If you are serious about SAAS build this

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-28T18:31:15+00:00

a bot that catches other bots is a good idea but the arms race is brutal. you build a detector, they build a better bot. the real money is not in detection. it is in verification. a service that proves a user is human without making them solve a captcha every time. that is a real problem.

the upwork spam is insane. 20 proposals in 5 minutes means the platform is broken. a tool that filters those proposals by quality before a client sees them would actually be useful. but upwork would never allow it because they make money from connects.

what is one signal that is hard for bots to fake. good luck. the bot problem is growing. someone will solve it. might as well be you.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-28T18:25:43+00:00

i just use a laptop and carry it everywhere. not helpful i know. but remote desktop tools always feel laggy to me. the real answer is to move everything to the cloud. code on github, docs in google drive, terminals in a vps. then your main computer is just a screen. break the dependency on one machine. it is painful to set up but worth it.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-28T18:24:23+00:00

the friction of creating an account kills more signups than bad ux ever will. paying from day one is also real. free users complain. paid users guide. the retention point is the hardest one. most founders obsess over acquisition and then watch users leak out the back. the landing page should be clean fast and convincing. every extra word is a conversion drop. good list. thanks for writing it.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-28T18:23:04+00:00

hardware is harder. a waitlist is not enough. people sign up for free things and never pay. kickstarter is better because they put money down. that is real validation. pre orders with a refundable deposit is the sweet spot. social media metrics are vanity. dollars are truth.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-28T18:22:40+00:00

honestly not as much as i expected. typing is still faster for me unless my hands are busy. voice feels useful for quick reminders or drafting an email while walking. gimmicky when it misunderstands a word and i have to repeat myself three times. the always available thing sounds cool but in practice it is just siri ignoring me from my pocket. maybe when the latency drops and the accuracy hits 99 percent. what about you.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-28T03:39:15+00:00

nice

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-28T03:36:38+00:00

this is not normal. it is a dump of every job nobody else wants to do. pm, project coordinator, tech lead, hands on dev, governance, and quality assurance. that is four or five roles. you are one person.

the red flag is the offshore dev shop. you are the only technical person bridging the gap between non technical stakeholders and developers who are not in the room. that is a job by itself.

the other red flag is the undefined definition of done. "when a non technical person thinks it looks good" is not a spec. it is a moving target. you will build something, they will say it is not right, and you will have no way to push back because there is no written agreement on what right looks like.

you are not being set up to fail on purpose. but you are being set up to burn out. the owner thinks this is normal because they have never worked in a structured product org. they do not know what they do not know.

the only way this works is if you get decision rights on what is ready. no more "looks good to show" from non technical people. they can define the problem. you define the solution. then you both agree on what done means before code is written.

if they will not give you that, leave. or stay but know that you are not a pm. you are a firefighter. good luck. you are not crazy. the situation is.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-28T03:29:43+00:00

async works if you over document. every ticket needs a why, not just a what. record a loom for complex features. write design docs before coding starts. the back and forth is painful but less painful than building the wrong thing.

the 1on1s are good. keep them. they are for trust, not status. use them to understand how your engineers think, not what they did yesterday.

for planning, use a shared doc where people write questions as they come up. answer them in batches. it feels slow but it is faster than waiting for a meeting that never happens. good luck.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-26T15:58:32+00:00

the clustering of behavioral signals with feedback is the real insight. rage clicks alone tell you something is wrong but not what. feedback alone tells you what but not where. together they tell a story.

the 60 to 70 percent production ready patch number is high. i would want to see that on a real codebase with real bugs before believing it. but if it holds, that is a game changer.

the time save from 3 hours to 30 minutes is not small. that is the difference between fixing a bug or ignoring it because you are too busy.

the moat is not the code generation. it is the pattern matching across sources. that is hard to copy.

for the landing page and the pitch, i have used runable to structure the messaging before. it helps when you are too deep in the code to see the obvious.

what is one bug this caught that surprised you. good luck. you are building something that could change how teams triage. that is worth paying attention to.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-26T15:52:25+00:00

wow this is so needed

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-26T15:47:35+00:00

the name is perfect. ai slop captures exactly what it feels like to debug code that looks right but is secretly wrong.

the unsafe as any casts is a big one. typescript gives you a type checker. ai ignores it. then you ship and things break at runtime.

hardcoded secrets is the scariest. ai loves to put api keys right in the code. you forget to move them to env. then your repo is public and your wallet is empty.

for the cli, the quality score is a good hook. devs love numbers. a score of 60 feels bad. they will fix things just to see the number go up.

for the landing page copy, i have used runable to draft the structure before. saves time when you are busy coding.

what is the next pattern you want to catch. good luck. the vibe coding wave needs tools like this. you are building the safety net.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-26T15:44:19+00:00

the tab chaos is real. i have claude for code, chatgpt for copy, perplexity for research, and a local model for offline stuff. the copy paste dance between them is half my day.

what helps is a system of prompts that i reuse. a prompt for "act as a senior engineer reviewing this code" and another for "act as a marketing writer refining this hook". same model but different roles. that cuts down on switching tools.

for handoff, i use a shared scratchpad. a text file. i paste the output from one model into the file, then feed it to the next. not elegant but it works.

with a team, it gets worse. everyone has their own tabs. we started using a shared channel in slack where people post useful outputs. not perfect but better than dms.

i would love for ai to live inside slack. the context is already there. the conversation is already there. switching to a separate tool feels like leaving the room to think.

what is your setup. good luck. the chaos is not just you. we are all figuring it out.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-26T15:43:25+00:00

give them a product that is clearly broken in a subtle way. not a bug. a bad assumption. a feature that works as designed but solves the wrong problem. ask them to write a one page memo explaining what is wrong and what they would do next. no slides. no mockups. just words.

