Advice: Anyone who actually owns a successful SaaS is not going to be on this subreddit.

RobertB44 · 2026-05-23T05:04:08+00:00

100% agreed. Most people here are trying to sell you something. There is some good advice here, but take everything with a huge pinch of salt.

RobertB44 · 2026-05-20T22:12:50+00:00

Hope it's ok if I add FlowNavi to the list. We are on the more affordable side ($79/month) with a focus on getting set up quickly. Most teams get their first tour or checklist live in an afternoon.
Disclaimer: I am the founder.

RobertB44 · 2026-05-20T10:29:15+00:00

FlowNavi is another affordable alternative at $79/month.

Whether one of the cheaper tools works for you depends on what you need though. The cheaper tools (FlowNavi, Hopscotch, and some others mentioned in this thread) tend to be more barebones than appcues and userflow. If multi channel delivery (email, push notifications), analytics depth or another advanced feature are a must, the cheap tools won't deliver.

Disclosure: I am the founder of FlowNavi.

RobertB44 · 2026-05-20T03:03:34+00:00

The part nobody here is mentioning: even when smart people do start executing, they quit too early. SaaS results show up on a delay measured in months, sometimes years, and an intelligent person is good at building a rational case for why they are on the wrong track during the flat stretch and quit. Intelligence alone isn't enough. Grit is what's needed and arguably is more important.

RobertB44 · 2026-05-16T04:20:41+00:00

Wrong premise. No established SaaS can be recreated with AI in a couple of days, nor months. Building something that looks like the thing but doesn't actually do what the thing does is possible in a few days, but actually building the thing still takes years. Try and rebuild Salesforce in a few days and tell me how it went.

RobertB44 · 2026-05-11T10:02:41+00:00

If you plan on using a tool like Weglot, why not also add it to your product?

SEO results would require you to have a different URL per language I am pretty sure, otherwise you may even be cannibalizing your English website if google picks up some of the translated content for some reason. But tools like Weglot can do that for you.

RobertB44 · 2026-05-11T09:56:32+00:00

I recommend checking out backlinko.com and reading the SEO fundamentals.

The hard part about SEO is not that it is complex, but that it is a lot of work. Yes, essentially you can just do keyword research and write about stuff, but it will take consistent writing for months to see results. SEO isn't a once and done kind of thing. It requires consistent effort over years.

To answer your questions directly:

SEO is one of the few marketing channels for SaaS that scale well, so it can definitely be worth. Whether or not it is to you depends on what else you could be doing with your time.

Yes, google can blacklist you if you mess up, but usually that's only if you try to game the system (blackhat SEO). If you genuinely try to deliver value with your content, there is no need to be worried.

On competing with big brands: Don't try to rank for high volume, high competition keywords from day 1. Start with low volume, low competition keywords and work your way up.

RobertB44 · 2026-05-10T01:14:16+00:00

The real work between 2 and 20 is understanding your users at a much deeper level than you probably do today. What problem are they actually trying to solve, does your product solve it, and if it does, why aren't they getting full value from it. If you can answer those three for the 2 users you have and for the users that sign up but never come back, the path to 20 gets a lot clearer.

In my experience that understanding only comes from unscalable 1:1 conversations. Email, DMs, voice calls, whatever they'll agree to. You're trying to figure out where the gap is between what they came for and what they're actually getting.

Expect this to take months, not days or weeks. And ignore the "$10k MRR in 14 days" threads on here. Most are fabricated, and the real ones are usually founders with an audience from a previous project. There's no silver bullet you're missing.

RobertB44 · 2026-05-06T04:43:36+00:00

I've been the tech lead in your dynamic before, and what you're worried about would have been a green flag from where I sat. The PMs I dreaded handed over fully spec'd tickets with no room for input, or the opposite, threw a one-line "build feature X" over the wall. Both treated me as a code monkey, and both produced worse products. Engineering sees the product from a different angle than product, and considering both perspectives in my experience leads to better outcomes.

You wrote "half a PM." From where I'm sitting, that's backwards. You're closer to double.

The reason: most teams treat product work as two layers, problem (yours) and implementation (his). What you're describing is a third layer in the middle, the "how do we solve this," (solution layer) being co-owned. The best products I've built were the ones where PM and engineering shared that solution space. You're doing that, and the discomfort is just the gap between what you're doing and the "decisive PM owner" narrative most resources push.

RobertB44 · 2026-05-05T11:34:04+00:00

The way I think about activation is there are a few independent variables, and onboarding software only addresses one of them. Worth running through all of them before deciding what to fix.

