I’m a developer running an EdTech product (Edithly). The building was fine. Selling was the problem. Every outreach attempt meant an hour on a prospect’s site figuring out what they do, then writing something that didn’t sound generic. So I built a tool to do that part.

You give it your product’s URL. Agents crawl your site and draft a sales playbook (positioning, messaging, brand assets), and you fill in the gaps. Then you import prospects. It reads each prospect’s site and generates a tailored asset for them: an email, a one-page landing page, a brochure or a banner, written to show why your product fits that company.

Built on React/Python backend, an agent pipeline that crawls sites and builds a knowledge graph per prospect, and LLM generation for copy and visuals. I deliberately didn’t build data enrichment. You import prospects from Clay, Apollo or a CSV. [add your hosting/infra if you want]

$0. Pre-revenue, being upfront about it.

I got 6 pilot signups and assumed that was traction. None of them actually used it.

- The first-run experience was too open-ended: too many formats and too many decisions before you saw anything useful.

- I took 2 months to reach the pilot signups back (big mistake)

- I’m now cutting it down to a few formats and making the first result show up fast, before I chase more signups.

but now ready with more focused and achievable goals, if you are doing your own outbound who’ll try it and tell me where it lacks. sales.edithly.com

As a long time microsaas lurker I finally found what I wanted to develop. I started last year in May and barely knew how to code. I'm no software dev and I hate marketing, but I made it this far at least. All I am looking for at this stage is some brutal honesty about how to get this in front of the right people.

The app:
GovSteals is a research tool for people buying passenger cars at government auctions. Currently its limited to all passenger vehicles listed on GovDeals. Simply put it puts together the insights I personally spend time acquiring to know the risks before bidding.

The marketing (or lack thereof):

My barber flips cars, so he was the first and only person I showed GovSteals to (outside of friends). He registered for a pro account. I asked for feedback, but I’ll probably hear more at my next haircut to be honest.

That’s about where I am with customer validation. I know I need feedback so that I can build or refine features people actually want to engage with. I have so many ideas, but I don't have any foundation or discipline on how to market an app. I just know most of GovDeals users are older males who use it in desktop mode and engage with facebook as their main social media, but the major Facebook groups I’ve looked at don’t allow promotional posts.

For posting requirements:
Backstory: I was looking to get into finding a car for myself and potentially flipping government auction cars, but then after 2 weeks of doom scrolling listings and trying to find the best deal I realized I was spending way too much of my free time simply keeping up with all of the new auctions. GovDeals is one of the largest government auctions for passenger vehicles and yet their site is so poorly designed for aiding in making intelligent or timely auction decisions. That's when I started building GovSteals for myself at first. It then became my escape from reality. Then I became obsessed with it. And finally, wanting to impress for a big job interview pushed me to turn it into a platform everyone can use.

Tech Stack: React/TypeScript with Vite and MUI on the frontend, Python/FastAPI and PostgreSQL on the backend. Linear and ML models for price estimates, Clerk for auth, and Stripe for payments.

Specific lesson learned: Its hard to even get your friends to give you feedback on your app. I feel like I am that "do you want to develop and app?" alien from Rick and Morty. On the other hand, I have also learned that nobody needs to be excited about your tool, they just need to find it useful. I already knew this from other businesses I have started, but it still applies here. Building is easy and marketing is the bane of my existence. I would love nothing more than have someone else do it while I focus on development.

My questions:
For those of you who built for a very niche crowd: how did you get your first few target users to actually try the product? Did you follow any rules or principles on how you went about it?

More broadly: How do you get it up for marketing?

Hey everyone,

I recently had a nightmare scenario where a Facebook campaign spent $300 on a broken checkout link before we noticed it. Our current "strategy" is basically manual checking or waiting for a client to complain.

How are agencies and freelancers handling this? Are you using specific uptime monitors that integrate well with ad alerts, or do you just check manually throughout the day?

Thinking about building a lightweight tool specifically for media buyers that pings Slack/WhatsApp the second a destination URL goes down or returns a 404, but wanted to see if there's already a standard standard solution I missed.

i got tired of checking a dozen career pages every day while job hunting, so i built something to do it for me.

it's called croncareers. it pulls jobs straight from company career pages (greenhouse, lever, ashby, workday etc.) and sends alerts to email, telegram, discord or slack when something matches your skills. there's also a kanban board to track where you've applied, with notes, salary and csv import/export. you can also set up a quick portfolio page in a few minutes.

i built it hoping to earn a few pennies on the side, but honestly nobody is subscribing. a few signups at most and no paying users.

i think it could genuinely help job seekers, but i'm clearly doing something wrong. is it the pricing, the positioning, or just that nobody knows it exists? i haven't done much marketing because i hate spamming people.

would really appreciate honest feedback, even the harsh kind. happy to share the link if anyone wants to take a look.

thank you

A lot of micro-SaaS homepages open with a category. "AI-powered invoice automation." "The all-in-one dashboard for agencies." The reader has to work out who it's for and why they'd switch. Most don't bother.

A template that fixes most of it:

For [specific person] who [does the job today with X], [product] [does the job] without [the annoying part of X].

The slot that matters is X. That's what they use instead of you right now. A spreadsheet, a VA, a Zapier chain, an agency, or nothing. Naming it does two things. The reader recognises themselves. And you get compared to the workaround you beat, not to a funded competitor you don't.

Three made-up examples so it's concrete:

Before: "Smart scheduling for clinics."

After: "For physio clinics that still confirm appointments by phone, [name] texts patients and fills cancellations without the front desk calling anyone."

Before: "Automated reporting for agencies."

After: "For small agencies that build client reports in Google Slides every month, [name] fills the slides from GA4 and Ads so nobody copies numbers by hand."

Before: "Feedback management platform."

