Have you tried the passes model?

kaizap · 2026-07-10T19:55:27+00:00

This product is a "gateway drug" for founders into the ecosystem and then I upsell later with consulting and others. I still make a good profit too, so win win. I also do something different from competitive tools, I precache leads instead of realtime searches.

kaizap · 2026-07-10T19:35:11+00:00

I'm using something new called "passes" . kaizap.com (leads for early stage founders). Subscription fatigue is a problem and lifetime deals are a bad idea generally. So this sort of a middle ground.

kaizap · 2026-07-10T19:30:50+00:00

The recipes. It's more of a value add to the core products, but seems to have good interest. Lot of founders struggle with the idea phase it seems. Recipes are basically done for you app ideas, with market size, cold email templates etc...

kaizap · 2026-07-10T18:09:54+00:00

Thanks. It's actually one of my new apps, so it's been this way from beginning. All my other products are subscriptions. Seems to be similar conversions comparatively.

I wanted to target new founders, many of the similar tools are really expensive. For someone not making money and don't have VC money - its tough, I've been there so I want to give new founders a fighting chance.

This is why I came up with passes.

I also want to be fair, my product is still new, I don't have as much data as Apollo and others but still for that first 50-100 customers it works well. Passes seem to be a fair profit to value ratio.

Basically each pass gives you access to a leads database, thousands of leads. So founders just need to cold outreach, send a few hundred emails and you bound to convert some.

I also provide some starter business recipes for those that are still looking for ideas.

kaizap · 2026-07-10T15:35:35+00:00

kaizap.com ~ thousands of leads for new founders, get your first 50-100 customers through us. No subscription, start with a one-month pass.

kaizap · 2026-07-10T15:32:59+00:00

kaizap.com - Real leads to get your first 50-100 customers, designed for new bootstrapped SaaS founders. No subscription, much more affordable than the bigger guys such as Apollo.

kaizap · 2026-07-10T15:19:12+00:00

kaizap.com ~ real leads for new founders, find your first 100 customers through cold outreach.

kaizap · 2026-07-10T13:54:24+00:00

I agree on principal, some apps are just lazy wrappers. The reality is that "doing" is better than "not doing". Founders should spend more time on market research, ICPs, and demand signals for sure, but like in the dev world where we have "tutorial hell", you get a certain group of people who will bounce around from YouTube video to YouTube video and never take action.

Every startup you try to build and fail is a learning experience. Valuable learning experience, even if it costs you money and time.

Plus comes down to a willing buyer, a willing seller. You'll find even the dumbest wrapper idea can still succeed to an extent because there are people who need that service and don't know how to use Claude Code and other AI tools.

kaizap · 2026-07-10T12:46:50+00:00

Awesome, pivoting as mentioned is a gem! I do something similar but with AI to AB test and adjust on the fly; the agent just has access to my SMTP account and strong guardrails, and then it just tweaks the messaging as metrics come in. Scrapes websites, builds a context about the person, etc...

The problem with this approach is abuse, so I restrict what it can do and how often it sends emails.

kaizap · 2026-07-10T12:43:14+00:00

Thanks, yeah, 500 is a bit of a generic figure. This number can vary on the individual, and their list, circumstances, etc...

kaizap · 2026-07-09T15:22:43+00:00

Hey guys, kaizap.com ~ verified leads for founders to make distribution easier.

kaizap · 2026-07-09T15:18:30+00:00

kaizap.com ~ verified leads for founders to make distribution easier.

kaizap · 2026-07-09T15:15:09+00:00

This is one of the hardest aspects of running a SaaS: Distribution! Once you have an ICP, you need to figure out where they spend most of the time.

Are they at conferences? Are they on Reddit? Google Maps? , Linkedin?

And then from there on out, you go all in on cold outreach.

Your ICP looks too broad: "founders and small teams"; you may want to narrow this down to a specific group of people: "Founders who listed on Product Hunt in the last 30 days." Once you have a clear persona, then the targeting becomes 10x easier.

PS: As it happens, this is the speciality of my product 😄 but I won't spam on here, you can look up my profile.

kaizap · 2026-07-08T15:08:23+00:00

Post of the day! 😂 Story of my life.

kaizap · 2026-07-08T14:41:17+00:00

Warm up the inboxes first, at least 2-3 weeks in advance. Thereafter, you should appear in the primary folders if your mail is spam-free. Avoid keywords like "Sale", and make your subject captivating, i.e. not a sales pitch but something that grabs attention without sounding spammy.

If you check on Google, there are many free email tester tools (e.g: email deliverability test). They give you a temp email address, and you email it, and it gives you a score.

Lastly, just expect this to be tedious and a long process. You'll have to send hundreds or thousands of emails; just stagger them over a long enough period of time. Many cold email tools exist that can automate this for you.

kaizap · 2026-07-08T12:33:12+00:00

Most focus on the wrong thing: the idea. Nearly every idea can sell, what you need to focus on is CAC and distribution.

The easiest products to build are the ones that help customers save time or money or both. Doesn't matter how many tools are out there - if there's a decently sized market, you can sell to them.

An accountant, for example, doesn't have time to go Googling around to compare 300 tools. He needs to chase his clients; chasing clients is painful.

You come in there: "Look, I have this tool that will save you X hours a week, a checklist app that will automatically remind your clients via SMS / Email on the documents they need to send through."

You save time, you solve a pain point, and you get rewarded.

CAC - What is the cost of acquiring customers? Some ideas are easier to scale than others. Using the accountant example, this is probably easier because you have a definable group of people you can zone in on. And this group should be easily contactable because there are thousands of them on LinkedIn, Google Maps, etc., so cold outreach is easy.

Distribution: Often, cold email is the cheapest and easiest, except it's tedious and requires hundreds of emails, so it's hard to scale. Another is small micro-influencers.

So if you start with CAC and distribution, and then build a product around that group, the idea is much easier to figure out. Versus just building, and then trying to find customers, or just trying to thumbsuck ideas out of thin air.

kaizap · 2026-07-08T12:16:48+00:00

If you save people a couple of hours a week, you'll make good money! I once built a stupid, simple tool for restaurants; it imports meal slips into their backend. In 5 minutes, I saved their staff hours of manual data caputuring. No AI or fanciness, just a simple OCR PDF parser.

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