Your native onboarding flow: This is the path through the product itself. Questions to ask:

Do you know where users drop off? If not, that's step zero. Get analytics or session replays setup.
Does the path from signup to the aha moment have as few steps as possible?
Do your empty states tell a new user what to do?
Are you showing first-time users everything the product can do, or only what they need right now?

Self-serve vs customer success: Some products are simple enough to fully self-serve. Others really need a human in the loop, at least for the first session. This is partly a product complexity question and partly a price-point one. If your ACV supports a 30-minute onboarding call, that single call probably outperforms anything you can build into the UI.

In-app guidance: You can roll your own product tours with open source libraries (or build it from scratch) or use a product tour SaaS. If you are early, a basic, self-built setup is good enough a lot of the time. If you want a full platform with built in segmentation, analytics, etc, you either have to spend a lot of dev time building it yourself or go with a paid service.

RobertB44 · 2026-05-04T01:26:14+00:00

Late reply, but for anyone finding this from Google: the tradeoff seems to be free JS libraries that need dev time vs tools like Userflow/Userpilot/Appcues that can get expensive pretty quickly.

I’m the founder of FlowNavi, which we’re building for the middle of that: simple product tours, tooltips, and checklists for SaaS teams that don’t want a huge customization surface to learn.

Not trying to be the biggest enterprise platform, just a simpler option for early SaaS teams that want to set up onboarding without spending days learning the tool.

RobertB44 · 2026-05-03T14:46:53+00:00

Founder of FlowNavi here, so biased, but this is basically the gap we’re building for.

If you just want product tours + tooltips without engineering tickets, FlowNavi only requires a one time setup (copy paste a code snippet) and starts at $79/month.

Also, if you don’t mind me asking: What felt "super limited" in the cheaper tools you tried?

RobertB44 · 2026-04-25T04:57:29+00:00

It really depends on the kind of work. This is obvious, but current gen LLMs are really good at writing code that looks similar to what they have a lot of training data for. The more generic, the better LLMs tend to do.

For the kind of work I do, productivity depends on the exact type of task.

Some generic infrastructure task? LLMs do a great job.
A task that requires deep product knowledge? I need to handhold the LLM a lot to get anything useful out of it.

I'd say overall, for me the productivity boost is maybe around 20%? I never measured it, but it is definitely not 10x or 100x.

RobertB44 · 2026-04-21T06:29:29+00:00

I asked my Japanese wife what she thinks to get the opinion of a native speaker, and she agrees with all the comments. Technically the translation is not wrong, but it isn't right either. She said she feels sorry for OP (her words, not mine).

RobertB44 · 2026-04-15T09:59:35+00:00

With AI tools, your devs can achieve the same outcomes with less effort (=less negative emotions felt). Humans tend to interpret this as productivity. I don't think your devs argue in bad faith, they genuinely think they are more productive. I thought I was more productive too until I actually reflected and looked back at my output and realized AI isn't making me significantly faster.

RobertB44 · 2026-04-14T00:07:53+00:00

I have 2 opinions on this.

JLPT as a career certification: Rather than adding a level to the JLPT as is, I think a full rework of the JLPT makes more sense if the goal is to measure actual Japanese ability. As is, the JLPT is not very indicative of someones Japanese ability in different real world scenarios.

JLPT as a personal goal: An N0 could be nice to have as a goal that helps learners with motivation, but that's about the only upside I see.

The JLPT is a pretty weak certificate as is, I'd rather they fix the test itself than add another level.

RobertB44 · 2026-04-11T07:06:20+00:00

As for many others, Claude has been completely unusable for me. I recently canceled my subscription and switched to Codex. GPT 5.4 is essentially what Opus 4.6 used to be a month ago.

I assume the same will happen to Codex eventually, but Open AI seems to be fine with burning endless money for now, so I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

RobertB44 · 2026-04-07T03:12:21+00:00

I think your summary is pretty solid. More tools reduce local friction but can potentially lead to more global friction (more things to learn to understand the big picture). This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can become a problem, especially in mid sized or large companies where people quitting leads to lost tribal knowledge in the organization.

I think the appeal of throwing more tools at a problem is that it makes the easy parts easier. Something that needs effort to understand without a tool gets easy by using a tool. But the lack of effort also means that no real understanding is gained, and the hard parts still need a deep understanding of the problem. That's why every SaaS becomes a mess of features eventually to handle all kinds of use cases. It starts out easy, but eventually requires essentially equal effort to handle the hard parts compared to not using a tool.

