thanks for sharing the honest version of the journey.

It's all sarcasm on the surface, but there's a pattern there: most of these errors are the result of optimizing for building and not learning. Probably the largest point is the “build the real version first”.

The more advanced the teams, permissions, integrations, analytics, and polish, the more it might seem like progress and the more it might make one wonder, “Does anyone really want this?” It's helpful to differentiate between product risk and implementation risk. If no one would like the product, then quicker solution to the technical problems doesn't help much.

That's also noteworthy. If a thing fails to gain any momentum, “bad idea” might be one reason. Sometimes the product just failed to reach a large enough number of the appropriate target audience to make a significant splash.

As an angel I can usually tell within five minutes which founders built in silence: they ask how to find customers, while the ones who sold first ask how to build faster. Henson Group only worked because clients hired me before I had anything resembling a product. Selling first is the cheapest validation there is.

Haha, "Step 2: Build the 'real' version first" hit way too close to home.

It’s so easy to fall into the trap of thinking that more features = more value, while ignoring the fact that nobody actually needs the product yet. I especially love the point about "Mistaking building for progress." It feels productive, but it’s often just procrastination in disguise.

Thanks for the reality check (and the laugh). The "PS" gives me hope that we can all learn from these painful mistakes!

Heheh thats really true, i agree with your points. Also when someone gives negative feedback about your product it feels demotivate ,self doubt too but we need to move on, one single feedback doesnt decide your product i believe.

haha that's really funny and honest. We have all been in this loop recently. But let's be honest, even before starting to build, doing a small market search is not as pretty straight forward in my opinion. We all have social media accounts, but building that engaged audience is not as simple as it seems, at least from my experience.

I treaded my two Saas as; first tools that solves my own problems, trying to make my life easier in the future. Also, they are something valuable for my portfolio, something I'm proud of. Of course, getting traction and having high conversion rates is the real deal when talking about Saas, but there is still that engineer inside me who wants to play around and release stuff and try something new, rather than just consuming.

Have been stuck in the loop of step 1 and step 6. Is it confidence lacking to go out and tell the people that i have built something cool while being uncool?

This is genuinely funny and a good mirror. Going through it point by point, I think I've actually avoided most of these, 113 days of daily posting (opposite of building in silence), actively working on not compulsively refreshing analytics, doing outreach and SEO from early on rather than waiting for some perfect launch moment.

But a couple hit close to home. I did launch with a genuinely full feature set instead of the leanest possible MVP,not sure if that was wrong for what I'm building, but it's a real match to step 2. And the closing line, blaming the idea instead of the fact that nobody knew the product existed, that's basically been my entire visibility problem for the last few months, not a validation problem, a "how does anyone find this" problem.

Congrats on the sold company and the $3K MRR on the current one, would genuinely be curious what changed between the failed attempts and this one, beyond just the mistakes listed here.

Step 2 and Step 9 both hit close to home. I built a landlord compliance tool (CertMinder) after getting fed up tracking gas safety/EICR/EPC dates across spreadsheets, and the pull to keep adding "real version" features before showing it to a single other landlord was strong.

What actually shifted things for me was treating testing as the finish line, not the launch: multiple test accounts, deliberately breaking it with messy real-world data (expired-yesterday certs, HMOs needing five different licence types) before I'd trust it enough to tell another landlord to rely on it. Cheap insurance against exactly the "built it in silence, nobody came" outcome you're describing.

Though I'll be honest, I probably leaned on thorough testing partly because it felt safer than doing Step 9 properly (i.e. actually talking to people before I was "ready"). Two different disciplines, and I only had one of them down early on.

Step 6 hits hard. Building feels productive, talking to customers is scary 😂

good going

Step 9 is probably the most dangerous one. It’s easy to convince yourself that polishing the product is productive,when talking to potential customers would teach you more in a day than another week of building.Learned that lesson the hard way 😅

Step 5 and 9 hit uncomfortably close. Built CheCeno in near silence, told myself I’d “figure out marketing after launch.” After was a lot further away than I expected.

The part I didn’t expect: even my AI coding assistant never flagged it. Answered every technical question well, never once asked why I was staying quiet about positioning. Turns out that’s on me to ask, not on the tool to notice.

Congrats on the exit + the current one — genuinely curious what changed your relationship with Step 9 specifically. Did marketing start earlier this time, or did something else shift?

Brutal honesty. Most builders focus too much on the product software rather than the raw market psychology. Keep executing. 👑🏁

For step 7, apart from the vision itself, what other signals helped you trust that it was the right direction?

If not completely, sums up quite a bit on my journey in building FileLever :D

Two rounds of “built it, nobody came” is a rough but common rite of passage. What’s different about how you’re approaching validation this time versus the first two?

Step 6 is the one that got me hardest. "Every new feature feels productive. Every conversation with a customer feels uncomfortable." That's not a bias you can decide to fix. It's structural. Building gives you feedback every 20 minutes. Talking to customers gives you feedback you can't always act on immediately. So your brain correctly concludes that building is higher-reward in the short term.

