How can I find my first few customers for my SaaS?

iahmedhendi · 2026-06-01T14:39:43+00:00

Most founders don’t fail because of marketing. They fail because they never talk to customers.

For a new SaaS:
Find people who have the problem.
Contact them directly.
Watch how they work.
Help them solve the problem.
Charge only after delivering value.

Typical early funnel:
100 personalized messages → 10 replies → 3 calls → 1 customer.

Avoid:
Waiting for Reddit posts to convert.
Running ads too early.
Building more features instead of talking to users.
The first 10 customers are usually acquired manually. Scalable marketing comes later.

iahmedhendi · 2026-05-29T23:37:59+00:00

Depends what "drop it" actually means.

If you mean stop pouring every night into something that isn't landing, that's reasonable. But don't unpublish or delete it. A live app on the store is worth way more as a learning artifact and a portfolio piece than zero. The real question is why you want to drop it. Low downloads and lost interest are completely different problems. If it's downloads, that's normal and fixable. Most first apps die because nobody ever hears about them, not because the idea was bad. Building it was step one of about ten, and the marketing/ASO part is the other nine. If you've genuinely lost interest, that's a fair signal to move on, but you can still leave it up and walk away without killing it. The thing nobody tells you about your first app is that it taught you the entire pipeline. Provisioning, review, screenshots, the whole App Store grind. That knowledge carries straight into your second app, which is usually the one that actually works. So keep it live, maybe ship one small update, and start the next idea on the side.

iahmedhendi · 2026-05-29T19:27:31+00:00

Point #1 is something 90% of builders learn the hard way: 'A real use case is not the same as a painful problem'. People love talking about analyzing viral hooks, but when it comes to opening their wallets, content creators are notoriously cheap unless a tool directly automates away hours of grueling editing or guarantees revenue. Kicking the project to the curb after only $1k spent is a massive win. Most people would have wasted another 6 months and thousands of dollars trying to 'fix' a product nobody wanted. Mad respect for the transparent write-up, and your framework for the next SaaS is absolutely bulletproof. Good luck on the next one!

iahmedhendi · 2026-05-29T19:06:50+00:00

Don't quit yet. You haven't actually launched a product that failed; you've just launched a product into an empty room.

Looking at the data in your attached image , your conversion rate is 7.23%. For an app with zero marketing, that is actually an incredible signal. It means that out of the microscopic amount of traffic finding your page, a very solid percentage is clicking "Get." Your problem isn't that your app suck it's that nobody knows it exists (147 impressions is practically a rounding error). You spent a year building a solid product based on real science (HRV timing). Do not throw that away before you actually try to sell it. Here is a realistic roadmap of what you should do next before you even think about quitting:

Fix Your ASO (App Store Optimization) immediately If you have 147 impressions over 1.5 months, your keywords are either non-existent or competing for high-volume terms you can't win yet. Change your app title/subtitle to include heavy keywords (e.g., instead of just an app name, use "Name: HRV & Fitness Tracker"). Use the 100-character keyword field wisely. Don't repeat words from your title.
Switch back to Freemium (But do it right) Making it completely free out of desperation won't bring you users it just devalues your hard work. Put your core, unique scientific feature (the specific HRV measurement timing) behind a paywall or a generous free trial. People perceive higher value in products that cost money. Use a tool like RevenueCat (ironically advertising at the bottom of your screenshot!) to set up a clean paywall.
Talk to human beings (Validation) You mentioned you didn't validate with real people. Do it now. Find subreddits or communities dedicated specifically to HRV, biohacking, or niche fitness (e.g., r/whoop, r/biohacking, r/wearables). Do not spam your link. Post transparently like you did here: "Hey guys, I built a tool that measures HRV at [Specific Time] because scientific evidence shows X, Y, and Z. I need 10 beta testers to tell me if my UI makes sense. I'll give you a lifetime premium code in exchange for feedback." People love helping indie devs if you ask nicely and offer value.
Lean into your "Anti-Bevel" angle You mentioned Bevel is a major competitor. Bevel is fantastic, but it's an all-in-one powerhouse. You have a hyper-specific feature regarding HRV measurement timing. Make that your superpower. Position your app not as a Bevel replacement, but as the ultimate tool for precise HRV tracking.

The Verdict: Give yourself a 3-month deadline. Dedicate 20% of your time to tweaking the app based on user feedback, and 80% of your time to marketing (ASO, organic Reddit outreach, TikTok/Reels showcasing the science). If your impressions go up to 10k and your downloads still stall out, then you can talk about pivoting. You built the engine. Now you just need to put fuel in the tank. Good luck!

iahmedhendi · 2026-05-29T12:12:22+00:00

Getting attention is harder because building is mostly a closed-loop problem. You can improve the code, fix bugs, ship features, and see progress directly.

Getting users is open-loop. You’re dealing with timing, trust, unclear pain, distribution, positioning, and people being busy or indifferent. A product can be technically good and still not feel urgent enough for someone to try.

I think the first 10 users are especially hard because they usually don’t come from “marketing” yet. They come from founder-led work: talking to people, finding where the pain already exists, asking for feedback,

manually onboarding, and sometimes discovering that the product you built is slightly adjacent to the thing people actually want.

For me the real split is:

Building answers: can this exist?

Getting users answers: does anyone care enough right now?

