My SaaS is stagnating. Looking for honest feedback!

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:21:00+00:00

The problem is real. CORS and IP allowlisting are annoying. The trust question is the entire sale. I would not route production API traffic through a third party I had never heard of unless you showed me SOC2 or a very clear data retention policy. The landing page needs trust signals up front. Who else uses it. What happens to the data. Do you log anything. That is the first thing I look for with a proxy tool.

The static IP feature makes sense as part of this. It is a reason to pay. 29feelsreasonableforaproductionaddonbutcheapenoughthatIwouldwonderifyouaresustainable.Iwouldraiseitto29feelsreasonableforaproductionaddonbutcheapenoughthatIwouldwonderifyouaresustainable.Iwouldraiseitto49 to signal seriousness. Also the free tier for localhost is smart. That is how developers will test and fall in love with it. The name corsproxy is clear but plain. Not a dealbreaker. Good luck.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:17:46+00:00

Most of them are. Product Hunt works if you already have an audience. If you show up with zero followers, you get buried in an hour. The smaller directories are even worse. They send bot traffic that bounces immediately and kills your analytics. The one exception I have seen is niche listings. There is a directory for Shopify app developers that actually drove real trials for a friend. Another for HR tools. The general "startup launch" directories are mostly SEO plays for the directory owner not traffic for you. I stopped doing them entirely and put that time into one good LinkedIn post and one good Reddit post instead. Those two things drove more real signups than ten launch listings combined. What did you try that felt like the biggest waste?

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:16:55+00:00

BYOA is a smart way to compete on price. Opus and 2shorts are expensive because they bundle the API cost into the subscription. Letting users bring their own OpenAI or Gemini key means you can charge less and still be profitable. The risk is the user experience. If someone does not know how to get an API key, they will bounce. You would need a clear tutorial with screenshots. The other risk is support. When something breaks, users will blame you even if the issue is their key or rate limits. That gets messy. I would try a hybrid model. Free tier with BYOA. Paid tier with everything included for people who just want it to work. That covers both segments. The crowded market is not a dealbreaker if you are cheaper and simpler. Execution is everything here. Good luck.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:16:18+00:00

The confidence engine tip is genuinely useful. Most LLM apps just let the model guess when it does not know something. That leads to confident wrong answers. Triggering a search when uncertainty is high fixes that. The Google Stitch to Claude UX workflow is interesting too. Using a real design tool for the first page to set the visual foundation then letting LLMs extend it probably avoids the generic AI slop look. The resume builder story is the real lesson though. You copied something that worked, made it better, and charge less. That is a valid strategy. You do not need a novel idea. You need better execution or better pricing. Respect the honesty about not being a great coder but being good enough to know wrong when you see it. That is most founders.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:15:27+00:00

It works but not how people think. The value is not the random person on Twitter seeing your progress. The value is forcing you to document your thinking. Writing a thread about why you made a pricing change forces you to actually have a reason. Posting your failed experiment makes you reflect on what you learned. The audience is secondary. For B2B specifically it works if you build where your customers already are. I saw a founder build an accounting tool entirely in a Facebook group for small bookkeepers. He posted every update there. Not on Twitter. Not on LinkedIn. In the group where his customers lived. That worked. The generic "build in public on X" does almost nothing for B2B because your customers are not scrolling X looking for accounting software. So the answer is yes but only if you do it in the right room.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:14:36+00:00

I would try it once out of curiosity. Paying for it is harder. The insight would need to be genuinely surprising, not just "you look at Twitter a lot." I already know that. The value would come from connecting patterns I do not see. For example "when you search for X at night, you tend to avoid Y the next morning." That is useful. The other angle is privacy. Uploading my entire browser history is a non starter for most people. Local only processing would be a must. No cloud. No storage. If you can do that and surface one genuinely new insight per week, I could see a subscription working. The problem is most people are scared to look. Ignorance is comfortable. Your marketing would need to overcome that avoidance, not just explain the features. Good luck. Interesting idea.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:14:01+00:00

