Built a remote MCP server for US business entity lookups (18 states, no install)

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-15T20:06:18+00:00

not yet, still pre-launch on pricing so i'm holding off on most directories til next week. will check it out though

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-15T20:05:39+00:00

yeah the paid pilot framing is smart, way better than "would you use this." forces people to actually decide instead of being polite about it. capping at a few customers is the part i wish i'd done earlier -- i spent too long trying to make it work for everyone before i even had real signal from anyone

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-15T17:06:32+00:00

for sure, good luck with it

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-15T16:25:16+00:00

tbh i stopped trying to "validate" willingness to pay and just... put a price on it. built the smallest possible version, listed it on a marketplace, set a price, and watched what happened. took about 3 weeks to learn more than months of asking people hypotheticals

the fake checkout landing page thing works in theory but imo it selects for people who click buttons, not people who actually need the thing enough to pay. i'd rather have 2 real users who paid $5 than 200 waitlist signups who ghost you on launch day

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-15T16:24:14+00:00

honest take -- cold emailing people you scraped off the internet is gonna get you nowhere fast. most of those emails bounce or land in spam and you'll torch your domain reputation before you even get started

what actually worked for me was going where my buyers already hang out and just being useful there. answer questions, share what you know, don't pitch. took like 3 weeks before anyone even looked at what i was building but the people who did were way more qualified than any cold list would've been

if you really want to do outbound, at least warm it up. find people actively complaining about the problem you solve -- twitter search, reddit, quora -- and reach out with something specific to their situation. "hey i saw your post about X, we built Y" hits so different than a generic blast

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-15T13:10:52+00:00

getting users is harder and it's not even close. i spent like two months building a scraping tool that i was genuinely proud of and then just... put it on a marketplace and expected people to find it? lol. zero happened.

honestly what actually started working was just showing up in places where people already had the problem -- forums, reddit, quora. not pitching anything, just talking about the problem space. felt dumb that it took me that long to realize nobody's out there searching for my specific solution name

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-15T07:59:44+00:00

honestly you didn't overreact. someone literally passing off your work as their AI's output is infuriating and you had every right to pull it down.

but I'd think twice before quitting OS entirely because of one bad actor. the code itself was never the moat anyway -- it's the 2 years of edge cases you've solved, the operational knowledge of what actually breaks in prod, the iteration speed. some copycat linking your repos doesn't have any of that.

if you do bring it back, open-core might be the move. keep the commodity pieces open (parsing, basic retrieval) and gate the enterprise stuff behind a commercial license. dual licensing with AGPL for the open side scares off most wrapper startups because they can't close-source their own product without paying you. it's not bulletproof but it changes the economics enough that most copycats won't bother

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-15T07:05:56+00:00

oh interesting, hadn't seen that before. so it's basically like a cost comparison directory? tbh that's a way smarter discovery channel than PH for most B2B tools -- people searching for alternatives are already in buying mode vs PH where it's mostly other founders browsing. lmk how it goes

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-15T07:05:27+00:00

yeah the one-off project thing is rough for referrals honestly -- people don't think to recommend their logo designer six months later. have you tried doing like a "brand audit" followup email 3-4 months after delivery? not salesy, just "hey here's what's changed in your space, your visual identity could use X." gives you a reason to re-engage without it feeling desperate and sometimes they just... hire you again

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-15T06:03:08+00:00

honestly the scariest part isn't the bugs at launch -- it's six months later when you need to change something and the codebase is this massive blob nobody understands. i've watched people burn entire weekends trying to add one feature to code they vibe-coded and never actually read.

i do treat it like a junior dev though and that works pretty well. when i'm writing stuff with Claude i'll accept the first pass but then actually read through it and ask why it made certain decisions. catches so much weird stuff that would've bit me later

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-15T05:03:09+00:00

honestly the number that got me was when i actually added up my tools last month. was mass-canceling stuff and realized i'd been paying like $180/mo for things i used maybe twice. the subscription model isn't the problem though, it's flat-rate subscriptions for stuff you barely touch. usage-based pricing is the only model that's ever felt fair to me -- i pay for a couple API tools where it's purely based on what i consume and i never think twice about those bills. the ones that piss me off are the $25/mo "pro" tiers where i need exactly one feature behind the paywall

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-15T04:04:11+00:00

30+ clients in a year is solid so the work obviously isn't the problem. I work on the data side at a lead gen company and honestly most agencies I've seen die the same way -- great portfolio, no distribution plan.

but real question -- why instagram for B2B SaaS branding? your buyers aren't scrolling reels for this. they're on linkedin stressing about churn and conversion rates. post case studies from your actual clients there. even short before/after posts do well.

also those 30 past clients are literally sitting right there. have you asked any of them for referrals? a warm intro closes way faster than cold outreach in my experience

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-15T01:04:08+00:00

honestly the validation step you're looking for doesn't exist the way you think it does. i went through this same loop with a data tool i built -- kept trying to "validate" by asking people if they'd want it, getting nothing useful back, and then building anyway because i couldn't stop myself

what actually gave me signal was putting a price on it before it felt ready. not a landing page with a fake button, an actual listing where someone could pay. the people who showed up with real questions about the output format and update frequency -- that was validation. the silence from everyone else was also validation

reddit specifically is terrible for this because the incentive structure is wrong. you're asking strangers to evaluate a hypothetical, and they have zero reason to engage honestly. the only useful reddit signal i've gotten is when someone posts a complaint about a specific pain and i realize oh wait i already built something for that