The only thing that broke the loop for me was a rule I had to make external: no new features until I'd spoken to 3 users in the last 7 days. Not "talked to users recently." Exactly 3, exactly 7 days. The specificity was the point. It's too easy to fudge a vague commitment.

The bit about selling a company is also worth noting. Most people don't write about the failures that preceded the exit. This is a more honest version of that story than the case study format usually allows.

We have all been here and keep doing it over and over again. Congrats on the successes in there as well.

I feel personally attacked by step 5 and step 9.

I spent three months building a Windows security tool. Ransomware protection, 32 detection rules, 32 hardening rules. Felt productive the whole time — shipping features, fixing bugs, making it solid. Then I launched it into complete silence. Zero users. Zero traffic.

Took me a while to realize that building the product was the easy part. Getting anyone to actually use it? That's the real challenge. Still figuring that part out.

Thanks for writing this. Made me feel a little less alone in the "built something and nobody came" club.

This really hits home. I’ve spent a lot of time building my AI tools platform, and now I’m realizing that building the product was only half the job. Getting real users and feedback is the harder part. I’m starting to focus more on talking to users instead of just adding features. Thanks for sharing this!

Nice

I hear you loud and clear! I was taught that same lesson today. Six months - three platforms - $0. Why? Because I built first, then offered a new tool to customers that hit them out of the blue. Some were shocked, some didn't even care, others copied and built similar on their own. LessonS learned.

are u talking about me

This hits home 😄. I'm currently building my own SaaS, and one of the biggest things I'm learning is that building the product is actually the easier part. Getting people to discover it, talk about it, and eventually become customers is a completely different challenge.

I'm building Postlefy, an AI-powered social media scheduling and automation tool, and I'm realizing that marketing and talking to potential users need to happen alongside development — not after everything feels "perfect."

Definitely learning this the hard way too.

That is nice

The part I’d add to this post is that “build vs. market” can still hide a conversion problem. You can talk to users, validate the problem, and still end up with a SaaS that people understand but don’t feel compelled to buy. The missing layer is often the translation from “this problem exists” to “this product is the obvious solution for me.” I’d be curious, looking back at those two SaaS attempts, whether the people you spoke to could clearly articulate why your product was different from their current workaround—or whether the validation stopped at confirming the pain.

This reads like a joke until you score yourself against it. I got to zero customers with a fully produced course platform, videos and all, so number 5 and number 9 hit hardest. Building genuinely feels like progress while you're doing it, that's the trap. The fix I've settled on is embarrassingly small: a daily 30 minute block where I'm only allowed to talk to people, not touch the product.

This hit pretty close to home. I’m currently building my own SaaS ecosystem, and one of the biggest lessons I’m learning is that building more doesn’t necessarily mean moving forward. It’s surprisingly easy to spend weeks improving the product because you know what you want it to become, while avoiding the uncomfortable part: putting it in front of people, listening to them, and finding out whether they actually care. I’ve definitely caught myself doing some of these things already, especially treating features and polishing as progress. Now I’m trying to reverse that mindset: ship earlier, talk to users earlier, and let real feedback influence what I build next. The “build in complete silence” point especially hit me. Thanks for sharing the lessons from the failures rather than just the success story. Those are usually much more useful.

The uncomfortable question that helped me most in this spot: did anyone complain about this problem before you built the tool? Not "would you use this" — people say yes to be polite — but spontaneous, public complaining: forum threads, app reviews, support rants about the incumbent. If that trail exists, it's a distribution problem and it's fixable. If it doesn't, no marketing fixes it. Worth doing that autopsy honestly before spending another month on growth tactics.

nice

nice

Thanks for sharing openly — traction is the hardest part. I’m building Finsight AI, and I’ve found customer discovery is more important than features early on. Curious, what would you do differently now to validate demand faster?

This hit home. I’m building my first SaaS right now, and one of the biggest things I’m trying to avoid is hiding behind “building.”

My instinct is still to improve the product, polish the brand, add features, and tell myself I’ll focus on distribution once it’s ready.

But I’ve realized that’s exactly how you can spend months building something nobody asked for.

With FollowReach, I’m trying to take the opposite approach: talk to people, share what I’m learning, publish the problems I’m seeing, and use real conversations to shape the product.

Still early, still learning, and definitely easier said than done but I think getting comfortable with customer conversations is probably more valuable than another week of polishing the product.

The “build in complete silence” and “mistake building for progress” points especially hit home. 😅

Absolutely. 2026 feels like one of the most unpredictable times to start a company. Competition is intense, technology is moving incredibly fast, and customer expectations keep changing. But that also creates huge opportunities for founders who can solve real problems, move quickly, and adapt better than everyone else.

That's a great list, and a glorious little plug of your own venture!

However, in terms of addressing the core message of it never being easier to start a business, you could flip your perspective and say that it's never been easier to be ignored. If thousands and thousands of nascent companies are being brought to life every day, you really need to bring something interesting to the table for people to take any notice.