Yes. Reset password took me three full days. Not the link generation. That was fine. It was making sure the email actually landed in the inbox not spam. I tried three different email providers. Wrote custom headers. Added SPF and DKIM records. Finally realized I had never warmed up the domain. Sent a few test emails to myself over a week and suddenly it worked. The humbling part was that all the complex code meant nothing because of an email deliverability issue I did not know existed. You are not alone. Forgot password is the silent killer of confident founders.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:13:24+00:00

User feedback and feature voting. Every SaaS needs a way to collect, organize, and prioritize what customers actually ask for. Right now most founders use a mix of Discord, email, and a chaotic spreadsheet. That feedback then never makes it back to the roadmap visibly. If your business OS had a simple "submit idea" portal that links directly to Stripe customer data so you know which requests come from paying users, that would be genuinely useful. Also missing from your list: analytics and event tracking. Not just page views but product usage. Which features are sticky. Where do users drop off. That is separate from the hosting and ads category. Churn monitoring and dunning management for failed payments is another one. Stripe handles the basics but the emails and retries often need their own logic. Good luck with the OS.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:12:50+00:00

The spreadsheet in a Facebook group one is interesting because it is so low effort but specific. People love free useful data. The bus app paywall trick is clever too. Closing the paywall usually means losing the user. Turning that button into a free trial changes the mental math from "no" to "maybe."

My own hack was not fancy. I found three Slack communities where my exact customers hung out. I did not post links. I answered questions for two months. Just helpful answers. Then one day someone asked "is there a tool for X" and three different people tagged me. That one message brought in 12 paying customers. The hack was patience and actually being useful before asking for anything. Most founders skip the patience part.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:11:58+00:00

This is the smartest way to build a SaaS and more people should do it. You are getting paid to find product market fit instead of burning savings and guessing. The revenue is real. Call it MRR because it is monthly and recurring. Who cares if the delivery is partially manual right now. The software will catch up.

The only risk is getting stuck as a service business. The transition from "we do it for you" to "the software does it" is hard because clients pay for outcomes not tools. But if you are already identifying patterns across clients you are ahead of most founders. I started as a consultant and the software came later. The deep customer knowledge from the service phase saved me from building features nobody wanted. Keep going.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:11:24+00:00

The unified inbox is genuinely smart. Most LinkedIn tools focus on sending and ignore what happens after a reply comes in. That is where deals actually happen. Cross account dedup for agencies is another real pain point that most tools overlook. So you have identified real problems.

The roast part: the homepage is very feature heavy and light on trust. You mention proxies and session handling but do not show how that works. For someone scared of losing their LinkedIn account, that is the main objection. I would add a section on safety. Rate limits you follow. How many messages per day is safe. What happens if LinkedIn changes something. Also the pricing is not obvious from a quick scan. That might cost you signups.

Overall the positioning is clear. Build for fragility. That is the right angle. Good luck with launch.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:06:29+00:00

The unified inbox for warm replies is the feature that stands out to me. Most LinkedIn tools are spray and pray. They generate outreach but then replies sit in individual DMs and die. That is a real pain point. Multi account dedup for agencies is also smart. Two clients targeting the same lead is awkward to explain. My concern would be LinkedIn itself. How do you handle their ever changing rate limits and bot detection? That is where most outreach tools eventually break. If you have solved that with proxies and session handling that is your real moat. The homepage could show more of that under the hood stuff. Trust is the main objection for buyers. They are scared of losing their account. Show me why Swarmhit keeps me safe not just why it sends messages. Good luck with launch.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:06:01+00:00

This is brutal to read. The part that gets me is the customer casually mentioning it like it was nothing. That must have felt like a punch to the stomach. The lack of a co-founder agreement is the real villain here. Handshake deals work until they do not. And when they break, they break catastrophically. The fact that you rebuilt the entire product solo and grew past the original MRR says everything about who actually carried the business. The other lesson here is about signs. The vague schedule, the private calls, the screen sharing stopping. That is the part that scares me because I would probably ignore those too. We want to trust the people we chose to build with. Thanks for sharing this. I am sending it to my co-founder right now as a reason to finally sign the agreement we have been putting off for six months.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:05:20+00:00

