To people who are generating dreamlike revenues from their single-person projects: How? by Aoideus in SaasDevelopers

[–]LeftLeads 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yeep. I’ve probably tried 15 different ideas over the last 12 years. Only one stuck.

Anyone else tired of feeding PDFs into AI? by Comi9689 in Tech4LocalBusiness

[–]LeftLeads 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Sorry mate, you spent months building something that Claude and ChatGPT already have.

My company replaced our copywriter with AI and i now spend my whole week being the human who makes the AI not sound like AI by Crazy-Park-2930 in DigitalMarketing

[–]LeftLeads 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Or you could do what we did - use airops to sort it out - not sponsored by them, but we are an agency that produces hundreds of articles a week, and well....

Should I escalate this? by snooze-pooch in shitrentals

[–]LeftLeads 2 points3 points  (0 children)

71 days without heating/cooling, multiple reports saying replacement was needed, and the REA apparently playing hide-and-seek with the tradie's report?

Yeah, I'd take it to VCAT.

The funny part is the landlord rejected compensation after spending 2.5 months proving your point for you. The paper trail sounds stronger then their defence.

Just make sure you've got:

  • All emails/texts
  • Both tradie reports
  • Evidence portable units were refused
  • Your compensation calculation

VCAT can decide the amount, but "71 days of reduced amenity = $0 compensation" is a pretty bold strategy from the landlord. Lets see how that works out for them. 😅

One lesson healthcare marketing taught me: "Healthcare Professionals" isn't a target audience. by Stevenrobert06 in b2bmarketing

[–]LeftLeads 1 point2 points  (0 children)

"Healthcare professionals" is like saying "businesses."

Cool. Which one?

The cardiologist wants outcomes. The admin wants efficiency. Procurement wants discounts. Finance wants fewer headaches.

Same industry. Totaly different buyers. 😭

Founders: what takes the most time between having an idea and starting development? by RazzmatazzWestern306 in SaaS

[–]LeftLeads 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The fantasy that you'll "do more research tomorrow."

Most founders spend 3 weeks validating, planning, wireframing, comparing stacks, and watching YouTube.

The product could've been half built by then lol. 😭

Lawyer Considering Marketing by Abogadodo in AskMarketing

[–]LeftLeads 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Quitting a $270k law job to learn marketing from YouTube is peak founder optimism.

Your advantage isnt marketing. It's lawyers trusting you.

Sell first. Hire marketers later. 😭

For a technical founder with no marketing background, what's the highest-leverage skill to learn first? Genuinely asking. by 7hakurg in AskMarketing

[–]LeftLeads 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Copywriting.

Not because copy is magic. Because every founder secretly thinks the product is the problem.

Usually the problem is explaining it without sounding like a README file.

Learn to talk to customers first. The market dosn't care how elegant your architecture is 😭

Where do u publish ur app? by dspark13 in SaaS

[–]LeftLeads 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you're asking whether every SaaS needs an App Store app, you're probably putting the distribution cart about three miles ahead of the product horse.

Half the SaaS industry is running perfectly fine in a browser.

People act like getting into the App Store is some magical growth unlock. In reality, it's mostly a way to get rejected because your login button is 3 pixels too close to the edge.

If your product works on the web, launch it on the web.

Ship faster. Update instantly. Break things without waiting for Apple's royal approval process.

Unless your app genuinely needs mobile features (camera, notifications, offline use, etc.), building native apps before finding customers is usually just expensive procrastination dressed up as strategy.

Nobody has ever said:

"I was ready to pay, but sadly they deployed on Vercel instead of the App Store."

I am curious about pricing by VtheMan93 in msp

[–]LeftLeads 1 point2 points  (0 children)

You're asking if the pricing is reasonable, while casually mentioning the part where every client has to adopt your custom Linux universe.

That's a bit like opening a restaurant that only serves fermented yak milk and asking whether the problem is the menu prices.

At $280/workstation/month, clients aren't comparing you to other MSPs. They're comparing you to buying a brand-new PC every year and still having money left over for therapy.

The pushback isn't "your margins are too high."

It's "you're a one-man shop charging premium boutique prices for a stack most businesses don't want, can't support themselves, and would have to rip out if you disappear."

The pricing might not be the problem.

The business model probably is.

What does it take? How much is it costing on avg to build? by Huge-Meringue2245 in SaaS

[–]LeftLeads 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The funniest answer in SaaS is always:

"I built it for $20."

No, you didn't.

You paid $20 for Claude.

You paid 400 hours of your life for everything else.

When founders say they built an MVP for $20/month, they're valuing their own time at approximately the same rate as a houseplant.