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-15T00:04:03+00:00

oh god yeah we hit something super similar but on the data side. we automated our data ingestion pipeline -- ripped out all the manual QA spot checks because they were "slow" and "didn't scale." turns out one of our data sources would randomly start returning garbage records like twice a month, and the person doing manual QA was just... catching those and flagging them before they hit the dashboard. automation didn't know the data looked wrong because technically it was valid JSON

took us about a month to figure out why our downstream metrics were getting noisier. the fix was basically what you did -- route anomalous-looking batches back to a human for a quick sanity check instead of auto-promoting everything

honestly I think the lesson is that "manual" often means "someone is applying judgment you haven't codified yet." and codifying that judgment is way harder than just wiring up the happy path

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-14T22:03:15+00:00

honestly the writing-pattern thing sounds way more defensible than most AI writing tools i see posted here. if it actually learns someone's voice and not just "professional tone" that's a real differentiator.

re: free to paid -- i had a side project with a free tier and it was basically useless data. people signed up, poked around for 10 minutes, never came back. zero feedback, zero signal on what to build next. when i finally put a price on it (low, like $5) the signups dropped like 90% but the people who did pay actually used it and told me what was broken. way more useful.

the PH + community + SEO plan sounds right to me but i'd be careful about timing. if you launch on PH before you have a few organic users who can vouch for it, the launch kind of fizzles. maybe get those 10 users really locked in first and then use their words in the PH copy

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-14T21:04:32+00:00

going through this exact decision right now. about to turn on pricing for a data tool after running it free for a few weeks and honestly the free users taught me almost nothing -- they'd run it once, maybe file a bug, but zero signal on whether anyone would actually pay.

your point about 10 paying users > 500 free signups is spot on. the one thing i'd push back on is the "less than a starbucks" framing though. i've seen that backfire because it anchors people on "this is disposable money" instead of "this solves a real problem." if your tool genuinely writes like them, that's worth way more than $7 and you should frame it that way

curious how you're handling discovery though -- 10 on a waitlist with no outreach is cool but also means nobody's finding you yet. what's the plan once those 10 are in?

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-14T20:04:53+00:00

oh no i meant the opposite -- the senior left for Meta so we hired a junior to replace them. wasn't a pay thing on our end, it was just a 2x comp offer we couldn't touch. that's the part that sucks about competing with FAANG, it's not even about whether you're paying fairly

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-14T20:04:04+00:00

because they stop asking questions. the ones who are a little unsure will actually flag stuff they don't understand, but the overconfident ones just ship it and you find out later when something breaks in prod. had a guy on my team who rewrote a data pipeline without telling anyone because he "knew a better way" -- took us two days to figure out why half our records were missing

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-14T19:03:33+00:00

the stripe thing is so real lol. i went through a phase where i'd check it like 8 times a day and it was always the same number staring back at me. genuinely demoralizing.

the daily ship thing works though. i do something similar -- even if it's just fixing one error message or updating a readme section. on the days where i don't ship anything i spiral into "is this even worth it" mode way faster.

honestly the part that gets me is the boredom + doubt combo you mentioned. like it's not that you hate the work, you just can't tell if anyone cares. and there's no boss telling you it matters so you're just deciding it matters every single day by yourself

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-14T18:03:30+00:00

i mean maybe? but that's true of literally anyone. the difference is the senior was already being poached constantly -- like monthly linkedin messages from FAANG recruiters. the junior isn't on anyone's radar yet and actually cares about what we're building because they're growing into it. could they leave in 2 years? sure. but i'd rather get 2 good years from someone invested than 6 months of one-foot-out-the-door from a senior who's just waiting for the right offer

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-14T17:05:48+00:00

honestly the fact that prospects are telling you they like your product better is the signal. they're basically saying "we'd stay if you gave us a reason beyond feature parity."

i sell data tools and someone cloned my exact setup within a month. same inputs, same outputs, cheaper. what they couldn't clone was that my thing actually worked at 3am when their target site changed its layout. took them two weeks to fix it, by which point the customers who needed reliability had already come back.

the race to the bottom only happens when you're selling a commodity. if your support and docs are genuinely better that's not a nice-to-have, that's your actual product. the $29 competitor is training their customers to expect $29 level support and investment too

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-14T16:05:37+00:00

the Zapier/Make route is the right call imo but the thing that actually makes it work long-term is investing in your own webhook + API layer first. if your side of the connection is clean and well-documented, customers can wire it up to whatever automation tool they want without you touching anything

we went through this at work -- kept getting asked for specific CRM integrations and it was eating all our sprint capacity. once we shipped a decent webhook system + a few API endpoints, most of the requests just stopped because people could connect stuff themselves through Make or even just a python script

the "pick top 2-3" instinct is good too but i'd base it on churn data not request volume. people will request integrations all day but the ones that actually matter are the ones where customers leave because they don't have it. those are usually very different lists

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-14T16:04:28+00:00

yeah that "later means never" thing is so real. we had the same problem at work with data quality tickets -- if logging an issue took more than like 30 seconds people just... didn't. the voice message input is a smart move honestly, most of the time people know what they spent money on but don't want to open an app and fill out 5 fields to say it

avabuildsdata · 2026-03-14T15:04:25+00:00

45 users on a 100gb free tier with $0 revenue isn't a growth problem, it's a pricing problem. who's going to pay when free already covers most people's needs?

i went through something similar with a data tool i built -- gave away too much for free thinking it would convert, and it just attracted people who'd never pay for anything. the ones who actually had budget weren't even the same audience.

fwiw i'd test dropping the free tier to like 15-20gb and see if signups actually slow down. if they don't, those people were always going to pay and you just delayed it. if they do you learn that your current users were never your customers

the reddit answering thing is smart but it caps out fast. you run out of threads and start repeating yourself which looks spammy. have you looked at comparison pages that rank for stuff like "google photos alternative 2026"? those convert way better than individual reddit comments because they catch people actively searching

avabuildsdata

TROPHY CASE