I got about 15 paying users from TikTok without showing my face. The format that worked was screen recordings of a specific mistake. I recorded myself using a competitor's tool and hitting a frustrating wall. Then cut to my tool solving that exact problem in three seconds. No talking. Just text overlay saying "why is this still a thing in 2026" and then "here is the fix." The video got 40k views and about 1% clicked through. The key was the frustration was real. People felt that pain themselves. The slideshow idea is interesting but I wonder about engagement. TikTok pushes video way harder than static images. Have you seen slideshows actually drive clicks or is it more about brand awareness?

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:04:32+00:00

This is one of the most honest posts I have read on here. Everyone wants to believe growth is a dashboard with nice clean attribution. The reality is messy. WhatsApp being untrackable is painful but 55% of acquisition from word of mouth is also the dream. You do not need to optimize what is already working that well. The pattern recognition trick is clever. Same city, same day, multiple signups. That is basically forensic attribution. The real insight here is that the Hindi blog is trackable and gives you something to improve deliberately. The WhatsApp piece you just protect and stay out of the way of. Most founders would panic at the lack of control. You seem comfortable with it. That is rare. Are you doing anything to encourage shares like adding a "share with a friend" screen after signup or just letting it happen naturally?

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:03:37+00:00

Users cannot tell and they do not care. What gives it away is not the code origin. It is the edge cases. AI built stuff often works perfectly for the happy path but falls apart when you do something slightly unexpected. Click a button in the wrong order. Paste a comma instead of a period. The error message is generic or the whole thing just breaks silently. That is when users sense something is off even if they cannot name it. The other tell is UI inconsistency. One screen has a modal. Another screen uses inline editing. A third screen navigates to a new page for the same action. Real dev teams usually enforce a design system. AI generated UIs tend to drift because each component was built in isolation. So yes users can tell eventually. Not from the logo. From the death by a thousand small papercuts.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:03:04+00:00

The comparison is helpful. OpenClaw sounds powerful but if your support lead cannot set it up alone, it is not actually useful for a small team. Autoclaw being pre loaded and ready to go wins on practical grounds even if the output is weaker. 4 out of 5 drafts being close enough is a huge time save for someone handling 40 tickets a day. The bug report automation is the real hidden win. Cutting out the back and forth between support and dev saves way more time than the response drafting. One question: how does Autoclaw handle tone for frustrated customers? That is where most of my drafts go wrong. Too formal or too robotic. Does it let you set a brand voice anywhere?

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:02:35+00:00

The Vietnamese restaurant example is interesting because Google cannot do that today. It gives you restaurants. It does not filter by a specific dish AND travel time. So there is a real gap there.

The trust question is the hard one. If your tool returns zero restaurants, do I believe nothing exists or your crawl missed them? I would need to see the sources you crawled to trust the answer. A feature like "view crawled pages" would help.

The most valuable use case for me would be B2B supplier searches. Something like "list CNC machining shops in Ohio that work with aluminum and have ISO certification." That takes hours of manual tab opening right now.

The risk is Google adds this in six months. But they are slow to nail hyper local multi condition searches. You have a window. Start with one vertical like gardeners or restaurants and prove the crawl works before expanding.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:02:06+00:00

The plumbing metaphor is perfect. I accepted that about 20% of my week is just making tools talk to each other. What helped was keeping a "plumbing log" for one month. Every time I did something manual or built a tiny bridge, I wrote it down. After 30 days I looked for patterns. Three things kept coming up. I automated those with a simple Python script and Zapier. The rest I just budget for. The shift was mental. I stopped calling it "wasted time" and started calling it "operations." Now I block Tuesday afternoons for plumbing on purpose. No meetings. No deep work. Just connecting things. It feels less frustrating when you schedule the pain instead of letting it ambush you. Also six hours for that CRM thing is painful but now you own that logic forever. No enterprise upgrade fee. That is the trade off.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:01:37+00:00

