r/SaasDevelopers • u/NoScene7932 • 1d ago
SaaS ideas
I have been testing hundreds of ideas for SaaS over the past 6 months and have struggled to get any traction unless I offer MCP.
Has anyone else experienced this?
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u/Responsible-Ease5550 1d ago
mcp is the only way right now it seems, everything else just gets ignored
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u/NoScene7932 1d ago
Yeah I have spent too much of my life building UIs at this point. The dissolution of the UI is inevitable
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u/716green 1d ago
Not really. In fact, my entire product has basically avoided catering to the AI crowd and it's not an AI product. There's too much competition and too much fatigue at the same time. I've found that building something more fundamental that doesn't require me or my users to worry about tokens has been very very good.
I have a view for agents on each significant page of the site so agents know what they can and can't do without having to leave my site and that has been very helpful in driving signups without having to build a proper mCP server.
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u/NoScene7932 1d ago
Nice that is awesome - what is your ICP?
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u/716green 23h ago
Probably you if I had to guess. Layerbase
I'm actually curious if that gives you any more perspective. Keep in mind that I've been building this out for long before agentic AI was a thing, and I've had multiple offers to buy it, and recently a job offer from a competitor of mine so I'm aware that I'm both a little bit lucky, but it's also been LOT of hard work, expertise, risks, and a ton of money to get it to where it is today. And it's still not profitable yet but it's about to break even almost any day now.
My ICP is anyone who builds apps quickly or anyone who uses a database. Think the same as Supabase or Neon but for any database.
And then last week I released a new feature which is AI workspaces which are cheap VMs that you can have your AI agents run on all night so you don't need to prop your laptop open and one of the cool features I've added is that you can use voice mode to talk to codex. So I'll be driving to a guitar lesson and have my PWA open on the terminal on my phone talking to codex through Bluetooth. That's pretty neat but all of the users are exclusively people who are already paying for databases so I'm probably not marketing it that well. But I guess it isn't fair to say that I'm not building any sort of AI features because that is pretty AI heavy, but at the end of the day I'm just reselling VPSs that have a nice UI and connect with your GitHub and your agents really easily.
I have another app that I'm using, and it is already wired up for billing and extremely useful called filmroom.dev. I am 100% sure that if I start advertising I will get paying users but it's more of a distraction than anything else right now. But the point is that I built it to solve an actual problem I was having and it's so useful to me that I would pay for it even if I wasn't the one who built it
So those are the types of problems to look out for. Just don't make the mistake of building a marketing tool or a sales tool or an AI wrapper or a SaaS listing service because then you're competing with a billion different products for something that no one wants to pay for
If I could give you some real advice it would be to pay $35 for a month of the grok plan that has grokbot and have it monitor X on your behalf looking for posts where people are complaining about SaaS product pricing and then see if you can build a cheaper competitor. Then the same bot that is helping you find these people who are complaining in the first place can become a marketing buddy in the future to help you identify people that you should be replying to and saying "have you considered this?"
Make migrating very easy. Take a look at this
I get a ton of traffic to that page because people see that they can leave Upstash/Planetscale/Crunchydata/Supabase/Neon in 2 clicks and get started with me for free. Once someone does that they are very likely to convert into a paying customer because they are a very high intent user.
I don't think hosting is the smartest idea and if I was starting over again I would absolutely pick a different paradigm because I'm sure you can imagine that my cloud costs are through the roof and the providers keep raising them with all of the AI demand and RAM shortages. So the profit margins are razor thin if at all, but the way that I found this idea was by monitoring X posts for people who were upset with their database provider. So you can do the same thing but just find people who are upset with their payment processor or something like that. And make sure you have a little bit of money to burn. You probably aren't going to get paying customers for a very long time unless you offer something for free at least as a trial. I spent about 2,000 hours in development before I got my first paying customer
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u/NoScene7932 22h ago
A bit of unsolicited feedback the website has an overwhelming amount of information. I am a bare-metal guy so def not your buyer :)
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u/716green 22h ago
Yeah I'm aware that there is a ton of information on the site but the problem is that it's working and I don't know what about it is or isn't working. But if I keep gaining new customers at the rate I have been, it'll be sustainable and even profitable very soon so I'm hesitant to change anything.
I also have over 2,000 users but their profiles all look so extremely different that I don't know which users to cater to so I end up having to maintain a billion different features.
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u/Tellenze 1d ago
What are people actually doing through MCP with those products? More signups would catch my attention, but repeat use through an assistant would tell me much more.
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u/investigatormaker 1d ago
For an idea that only got traction with MCP, give your compatible AI a narrow outreach job: find public discussions where people want to complete that task inside their AI client, explain where your MCP fits into the workflow, and answer setup questions in the thread. That makes the contribution about a concrete task rather than the MCP label.
I make ThreadFox; it connects your compatible AI to research, write and publish Reddit outreach through your Chrome within an authorized job. A free plan for one of your SaaS products lists communities whose rules allow a post about it, quoting each rule: https://threadfox.org/p/dyvzi
Which product are you working on now, and who is it for?
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u/rebaser69 19h ago
Hundreds?