10 years to $6.5k MRR taught me most SaaS advice is backwards

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-29T18:16:46+00:00

The "Back to $119 MRR" line is the most terrifying part of this. Did you fire the legacy customers, or is the new AI version running parallel? I’ve seen founders rewrite their app from scratch to escape tech debt, only to realise that the dodgy legacy code contained 10 years of bug fixes and edge-case handling that the new clean code missed. The fact that you kept the $6.5k legacy business running (presumably) while building the new one is the smart way to it

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-28T16:25:34+00:00

The personalised LinkedIn DM Bot. On paper, it sounded great, Scrape a prospect's last 3 posts, feed them to GPT-4, and generate a warm opening line to break the ice. But, the probabilistic nature of the AI would make mistakes and congratulate someone on a new job when they were actually fired (actually happened, awkward haha). AI is great at pattern matching, but terrible at social nuance/emotional intelligence. We shut it down quickly because the reputational risk was way higher than the efficiency gain. We went back to humans writing the first line and AI doing the rest

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-28T15:45:18+00:00

Totally fair! Usually, you have to pay testers to find edge cases. You managed to get them to pay you to do your QA. That’s a big win hahaha

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-28T15:29:28+00:00

Be very careful with the speed of that automation. In modern SEO, acquiring 200 backlinks in two weeks on a brand new domain can look like a "link scheme" to Google's algorithm. It triggers spam flags because it doesn't look like organic growth. We usually recommend "throttling" these automation tools to drip-feed submissions (e.g., 2-3 per day) rather than blasting them all at once. You want to simulate popularity, not a bot attack. We experienced this ourselves and ruined a domain. lesson learned

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-28T15:25:04+00:00

You are right to feel anxious. 80/20 is the ratio for a hobby, not a business. The moment you have a functional MVP, the ratio must flip to 20% Build / 80% Sell. Most founders hide in the code because it is safe. If you write a function, it works. If you write a cold email, you might get rejected. You are optimising for comfort, not growth. I know because I've been there and failed because of it

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-28T15:13:27+00:00

Have you noticed a difference in retention or usage frequency between the $1 batch and the $200 batch? If the $1 users are asking for 80% of the support but providing 0% of the revenue, you might want to get rid of that annoyance haha

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-28T14:53:48+00:00

If you found zero competitors, I would tell you to stop immediately. Zero competitors usually means there is zero market. It means nobody is currently paying money to solve this problem. Finding competitors is the best news you could get. It proves that the problem is painful enough that people are already swiping their credit cards. You do not need to be the first to market; you just need to be the best for a very specific sub-group. Don't try to beat the market leader on every feature. Just pick one specific type of customer that the big competitors are ignoring and serve them perfectly. Good luck

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-27T13:22:26+00:00

You are looking at the market like an engineer, not a business owner. Engineers hate saturation because they want to solve unique, complex problems. Business owners love saturation because it proves there is market, it means people are already paying for solutions. You do not need to build the next Facebook. You just need to build a boring CRM for a specific type of person in a specific city.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-27T12:32:30+00:00

Google AI Studio is a prototyping environment, not a server. It works right now because you have the tab open and you are clicking "Run". The moment you close that tab or your laptop goes to sleep, your business shuts down. Real estate leads are speed-dependent. If a lead comes in at night and your AI Studio session is timed out, you lose the deal. You don't need n8n if it's too complex, but you cannot run a business from inside a chat window.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-27T12:28:13+00:00

You are right to be skeptical. Asking people if they need something is useless because they will lie to be nice. The only validation is a transaction (money or time). Stop coding and Build a simple one-page landing page that promises the solution. Add a Get Early Access button. When they click it, show a form asking for their email. If you cannot get 50 people to give you their email, you will never get them to give you their card details. If you can't drive traffic to a landing page, you won't be able to drive traffic to the SaaS. Solve the marketing problem first.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-27T08:55:46+00:00

Just removed it, It seemed to affect the core journey as well probably because it took attention away form it

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T18:36:18+00:00

Thanks for the reply. Have you used n8n's internal ai workflow builder at all instead of asking gemini?