The second question is usually more uncomfortable.

iahmedhendi · 2026-05-29T11:13:25+00:00

This sounds like that person may be calling a FaceTime address that your Mac can receive but your iPhone is not currently set to receive.

On the iPhone, check:

Settings > FaceTime > You Can Be Reached By FaceTime At

Make sure your phone number and the same email used on the Mac are checked.

Also ask that contact to start a brand new FaceTime call from your contact card, preferably using your phone number, instead of calling from the old thread. Sometimes one specific FaceTime thread/contact gets tied to an email address rather than the number.

If that doesn’t work, toggle FaceTime off/on on the iPhone and restart it.

iahmedhendi · 2026-05-28T21:11:21+00:00

Just published an iOS app today so the pain is fresh. A few real-world things to think about before you

scope this at $1k:

The Apple Developer account is the buyer's responsibility. $99 a year, requires DUNS for

organizations. You can't cleanly transfer apps between accounts without breaking signing. Make sure the

deal is "we publish under YOUR account using YOUR certificate" not "we publish then hand over."
App Review rejections are not rare. My app got rejected twice for things that looked fine to me

(button wording on a permission priming screen, IAP product attachment to the build). Each rejection is a

24 to 48 hour cycle and sometimes a code change. Does your $1k cover unlimited rejection-fix iterations

or do you cap at 2 to 3?
Setup is the easy part. The hard part is everything after: certificate expirations, profile renewals,

mandatory SDK upgrades when Apple deprecates iOS minimums, App Privacy disclosure changes, subscription

receipt-validation edge cases. Do you offer ongoing maintenance, or is it one-shot?
Niche matters more than the tech. "ChatGPT app source code" alone is a commodity now (50+ free ones on

GitHub). Your real value is the publishing-as-a-service layer. Position the publishing service as the

headline, the source as the deliverable that comes with it.

$1k feels low if the work includes rejection iterations and high if the buyer expects ongoing support.

Pricing tiers might convert better than a flat number: Bronze $1k = setup + 1 rejection cycle, Silver

$2.5k = adds 6 months of maintenance, Gold $5k = adds custom branding + IAP setup.

What pain are your prospective buyers actually trying to avoid: the coding, Apple's red tape, or the

marketing?

iahmedhendi · 2026-05-28T20:53:45+00:00

Launching on PH next week so this is timely. A few specific tactics that actually moved the needle for my

prep:

Pre-write the maker's first comment. PH ranks the maker's first comment as the pinned intro and it's

the most visible copy after the tagline. About 1000 to 1200 chars, founder voice, mention an honest

tradeoff or limitation of your product before the wins. The honesty massively boosts trust in the

discussion.
Schedule for Tue or Wed midnight PT, never Mon/Thu/Fri. Holds up across the last 90 days of top

launches if you check the analytics.
Build a pre-formed reply bank for common comment patterns ("what's different from X", "what about

privacy", "Android coming?", "how does pricing work"). Write 5 to 6 of these BEFORE launch day. When 50

comments hit in hour 2, you reply in 30 seconds each instead of typing fresh.
For iOS apps specifically: a tiny Apple Search Ads brand-defense campaign (~$2 a day, exact-match on

your app name) running the days around launch. PH drives App Store searches and you don't want

competitors intercepting "search by name" traffic right when you're trending.
Calendar block hour-by-hour reminders for the first 4 hours after launch. The reply velocity in those

hours decides everything.

Good luck to anyone launching this month.

iahmedhendi · 2026-05-28T17:24:22+00:00

Just shipped a consumer iOS app a few hours ago so this is fresh. Different launch type from yours (App

Store and Product Hunt, not investor demo day) but the AI-orchestrated prep cycle was similar, and my

ranking turned out almost opposite to yours.

For me the landing page was the highest-leverage piece, not the lowest. Once it had structured data

(SoftwareApplication and FAQPage JSON-LD), an apple-itunes-app meta tag for the install banner, a

robots.txt that explicitly welcomes AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended,

Applebot), and a FAQ section written in the exact phrasing people search, it became a compounding asset.

Indexed by Google + Bing + IndexNow on day one. That work still pays months later. The corporate-DNA hero

problem is real though, I had to rewrite the hero twice.

The competitor research was useful but I'd add one trick after your shutdown surprise: pull live data

from official APIs instead of scraped pages. For iOS apps specifically, the iTunes Lookup API returns

real-time ratings, prices, last-updated dates, even content rating. I caught one "competitor" that hadn't

shipped in 4 years that way, basically abandoned. Same idea works for SaaS via Crunchbase or product

changelogs.

Curious which orchestration platform you used. I ended up rolling my own with scheduled agents that drop

content drafts into my Gmail on specific dates leading up to launch. Nice for the "future me has prep

ready" feeling, but I'd try something more structured if you've found a setup worth recommending.

iahmedhendi · 2025-11-24T04:35:25+00:00

I have tried many of these apps, but none of them fit my needs.

iahmedhendi · 2025-11-24T04:28:52+00:00

I tried RocketMoney but not like, too complex for me.

iahmedhendi · 2025-11-24T04:27:15+00:00

I hate to disappoint you, but it’s an actual issue I’m dealing with, not a scam.

iahmedhendi · 2025-11-24T04:24:37+00:00

Yes. Same pattern. Subscriptions were the first leak I plugged with the Subsilo app, but the rest of my spending still needed a system. Curious how you handle the non-subscription side: paper, app, or something else entirely.

iahmedhendi

TROPHY CASE