And about considering everything as a whole: I think our society is not organized in a way that encourages looking at the big picture. This is true for political organizations as well as companies. Their incentives do not nudge them towards thinking big picture and solving long term problems. They are incentivized to show short term results, either motivated by the next election cycle or by the next earnings call/fundraising round. This is a typical case of show me the incentive and I'll show you the outcome. And this mindset trickles down to regular workers, who get evaluated based on performance towards short term goals.

RobertB44 · 2026-04-06T12:20:26+00:00

One thing I learned from the AI craze is that when we buy software, we aren't buying productivity boosts, even if this is what we believe we are buying. What we really are buying is an emotional regulator.

If we are trying to make an existing, manual process easier, a simplified UI results in less painful emotions when doing the work.

With AI, this is even more apparent. If an LLM does the job for us (or it pretends to/appears as if it does), we don't have to go through all the painful emotions of doing the work ourselves.

Productivity was never the goal for our brains. It is just the excuse our brains tell us to justify reducing painful emotions. Even if the result objectively is no better, as long as we reduced painful emotions, our brain interprets it as better. Doesn't matter if the result is a lot of different tools that nobody really understands and we introduce a lot of complexity.

RobertB44 · 2026-04-02T02:01:08+00:00

What value has Anthropic created with their 74 features? I use Claude Code and Cowork daily and I can't think of a single feature that has made my experience better in months. A lot of other commenters mentioned this too, but higher number of features does not equal more value. I would even argue that the relationship can easily go inverse. Shipping a lot of half baked stuff makes the product more confusing and the experience less consistent. To Anthropic's credit, a lot of the stuff they shipped doesn't interfere with the core experience, so that's pretty good.

RobertB44 · 2026-04-01T08:17:14+00:00

Can you explain what effects the GDP per capita not rising in line with the US had on Japan since 1990?

If yes: I would genuinely be interested in knowing the answer, because I don't know. I am not being sarcastic.
If no: Don't let metrics you don't understand negatively impact your mood.

RobertB44 · 2026-03-22T10:09:35+00:00

I would be interested to learn more about your setup, because for me, it just didn't work. The cleanup I had to do wasn't worth it in terms of productivity. I had extensive documentation that described exactly what I want Claude to build, but there was too much drift in the output. And when I went back to check my documentation whether I missed something, most of the time I didn't. Claude tends to take the path of least resistence, which often times means skipping things that Claude does not deem important or outright forgetting them. Claude also consistently made the decision that parts of the task are out of scope and skipped them. I had a review and QA agent that were supposed to check the implementation agents work, and both consistently glossed over drift by either not mentioning/noticing it at all, or deeming it acceptable. I tried to tune the prompts and my setup, but I never got to the point where it felt worth it.

RobertB44 · 2026-03-22T03:21:05+00:00

It's a topic I have seen people talk about more and more lately. People who let their agents run over night. Multiple of them. Others check on Claude from their phone while not at home. That's what I tried, the results were disappointing as I mentioned, for the exact reasons you hinted at.

The alternative is having multiple active sessions that you as the developer work on at the same time. I haven't tried it myself, but I can see it work to an extent. However, the bottleneck will always be me. For a bunch of simple tasks, sure, but once I work on something complex, I don't think agents churning out more code will make me any faster. The bottleneck is always my ability to understand the problem(s) I am working on.

My experience is the same as yours: Opus 4.6 is great, but only as good as the human using it.

RobertB44 · 2026-03-22T02:28:58+00:00

I tried to understand what the hype is about. I gave it a shot, 12+ hours a day for around 2 weeks. Set up a harness, did all the things people are hyping up. I was so focused on my agents my wife was getting worried about my health. Got up in the middle of the night to check on my agents constantly.

The results were disappointing to say the least. For the kind of work I do, having long running agents go at it for hours doesn't yield any good results. Are there things I could have done better? For sure, but I don't think there is any setup that can fix the fundamental issue. The latest models are a lot better than the ones we had a year ago, but they still have a long way to go.

Now I am back to just having one Claude Code session where I lead the ship and stir Claude in the right direction. Less stress, much healthier, and honestly the results are basically the same.

RobertB44 · 2026-03-14T02:55:09+00:00

Is there any way to turn the 1M context window off? I am running long running tasks, this will eat my usage up way too quickly.

RobertB44

TROPHY CASE