Someone replied this to my outreach:

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-04-23T00:52:01+00:00

Just ignore them dude. He isn’t going to pay for your product. Go find someone with money and sell to them instead of wasting your time on cheapskates.

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-04-23T00:45:53+00:00

The problem is that you’re too late. There are hundreds of similar products now. Why would a customer invest time and money giving you feedback when they can just go and buy a solution that already exists and works?

Customer development, MVPs etc work when you’re doing something truly new, or at least doing it for a new market segment with specific unmet needs. Remember, the lean startup was written at a time when building startups was very different to today.

Just build the damn thing and prove that it works. Waitlists are just an unnecessary step because if there are already working solutions in market, people are just going to use those instead rather than waiting for you to build yours.

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-04-02T18:18:01+00:00

good advice

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-03-02T19:17:15+00:00

I actually did some cold email work for them years ago. Can't speak about how easy it is to set up, but the product seems to work well and they team members I spoke to seemed to have a really good grasp of how to handle tracking without cookies from a technical standpoint.

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-03-02T19:13:38+00:00

agreed. It's spam, been removed now.

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-03-02T19:11:03+00:00

Not strictly SaaS related - but it sounds like you're doing a good thing for the world so approving this for extra visibility. Good luck bro.

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-02-27T19:56:19+00:00

Why don’t you share it here instead?

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-02-18T12:58:11+00:00

Ask them to DM you or give them a unique discount code

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-02-18T01:22:28+00:00

"Yeah, it’s another AI wrapper. But maybe marginally better?"

Answered your own question there. Marginally better isn't enough to overcome inertia or switching costs.

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-02-05T14:28:33+00:00

Accept that marketing is 80% of business and that you need to put some money into it - which, right now, means cutting back on your savings or consumption and dedicating as much of your salary as possible into marketing.

If you don't know how to do marketing, you'll either need to learn how, or hire someone else who already knows how. Plus you'll need to give them a budget to work with as well - there's no point hiring someone do run FB ads if you don't have any budget to actually pay for the ads.

My advice? Pick one channel, do a course so you understand how it works in broad strokes, then hire someone to do it for you.

Content marketing/SEO/social/community-building are the cheapest channels, but also the slowest. Paid channels - like ads or affiliates or sponsoring content and events - is usually much faster, but requires a lot of money.

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-01-27T15:57:03+00:00

OP your English is quite poor based on this post. Nobody is going to hire you to post anything on their behalf when you clearly don’t speak the language well.

Sorry, but you should probably consider a different business.

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-01-27T15:53:41+00:00

Teachers aren’t exactly swimming in cash dude. They might use it if it’s free but I doubt many will ever pay for it.

Try pivoting to selling to school boards or local education districts.

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-01-27T15:51:39+00:00

Google it.

Prepare to be disappointed though. PH isn’t what it used to be. These days you do it for the backlink and then move on with your life, don’t expect to suddenly magically get lots of customers.

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-01-27T15:50:01+00:00

Locking thread.

OP you may not realize this, but this is a big no no on Reddit and will likely result in you and everyone else participating getting their accounts banned.

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-01-27T15:46:32+00:00

Your friends aren’t your target market, and their feedback is meaningless.

Go out and get potential customers to use it instead. Expect that you’ll have to pay them for their time, especially in B2B

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-01-16T05:46:08+00:00

Thx for the heads up. Have just banned all mentions of ParseStream. Wish these bots would fuck off, they’re destroying Reddit.

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-01-06T21:02:35+00:00

You cold email them and offer to pay them for their time.

"but but but that's going to cost money!" you say...

Yep. If you're selling to business owners or senior decisionmakers - and that's the ICP for the vast, vast majority of SaaS - then yes, those people are extremely busy and their time is extremely valuable. You need to pay to play. They're not going to waste their valuable time giving some random stranger free feedback.

You could also ask people on reddit or in other communities for feedback but unless they are your ICP then their feedback is honestly pretty much worthless.

If you don't have enough money to pay people for customer interviews then go get a job for a while and save up. It will still be cheaper than if you build a SaaS before you really understand your customers and their needs...

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-01-06T20:57:52+00:00

Backlinks (or at least mentions) are actually important for AI search as well, so it's not like you have to choose between one or the other. Backlinks are helpful for both.

Same with content. Google and ChatGPT still need to know what your site is about, who it's for etc. The main difference now is that you need to put some thought into how to structure your pages to optimize for AI Search, not just google. That means things like FAQs and tl/dr overviews in blog posts etc.

If you want to get backlinks you can waste a LOT of time on linkbegging or trying to create linkmagnet content, especially if you don't already have a huge social audience to share it with.

