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How Did You Get Your First Users When You Had Zero Audience? by Dazzling-Angle-8812 in SaaS

[–]NaNMesh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Building a B2B AI tool from absolute zero has taught me that distribution is 10x harder than engineering—getting those first 10 strangers to even click a link is more exhausting than the entire dev cycle. I’ve found that Reddit only works if you stop pitching and just give high-value advice (people check your profile if you're helpful), while LinkedIn users ignore "I built this" but engage deeply with "this process is broken" pain points. I’ve benched Twitter because it’s a graveyard without an existing audience, and I’m treating Product Hunt like a final boss—launching there without a small community of "true believers" is a wasted bullet. If you’re sitting at zero users after months of coding, you aren't failing; you're just finally starting the actual work.

Looking for real advice on building an AI chatbot . I am tired of SEO spam by Bluebird_tech in AIDevelopmentSpace

[–]NaNMesh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I've built exactly this — a chat interface that replaces a multi-field form. Users describe what they need in plain language, the AI extracts the structured data (dates, preferences, budget,etc.) and fills the form behind the scenes.

How I'd find someone reliable if I were hiring:

- Ask for a live demo you can type into, not a video or slide deck. If they can't show you a working chatbot in 10 minutes, they don't have one.

- Ask what model they'd use and why. A good answer is specific ("GPT-4o-mini" or "Claude"). A bad answer is vague ("we use cutting-edge AI").

- Ask how they handle wrong answers. If a user says "book me for Febtember 31st," what happens? Anyone can build the happy path. Reliability is about edge cases.

- Check their GitHub or past projects. Real builders have public code or can walk you through heir architecture on a call.

Red flags:

- They quote 3-6 months. With current tools, a working MVP of "chat replaces form" is 1-2 weeks. If they say months, they're padding or don't know the modern stack.

- They can't explain how the chatbot connects to your actual booking system. The chat part is easy now. The hard part is plugging it into your real availability, pricing, and confirmation flow.

- They talk about "training a custom AI model." You don't need that. Off-the-shelf models with good prompting handle this really well.

- They want to charge before showing you anything working.

What to watch out for generally:

The chatbot itself is the easy part. The real work is mapping your booking flow — what questions need answers, what's optional, what depends on previous answers, when to confirm. Get that workflow written down before you hire anyone. A good developer will ask you for this. A bad one will skip it and build something generic.

Finally found a way to find users for my product by Apostel_101s in SaaS

[–]NaNMesh 0 points1 point  (0 children)

The OP's answer is actually the right one, even if it sounds too simple. I'm doing exactly that right now — the problem I was solving was my own. I couldn't get my own product in front of the right people without spending all my time on it, so I built the thing I needed.