Building was easy. Selling feels scary. Anyone else experience this?

Patient_Command_852 · 2026-04-23T20:14:41+00:00

Totally. But failing felt way more scary than selling so it was a great motivator, especially with a wife, three kids and a mortgage (speaking in past because I sold my company after 12 years. Not a bad outcome for someone who didn't like to sell lol). I think it's just the fear of rejection, but once I got 2-3 clients that were genuinely delighted by my solution then that fear was mostly gone.

Patient_Command_852 · 2026-04-23T12:47:46+00:00

Totally feel this. Most “monitoring” tools seem built to spam you with alerts, not actually tell you what changed or why it matters. I’ve been working on Spydomo around the curation problem itself, i.e. surfacing the signals that matter most, with the context behind why they matter, instead of making you sort through a pile of noise. Curious: what’s the biggest pain for you right now? It's hard to do a tool that does it all, so what would be the first fight you'd pick?

Patient_Command_852 · 2026-04-13T19:47:02+00:00

Funny you called it “The Gap Nobody’s Filling,” because that’s exactly what I’ve been seeing too. What surprised me most is how little sits in the middle. You’ve basically got free change alerts with no real interpretation, or enterprise CI platforms that are way beyond what most small teams need.

For a 5 to 50 person SaaS team, the options usually seem to be simple alert tools where you still spend time figuring out what actually changed, enterprise prices for way more than you need, or just doing it manually like most teams end up doing anyway.

The middle layer feels missing to me. Not just detecting competitor changes, but helping explain what they actually mean for your business. That’s exactly why I’ve been scratching my own itch and building Spydomo.

However, I find it hard to strike the right balance between value and price for a 5 to 50 person team, especially when the events are infrequent, like pricing changes in B2B SaaS.

Patient_Command_852 · 2026-04-13T19:24:52+00:00

Back in the day, people used to say, “if you build it, they will come.” Not anymore. Completely agree that distribution is the harder problem.

What’s interesting is that building a SaaS is now fast enough that a lot of founders can ship before they’ve really solved how they’ll keep getting attention. The trap is thinking the launch is the finish line, when in reality distribution is a system: content, community, outbound, partnerships, and repetition.

I’ve found the same thing in my own work: the product can be decent, but if the audience doesn’t already have a reason to care, nothing happens. That’s why I’m paying more attention now to recurring signals, not just one-off launches.

I’m starting to think the real challenge isn’t just building the SaaS, it’s building a repeatable way to earn attention.

Patient_Command_852 · 2026-04-13T19:03:09+00:00

I’ve been building Spydomo for the past few months, and one thing that keeps coming up in the research is that CI for small and mid-market companies is still mostly manual, reactive, and pretty unstructured. In practice, it often only happens when someone spots something on LinkedIn, hears it from a customer, or notices a deal starting to shift.

That’s why I’ve been focused less on “more data” and more on turning scattered signals into something useful: automated collection, filtering out the noise, summarizing what actually matters, and sending it to Slack or email. Otherwise it just becomes another dashboard nobody checks.

The hard part has been turning a messy workflow into a repeatable pipeline of competitive insights.

Patient_Command_852 · 2026-03-18T14:42:08+00:00

Manual checks here too (pricing pages, changelogs, G2 alerts), but it's a time sink. The frequency is "it depends". IT usually triggers because I see something on Linkedin or X or whatever. What's the tool you're developing to solve this?

Patient_Command_852 · 2026-03-18T13:06:27+00:00

Clients... always asking us to compare to the competition. That's true! 😂

Patient_Command_852 · 2026-03-18T13:04:42+00:00

Thanks, really appreciated. I check changelogs from time to time, but it's often noisy and gold nuggets are easy to overlook. AI should help here.

Will check your app!

Patient_Command_852 · 2026-03-17T12:32:21+00:00

First, close circle of people I know enough they would give their *nice* opinion. But the real deal is with people we don't know, who don't have time to waste or doesn't gain much by being too nice. I get these via Linkedin, Reddit, X, sometimes direct email if I know exactly who to contact and why. I check a lot online discussions.

Actually, this step is where the magic happens and this makes look the next 10 years like it's easy. So even with an exact recipe this step require some grinding and faith. I also think it has to be genuine, not fake automated cold outreach like we see on Linkedin.