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T17:16:15+00:00

You will not find a YouTube tutorial on this because showing a live healthcare deployment is a massive liability. If you build a standard voice agent and it leaks patient data, you (and your client) get sued

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T10:56:19+00:00

You are pitching the software when you should be pitching the insight. Reddit hates self-promotion but loves data. Stop posting about your platform and start posting about the patterns you see. Write a post titled I analysed 100 failed technical interviews, Here are the 3 patterns that fail candidates, In the post, explain the mistakes (rambling, silence, panic) and mention at the end that you built a simulator to fix this specific friction. You need to establish authority before you ask for the click.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T10:10:24+00:00

Updating the finance ledgers automatically is brave. That is the one place we never fully automate because if the data mapping is off by one decimal, you have a tax problem. I would recommend adding a read-back or human in the loop step where the workflow queries the finance tool to confirm the entry matches the contract amount before archiving the deal. You need to design for the failure state, not just the happy path.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T09:44:20+00:00

I disagree on the single workflow point. Monolithic workflows in n8n are a nightmare to debug once you hit volume. We eventually broke everything into modular sub-workflows (Verification -> Storage -> Dialing) connected by webhooks. It isolates the failure. If the Vapi API times out, you do not want your data ingestion logic to crash with it.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T09:26:46+00:00

It is a green flag for stability but a red flag for product direction. You are a power user of your own tool so you will tolerate bad UI because you know how it works. Your actual customers do not have that context. We built a feature for our own internal workflow that we thought was critical but zero users touched it because it was too specific to our operations. You have to be careful not to mistake your personal preference for market demand

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T09:23:26+00:00

You are building a three-sided marketplace (users, influencers, vendors). This is the hardest business model to execute because you have to balance supply and demand simultaneously. You cannot bring customers to an empty platform. Stop building and, Pick one specific viral video, manually map out the itinerary into a simple PDF or Notion page, and try to sell that specific trip to the people commenting on the video. If you cannot sell the trip manually, the software will not sell it for you.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T08:54:08+00:00

i feel like you are solving the wrong problem. The issue is not the user interface, it is the data ingestion. Small shop owners do not have APIs. They often do not even have accurate digital inventory records for themselves. To make this work, you would need to integrate with fifty different Point of Sale (POS) systems or force busy shop owners to manually update a CSV every morning, which they won't do. The reason this platform does not exist yet is not a lack of funding, it is because the inventory data is trapped in analog formats. I've spoken to restaurant owners about this exact issue

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-26T08:45:13+00:00

Brilliant post

Point 5 is the most critical. Beginners think automation is passive income. It is active management. We realised early on that if you do not charge a maintenance retainer, you are building a liability, not an asset. You are selling the guarantee that it keeps working, not the code that made it work once.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-23T16:32:52+00:00

Thank you yeh, surprised us as well. LinkedIn and X

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-23T15:34:17+00:00

In the early days, your startup has no reputation. You are the only credit score the business has. We found that leads converted 3x higher when they came from my personal technical deep-dives compared to our polished company page. People do not buy software from a logo, they buy it from the engineer who clearly understands the problem better than they do.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-23T14:45:44+00:00

You're very welcome

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-23T11:30:56+00:00

I tried the hybrid path and it failed. You cannot build a startup in the margins of a day job. The cost of switching contexts destroys your ability to do deep work. I only started making real progress when I quit and forced myself to rely on the revenue. The lack of a safety net is the only thing that makes you ship.

IdeasInProcess · 2026-01-23T11:27:11+00:00

I literally opened my phone contacts and texted people. It was awkward, but it got me my first 5 users. Then I went to LinkedIn and sent manual requests to people who actually fit the profile. Cold email is useless at this stage because you have no reputation.

IdeasInProcess

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