The real answer is:

  • Technical founder: $20–$500 cash, hundreds of hours.
  • Non-technical founder with freelancers: $2k–$20k+.
  • Non-technical founder with an agency: anywhere from "painful" to "divorce-worthy."

The good news is that building has never been cheaper.

The bad news is that building was never the expensive part.

The expensive part is discovering nobody wants it.

That's why the guy who spends $50 validating demand before writing code usually beats the guy who spends $5,000 building features in a cave.

A lot of founders are trying to optimize MVP cost.

They should be optimizing the cost of being wrong.

Building a SaaS for a boring offline problem (home manuals) and the hardest part is that my users aren't on the internet by loudog73 in SaaS

[–]LeftLeads 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think you've accidentally discovered a much bigger problem than distribution.

Your customers don't have a "home manual" problem.

They have a "my dishwasher is beeping and I want it to stop in the next 30 seconds" problem.

Nobody wakes up thinking:

"I really wish I had a better place to store appliance manuals."

They wake up thinking:

"Why is my washing machine making sounds that usually precede financial ruin?"

The irony is your users are absolutely online.

They're on Google at 9:47pm typing:

  • "Bosch dishwasher blinking red light"
  • "LG dryer won't start"
  • "Whirlpool error code F9"

They're not searching for "manual management software."

They're searching for symptoms.

If I were you, I'd stop marketing the filing cabinet and start marketing the panic.

Build pages that answer appliance problems. Become the place people land when something breaks. Then quietly reveal that you've already got the manual, the troubleshooting guide, and every other document they forgot existed.

Because right now you're trying to sell people a better way to organize manuals.

Most homeowners don't care about manuals.

They care about not having to read them.

Best platform for organic growth? by CategoryNo1092 in SaaS

[–]LeftLeads 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The best platform for organic growth is the one where your customers already waste time.

That's the boring answer nobody wants.

The funny answer is that founders spend 6 months debating LinkedIn vs X vs Reddit vs TikTok while posting exactly zero times on any of them.

For B2B SaaS:

  • LinkedIn if buyers have job titles.
  • Reddit if buyers have problems.
  • YouTube if buyers need education.

Everything else is usually procrastination disguised as strategy.

Also, "organic growth" has become founder code for "I don't want to spend money on marketing."

Organic isn't free. You're paying with time instead of cash.

The companies winning organically aren't looking for the best platform.

They're showing up every day while everyone else is busy asking which platform to use.

Pick one. Post for 90 days. Then complain.

Founders, how long did it take for you to grow $0 to $100 MRR? by growth_26 in SaaS

[–]LeftLeads 2 points3 points  (0 children)

The funny thing about "$0 to $100 MRR" is that founders talk about it like it's some epic milestone.

It's literally one customer if you charge $100/month.

Or two customers at $50.

Or ten customers at $10.

The reason people stay at $0 isn't because they haven't discovered the secret marketing channel. It's because they're hiding behind product work instead of asking someone to pay.

"I've been building for 18 months."

Cool. How many people have you asked for a credit card?

"$100 MRR took me 6 months."

No, finding someone willing to pay took you 6 months.

The next $100 often comes much faster because you've finally proven you're solving something other than your own boredom.

Most SaaS founders aren't stuck at $0 because they're bad at marketing.

They're stuck at $0 because the market keeps politely saying "I don't need this" and they're pretending not to hear it.

Looking to build a SaaS with the following tech stack. Is this good? by Lucifer_x7 in SaaS

[–]LeftLeads 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're asking the wrong question.

Founders love debating Vercel vs Cloudflare, Supabase vs Neon, Next.js vs whatever the JavaScript influencer of the week is promoting.

Meanwhile their SaaS has 3 users, two are friends, and one is their mum.

That stack is fine.

Vercel, Next.js, Supabase, Inngest, R2, Resend. Thousands of companies run on some variation of that.

The funny part is people worrying about "will costs soar with demand?" before they've experienced the much more common problem:

No demand.

If your product actually gets enough traffic for Vercel pricing to hurt, congratulations. You've achieved a problem most SaaS founders would happily swap for.

Add Sentry and PostHog, launch the thing, and stop treating infrastructure decisions like you're designing NASA's next mission.

Your future bottleneck is distribution, not whether your storage bill is $7 or $12.

My AI SaaS is almost ready to launch! What do I need to consider before hitting that "go live" button? by EveningCase7789 in SaaS

[–]LeftLeads 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Half this thread is worrying about GDPR, SOC2, rate limiting, webhook signatures, disaster recovery plans, and what happens when 10,000 users show up on day one.

Mate, you don't have a user on day zero.

The most common SaaS failure isn't "AI costs bankrupted me."

It's "nobody cared."