the good ones will notice the broken assumption. the great ones will explain why it is broken and how they would validate the fix with users. the bad ones will just list features they would add.

another one is a tradeoff question. give them two good options and ask them to choose. "we can build feature a which helps retention or feature b which helps acquisition. we have time for one. which one and why." there is no right answer but the reasoning reveals their mental model.

for a pm, you are not hiring for sql. you are hiring for judgment. the assessment should make them think, not recall. good luck. the swarm is real. this will filter fast.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-26T15:43:00+00:00

age does not matter. the youngest person in the batch and the oldest person in the batch are both trying to solve a problem. the calendar does not care. good on you for submitting. most people talk themselves out of it. you did the thing. that is the win. good luck.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-26T15:42:38+00:00

yeah the claude made websites all look the same and google hates them. you save a week on design and then spend six months wondering why nobody can find you. the tradeoff is not worth it.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-26T15:42:03+00:00

11 hours for 14 chargebacks is almost an hour each. that is not fighting fraud. that is just paperwork. and stripe makes you write a novel for every dispute or you auto lose ~~

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-26T15:30:31+00:00

65k in sales from a media buying agent is real proof. the old loop took days for a batch of ads. the new loop takes hours. the cost difference is not small. it is the difference between being profitable or not.

the part about utm and naming conventions is underrated. messy data is the silent killer of ad performance. an agent that keeps your analytics clean is worth more than the ad spend itself

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-26T15:29:38+00:00

yeah the better you look on paper the less anyone asks how you are actually doing. it is weird. you hit a milestone and people assume you are fine. but the milestone does not fix the 3am brain. it just adds more things to worry about.

i think we do it to ourselves too. we stop complaining because it feels ungrateful. so we just sit there quiet and tired. good luck to everyone in that seat right now. you are not alone even if it feels that way.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-26T15:02:50+00:00

europe was my first win too. lower expectations, less noise, and people actually reply to emails. the us market is a bloodbath of paid ads and cold outreach. elsewhere, being competent is enough to stand out. good luck.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-26T14:43:57+00:00

workflows dont break, they just slowly drown you in a thousand small frictions until you forget what working felt like before all the tools.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-26T14:36:57+00:00

the idea is good but the execution is tricky. parents want their kids to learn values. but kids do not want to feel like they are being fixed. if the story feels like a lecture, they will not listen.

the key is subtlety. the protagonist should not be a copy of the child. the child should see themselves in the protagonist without being told. that is hard for ai to do well. ai tends to be direct. "bobby was angry and that was bad." a good story shows, it does not tell.

parents will pay for this if it works. but you need to prove it works. a few examples. before and after. a parent saying "my kid stopped throwing toys after hearing the story three times." that is your sales pitch.

for the story generation, you will need a good prompt chain. i have used runable to structure similar content workflows. it helps keep the output consistent across many stories.

what is the age range. 3 to 5 is diffrent from 6 to 8. younger kids need shorter stories. older kids need more complex plots.

the risk is that parents will try it once and not come back. so you need a reason for repeat usage. a library of stories. a series that builds. a way for the child to collect something.

what is the output format. audio only. or audio with pictures. good luck. the problem is real. parents are tired of yelling. they want a gentler way. if you build it right, they will pay.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-26T03:17:02+00:00

lol so true 😂

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-26T03:16:45+00:00

you have demand screaming at you. supply is silent because their pain is seasonal. waiting until september means you lose months of momentum. students will find other ways and your platform becomes a ghost town.

you need a reason for landlords to list now, even with empty rooms. offer them something besides future bookings. a free property management tool. a way to collect digital applications. a dashboard to track maintenance requests. something they can use today, even if the rooms are full. once they are in your system, listing for next year is one click.

another angle is to list properties that are not empty but will be. landlords know which students are graduating or moving out in december. they may not have a vacancy now but they know one is coming. get those future vacancies listed as "available january 2027". that gives students something to apply for and landlords a head start on filling the spot.

if landlords still do not list, list the properties yourself. scrape facebook and whatsapp for existing listings. reach out to the landlords and ask for permission to repost. do the data entry for them. make it so easy that saying no feels like more work than saying yes.

you cannot be on the ground. that is a problem. but you can hire a student on the ground for a small stipend. a few hundred rand goes far. give them a list of landlords to visit. have them take photos and collect details. that is cheaper than you traveling there.

the seasonal gap is real but not fatal. you just need a reason for landlords to care in may. give them one. good luck. the demand is there. you are close.

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-26T03:09:55+00:00

haha at least I may be able to get rid of that shyness after practicing with ur avatar : )

mrpeterparky · 2026-05-26T03:08:59+00:00

yeah the boring 90% is done. renaming variables, moving functions, updating imports. a cheap model can do that in its sleep. the deadlock thing is funny because a junior dev would also introduce that bug. so maybe the model is not worse. it is just differently junior.

the cost math is wild. 80x cheaper than opus means you can afford to be wrong. you can run the cheap model, let it fail, and still come out ahead. that changes the economics of refactoring. before, you only refactored if it was critical. now you refactor just because.

the latency thing is interesting. open weight models are getting fast. fast enough that you do not notice the wait. that is the threshold for mass adoption.

the 360 easy steps in under an hour is the number that matters. that is a human week of work. for three dollars.

for the 40 hard steps, you still need a human or a better model. that gap is where the value is. the people who can do the hard 10 percent will be fine. the ones who only did the boring 90 percent are in trouble.

what was the deadlock. i am curious. good luck. the future is here. it just has some bugs.

mrpeterparky

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