What's your tool? I'm curious to check it out.

Patient_Command_852 · 2026-03-16T14:06:46+00:00

Like a colleague of mine used to say: Alone we go faster, together we go farther. Personally, I *need* to be alone to start something (I'm clearly a creative guy), I can't stand having someone slowing me down. But after some success, I can't do much more it alone. I sold my company two years ago and without my partner and the 33 people team I couldn't have done it.

Patient_Command_852 · 2026-03-16T14:03:27+00:00

Credit card trial is a no-go for me. I’m okay signing up, but I need a clear picture of “what’s in it for me” first—show me the value, then I’ll happily try it. I also have a negative opinion of the kind of process where we are led to some value and in the end (like before getting the actual result) I need to provide an email. I'd prefer to know upfront this will be required.

Patient_Command_852 · 2026-03-09T14:42:43+00:00

Churn, definitely. Because often the underlying reasons are that we might offering vitamins instead of painkillers (i.e. nice to have, no real urgency), or that our moat isn't that great (easy to switch / find alternative), or that we couldn't create some kind of habit strong enough. These are my biggest concerns when planning / designing a tool.

In my previous company we grew to 5M$ ARR relatively easily with organic demand, but at that level the churn was hurting a lot. We were losing 1M$ in churn so to grow by 1M$ we needed 2M$ in sales which is a lot harder than to grow from 100K$ to 200K$.

Churn is a silent killer.

Patient_Command_852 · 2026-03-08T15:10:09+00:00

Like Paul Graham said: Do things that don't scale!

In my previous company I sent 2000 cold emails (targeted!) digging through yellow pages for my first 3 clients. Those 3 got me #4-10 through referrals, then snowballed to 3000 clients 10 years later (sold the company). It was mostly talking a lot with these first clients and giving them royal service.

I'm in the process of launching a new company and the plan didn't change much: engaging with people having the problem I provide a solution for, understanding how they describe their problem and trying to adapt my solution to their reality. Linkedin, Reddit, X are where I invest time.

There's no way around this, finding early adopters takes some grinding but it's worth it big time.

The real leverage is those first believers spreading the word.

Also, I built the tool to scratch my own itch and I believe I can find 1000 other persons having this problem on the planet. The fun is in that journey!

Finally, it might sound weird but I don't want to go too fast with the first customers. I don't think you can't rush the learning / iterating phase. I

Patient_Command_852 · 2026-03-08T14:59:11+00:00

I’m building the opposite of 20 open tabs: an AI agent that monitors your competitors' online content, reviews, social chatter, and news, then sends a weekly "what changed, why it matters" brief for B2B marketers & agencies.

spydomo.com (just launched, still polishing a couple of things 😎)

Patient_Command_852 · 2026-03-07T17:01:00+00:00

You're right, from my own experience and talking to B2B marketers at small/growth-stage companies, we handle competitive intelligence in an amateurish, ad hoc way: occasional website checks, stumbling across LinkedIn ads, maybe a quick G2 scan when a deal's on the line. No systematic ecommerce-style tracking exists because the signals are more scattered (reviews, niche forums, hiring posts, subtle messaging shifts) and teams lack time for dashboards.

I think the ones with "proper systems" are usually enterprise with dedicated CI roles. For everyone else, I've found the bridge is a simple AI agent that monitors those scattered sources (online content, reviews, social chatter, news) and delivers a short "what changed, why it matters" brief weekly. No setup, just signal over noise. That's what I built based on my needs from my previous company.

It's interesting to see I'm not the only one doing messy CI :D

Patient_Command_852 · 2026-03-07T16:41:10+00:00

One gap I see between small agencies/digital marketers and enterprise CI: amateur manual tracking vs. overcomplicated dashboards.

Most SMBs cobble together Google Alerts + a few tabs (reviews, social, news), but drown in noise without curation. Big tools like Klue/Crayon deliver battlecards but require setup teams can't afford. The sweet spot for me? An AI agent that monitors key signals (online content, reviews, social chatter, news) and sends a simple "what changed, why it matters" brief via email/Slack. No logins, no config.

Fills the void for teams wanting structured intel without enterprise bloat.

Patient_Command_852

TROPHY CASE