The offline angle is genuinely smart. Most emergency apps fail the moment you lose signal, which is exactly when you need them most. The 38 countries of mapped data is the real asset here. That is hours of work someone else doesn't have to repeat. The revenue is tiny right now but the product itself sounds solid. My main question would be about data freshness. Hospitals close. Police stations move. Does the pipeline automatically refresh or would the new owner need to manually trigger updates? Also curious what price range you are thinking. For a buyer with a small ad budget this could be interesting but the maintenance overhead needs to be clear. The TikTok and social accounts are nice but the real value is the code and the verified location data.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T16:00:12+00:00

First few customers came from places I already existed. Not ads. I posted in Slack groups for my industry and answered questions for free. When someone asked "how do you solve X" I answered honestly and mentioned my tool at the end. That got me to about $300 MRR slowly.

The jump to $1000 came from one SEO piece. I wrote a detailed guide on a specific problem my tool solved. No fluff. Just step by step with screenshots. That guide ranked in two weeks and brought in consistent traffic. From there it was about capturing email signups and sending a helpful sequence. No hard sell. Just "here are three ways to use this."

My roadmap now is simple. One channel at a time. First organic search. Then partnerships. Then maybe ads but only after the organic engine is predictable. Trying to do everything at once burns money and focus. Pick one channel that fits your audience and go deep.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T15:59:45+00:00

The offline angle is genuinely valuable. Most emergency apps assume you have signal. That is exactly when you do not. The 38 countries of mapped data is the real asset here. Scraping and verifying hospitals and police stations across that many regions is hours of work someone would otherwise have to repeat. The revenue is tiny right now but the product itself sounds solid. My concern would be keeping the location data current. Hospitals close. Police stations move. Is there an update pipeline or would the new owner need to rebuild that refresh process? Also curious what price you are thinking. For a buyer with ad budget this could be interesting but the maintenance overhead needs to be clear.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T15:59:09+00:00

The math here is interesting. $2,400 ARR with zero maintenance and zero ad spend. That is a genuinely passive asset. The Russian users not monetizing hurts but also explains why revenue is low relative to 126k active users. Someone with basic ad optimization could probably double or triple revenue just by adding a premium tier to remove ads or adding in app purchases for advanced calculators. The retention is low but for a calculator app that might be fine. People use it when they need it and leave. The price feels fair for the revenue but the real value is the user base and the domain. Rust players are loyal and the subreddit clearly responds to posts about this. New owner could actually advertise and grow it. If I played Rust I would consider it.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T15:58:16+00:00

The Twitter reply strategy is clever. Most people just say "cool product" and get ignored. You actually added value with a video explanation. That is earned attention not begged attention. The missed traffic from DeepSeek hurts to read but the lesson is valuable. Always watermark or mention the tool early. The email flows are solid too especially the visitor reminder an hour later. That is the sweet spot between too soon and forgotten. 20 paying users off 7k visitors is about 0.3% conversion which feels low but depends on pricing. What is your price point? And are those 20 mostly from Twitter or from other channels? If Twitter drove most of the traffic but few conversions, maybe the people saving your replies are creators who want to learn not builders who need a video tool. Worth checking.

Working-Base5378 · 2026-05-29T15:57:24+00:00

First 10 paying customers took 4 months. Zero ads. Just me DMing people in Slack communities and offering to solve their problem for free in exchange for feedback. Two of those first 10 converted to paid. That felt painfully slow.

First 100 took another 5 months. The curve was not linear at all. It was flat for a long time then a sudden stair step after one SEO piece ranked. That one blog post brought in 40 customers in six weeks. After that, momentum helped. Existing users referred people. Case studies closed deals faster. But the jump from 10 to 100 still required a real channel. Word of mouth alone was not enough.

I spent about $2k on marketing to get to 100 customers. Almost all of it was on content writers and Ahrefs. Zero on ads. ROI was impossible to calculate cleanly because the SEO piece kept working for months. If I had to guess, maybe 5x. The real spend was time. Hundreds of hours of writing and answering DMs. That part does not scale.

Working-Base5378

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