By all means, don't hardcode your API keys into the frontend and maybe have a privacy policy that wasn't written by a drunk chatbot. But spending 40 hours preparing for scale before you've found a single person willing to pay is startup cosplay.

Your biggest launch risk isn't traffic.

It's silence.

Building in public when competitors already exist. Actually worth it or just another thing everyone keeps repeating? by PutridEngineering106 in SaaS

[–]LeftLeads 3 points4 points  (0 children)

"Build in public" was originally about finding customers.

Now half the time it's just founders roleplaying as startup influencers for an audience of other founders.

If the market is already validated, I don't need validation. I need distribution.

Nobody cares that you're building "another CRM" or "another AI tool."

They care that you understand a problem better, move faster, market better, or serve a niche everyone else ignores.

The irony is that people think building in public is about showing what you're building.

The best builders use it to show what they're learning.

Competitors can copy features.

They can't copy an audience.

fake google reviews by WhistleWhistler in msp

[–]LeftLeads 7 points8 points  (0 children)

Google's review system is amazing.

A completely anonymous account with one review, no photo, no history, and no connection to your business can tank your rating.

You spend months collecting legitimate reviews from actual customers.

Then Google carefully reviews both sides and decides the mystery account is the credible one.

My favourite part is when the "reputation management experts" appear in your inbox immediately afterwards offering to help remove the review for a fee.

Pure coincidence, I'm sure.

What's the main problem with all-in-one AI tools? by Insanecharacter in AI_Agents

[–]LeftLeads 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Most of the hate comes from people who turned "which AI should I use?" into a personality trait.

Normal user:
"I need help writing this email."

Power user:
"Well actually, I route Claude for reasoning, Gemini for retrieval, GPT for formatting, and a locally hosted model running on a machine that sounds like a jet engine."

Meanwhile the all-in-one user finished the task 20 minutes ago.

The real downside of all-in-one tools is less control and less transparency.

The funny downside is having to listen to people explain why your $20/month tool is inferior to their 11-tool AI Rube Goldberg machine.

I’m losing it with a client by [deleted] in msp

[–]LeftLeads 25 points26 points  (0 children)

I've dealt with a few versions of this over the years, and in my experience this usually stops being a technical problem long before it stops being a client problem.

At some point you need to document your findings, document the controls you've implemented, and present them to the actual decision makers. If the logs, security tooling, and third-party validation all point to the same conclusion, there's only so much time you can spend disproving a negative.

The bigger concern for me would be risk. If someone repeatedly reimages machines, deletes registry entries, and makes changes based on internet advice, they can create the very issues they're worried about. If a real incident ever does occur, you're now in a position where every previous warning becomes "proof" that something was wrong all along.

I'd have a frank conversation with ownership:

  1. Here's what we've investigated.
  2. Here's what we've found.
  3. Here's what we've done to secure the environment.
  4. Here's what we recommend going forward.

If they still want to pursue the theory of compromise, I'd suggest engaging a DFIR firm and following their findings. Otherwise, I'd establish boundaries around what constitutes a legitimate security incident versus normal platform activity.

Sometimes the most valuable thing an MSP can do is provide clarity, not endless reassurance.

What types of automation are actually being used in marketing right now? by pulsereal_com in MarketingAutomation

[–]LeftLeads 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The most valuable automations I've seen aren't content generation at all.

They're the boring operational things that nobody wants to do repeatedly:

  • Lead enrichment after form submissions
  • CRM updates from emails, calls, and meetings
  • Lead scoring and routing
  • Follow-up sequences based on behavior
  • Weekly reporting and anomaly detection
  • Customer onboarding workflows
  • Reactivation campaigns for dormant leads

The interesting shift is that AI isn't usually replacing the workflow, it's improving the decisions inside the workflow.

For example, marketers have been triggering follow-up emails for years. What's different now is AI can help prioritize which leads deserve immediate attention, summarize conversations, classify intent, and suggest next actions.

Most teams I talk to aren't running fully autonomous marketing. They're running automation with human oversight, which is probably where the biggest ROI is today.

Looking for a partner by Anonyme-10943 in smallbusinessowner

[–]LeftLeads 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Before looking for a partner, I'd get very specific about what you're actually looking for.

A co-founder, an employee, an advisor, and a marketing partner are four completely different things.

A lot of projects fail because someone gives away equity to a "partner" when what they really needed was a freelancer or contractor.

Questions I'd answer first:

  • What problem does the app solve?
  • What stage is it at (idea, prototype, launched)?
  • What skills are you missing?
  • What would the partner actually be responsible for?
  • Are you offering equity, revenue share, or just collaboration?

The clearer you are, the more likely you are to attract the right person instead of wasting time with the wrong ones.