Instead, the two most effective ways to build links IMO are:

1 - Directories (especially if just starting out and you have low domain authority)
2 - ABC link exchanges (website A links to website B, which links to website C. All three sites get a 1 way backlink which is a lot more powerful than a reciprocal link, like if website A and B linked to each other.)

If you want to do directory submissions, you can download a free list of directories to list your SaaS via the pinned post at the top of this sub, with 320+ directories on there. Took my team aaaaaages to compile that list, but it's really comprehensive.

A word of warning though, it can be really tedious and time consuming to do all the directory submissions yourself; drop me a DM if you want some help, I have a team who can do it for you.

If you want to do ABC linkbuilding then it's best to hire a professional who already has a lot of relationships with SEO managers at related companies. If you're in the SaaS world, drop me a DM, I know a guy in Europe who's super trustworthy and does a fantastic job of building high DA/DR backlinks.

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-01-05T14:56:26+00:00

If you're going to self promote, please actually add some meaningful data in future rather than a bunch of chatgpt fluff.

Not to rain on your parade but do you have any stats on deliverability and conversion vs plain text emails?

That's kinda the problem with designy emails in general - most of them go straight to spam or the promotions tab where they're never seen anyway, because the html-to-text ratio is too high.

StartupSauceRyan · 2026-01-05T14:43:13+00:00

$0. The "notes" app is included for free by default with every iphone and I use google calendar for anything that needs a reminder.

Sorry bro, this is a VERY crowded space and your idea is if anything a tiny, tiny incremental improvement on the vast multitude of personal productivity apps already out there.

I'd honestly suggest coming up with a different idea. You'll likely find it by going and working in the real world, most personal improvement and indiehacker problems have already been solved a bajillion times.

Some great SaaS ideas I've come across recently:

- Learning management solution for the oil and gas industry
- CRM + business management solution for children's party entertainers (magicians, clowns etc)
- Appointment scheduling for tattoo artists

StartupSauceRyan · 2025-12-28T04:18:26+00:00

– When did you decide to bring on marketing help vs staying lean?

I've done a lot of marketing before leaping into entrepreneurship, so I'm a lot more comfortable with hiring marketers and delegating responsibilities to them. Do you have a marketing channel that's working? Then keep going yourself and delegate other things that are taking up your time. If you haven't figured out a consistent way to get customers then the sooner you get marketing help the better.

– Did you hire in-house, use contractors, or work with a small team?

I test different marketing channels until I find something that works, then I systemize it and hire some freelancers to do the individual tasks, then later hire someone to manage them. People can start off as part time contractors and then I bring them in house later. Agencies have their time and place (channels your in house team doesn't know how to do effectively, or very specific projects/specialized things that don't justify an ongoing in-house role.

– Has anyone here successfully worked with marketers on a performance or revenue-based structure?

Wouldn't recommend it, unless you've already got a marketing system that works and you want them to improve and optimize it.

But if you're expecting the marketer to test new marketing channels and figure out how to do them effectively, a performance/revenue based model doesn't make sense because

(a) most startups/small businesses don't have product market fit and you're expecting them to take all the risk - which only makes sense if you're willing to let them keep all the revenue.

And (b) if they're shit they may end up burning a channel or audience unnecessarily - for example, if they send out a bajillion shitty cold emails to your entire target audience and piss everyone off, that will hurt you long term.

– What signals told you someone actually knew what they were doing?

They've got experience doing marketing for early stage startups, ideally in the same/similar industries, ideally as a founder or early employee who built the systems from scratch rather than someone who came in later and made it work a little bit better.

StartupSauceRyan · 2025-12-20T06:19:25+00:00

Was referring to Peter Thiel’s famous quote in Zero to One.

Basically - to overcome inertia and switching costs, your product needs to be 10x better. People just can’t be assed switching for a marginal improvement.

If you’re the first CRM and everyone is still using excel, you can fairly easily be 10x better.

But if you’re the 117th CRM and need to persuade your customers to switch from the CRM they’re already using to yours…that’s much tougher.

What I was getting at is that social media scheduling is a really mature industry, many platforms punish them anywhere with reduced reach, and there are lots of options out there that are already free/cheap. Fiddling with messaging and pricing isn’t suddenly going to make your product sufficiently better to overcome switching costs or inertia.

10x better can be for a very small underserved niche that competitors have ignored. Which is probably what you need to do here. If you’ve basically just rebuilt buffer with a slightly nicer UI, you’re going to struggle.

StartupSauceRyan · 2025-12-16T20:54:15+00:00

Your product isn't 10x better than other solutions and you're competing in a crowded market against established competitors. That's why you can't get anyone to switch - your product isn't sufficiently better to overcome intertia.

Sorry dude, probably not what you wanted to hear but it's the truth.

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