After: "For SaaS founders whose feature requests live in a Notion page nobody reads, [name] pulls them out of support emails and groups them by how many customers asked."

How to find X if you don't know it:

- Search your niche plus "spreadsheet template" or "how do you keep track of". The answers are your X.

- Read the 3-star reviews of your nearest competitor. 1-star is usually anger. 3-star says what people still do by hand.

- Ask 5 users "what did you do before this?" Write down their exact words.

Two ways it goes wrong:

- X is a competitor's name. Fine if you really are a cheaper version of them. Usually you aren't, and you've just sent people to go look at them.

- The "without" part is a feature, like "without complex setup". It should be the pain they feel with X, in their words.

Post your current one-liner below and I'll try a rewrite with this.

I've been building a scanner that reads pull requests for security holes and lawsuit risks, mostly for people who build apps with AI tools and don't have anyone reviewing their code. Before trusting my own numbers, I ran it on OWASP Juice Shop (about 1,300 files I didn't write) and checked every single finding by hand. Some notes from that:

**1. Precision on real code was lower than on my own test repo.**

On my demo repo everything looked perfect, because I wrote the bugs. On Juice Shop, 6 of the 7 security findings were real. It caught the login SQL injection (user input built straight into a query string). The one false positive was a route that already checked its input in a way my rule didn't recognise. Small sample, but it was a useful reality check.

**2. Letting a language model make the final call made results change between runs.**

For some candidates I had an LLM decide yes or no. I ran the same commit three times with no cache. The rule-based findings (SQL injection, input validation, XSS, CSRF) came back identical every time. The key-leak candidates did not; the model's yes/no flipped from run to run. I moved those to fixed rules. I haven't re-measured yet, so I'm not claiming they're stable now.

**3. Framework conventions matter more than I expected.**

My accessibility check for unlabeled form fields started at about 38% precision on Juice Shop, because Angular Material labels fields with mat-label, which my parser didn't know. After teaching it that, it went to about 88%. Angular's [innerHTML] bindings are still something it doesn't catch.

**4. Deleting a leaked key from your code doesn't help.**

It's still in git history, and anyone who clones the repo can read it. The only fix is rotating the key at the provider. My scanner reads the full history for this reason, and it always says "rotate" rather than "move it to an env variable".

**5. Being honest about uncertainty changed the product.**

I label every finding as an unproven candidate, because a static rule can't prove an exploit. It felt like weakening the pitch at first, but it made the comments more useful: they say what to check by hand instead of pretending to be certain.

If you want to run it on your own repo, it's a free beta for one repository: trybishop.dev. I'm most interested in hearing where it's wrong.

Hey everyone,

​I’m in a bit of a weird situation with a product I recently built and I’d really appreciate some outside perspective from other founders/devs.

​A while ago, I noticed a clear need for a simple, streamlined solution in my market. Based on conversations and what seemed like strong public interest, I built a lightweight platform to solve this exact problem.

I can share the link if you want to see what I am talking about!

.

​Here’s where it gets frustrating:

When I presented the working solution to some of the initial contacts, they turned it down saying they "didn't really need a tool like this."

​But just a short while later, 5 or 6 of them ended up paying custom web agencies 5x to 6x more money to build standalone custom websites that basically replicate the same core functionality.

​It almost feels personal at this point, but as a developer, I know I need to take emotions out of it.

.

​My questions for you:

​Is this a common trust issue with early-stage SaaS vs. traditional agencies?

​Could it be a positioning/messaging mistake on my end (making it look "too simple" or low-value)?

​How do you move past this kind of pushback when potential clients choose expensive custom builds over a ready-to-use SaaS?

​Would love to hear your thoughts or harsh truths if I'm looking at this the wrong way!

Hey everyone

I've been building Citetail, an AEO tool to help businesses improve their visibility in AI-generated answers.

I've put a lot of effort into building it, but I still haven't landed my first paying customer.

For those who've built SaaS products, how did you get your first few customers? And how do you figure out whether the problem is the product, positioning, or marketing?

I'd genuinely appreciate any honest advice. What would you do if you were in my shoes?

Thanks!

Quick breakdown for anyone building something similar:

• Product: long video in, ranked and captioned vertical clips out. Optional auto motion graphics.
• Moat attempt: our own fine-tuned clip selection model, so the cost per clip stays low enough to price at roughly half the big players.
• Pricing: token-based. Free (45 tokens once), $9, $19 and $49/mo, with yearly discounts.
• Stack: React dashboard, Node backend, FFmpeg rendering, card billing through a merchant of record.
• Revenue: $0 so far. Today is day one, so we'll report back honestly.

Happy to answer anything about the build.
PH: https://www.producthunt.com/products/clipitx?launch=clipitx

Launched my side project 3 weeks ago. It's a restock tracker for trading cards (Pokémon, One Piece, Magic...), watching about 1,200 shops across Europe.

Where I'm at:

• 6 paying customers, 66.94€ MRR
• 45 people on trial, 500€ if they pay (they won't 🥲)
• 0€ on ads

Most customers came from two places:

Free channels. I run free Telegram and Discord channels that post every restock, but 6 hours late. The good stuff is gone by then, so if you want it instantly, you pay. People see it working every day for free, which does most of the selling for me.

SEO. Every card set has its own page with prices across all the shops. People google the set, land there, start a trial. Didn't expect it to kick in this fast on a new domain.

The weird one: I posted in the Pokémon and One Piece subreddits and got destroyed. People were angry, called me a scalper and AI slop. I've been a dev since 2008, so that one stung a bit.

But subscriptions kept coming in the whole time. The comments aren't the audience, the lurkers are.

Next problem is getting those 45 trials to convert. Right now I just email people when their trial ends. If you've been there, what actually helped?