i'm begging you: - find 20 startups that raised a seed round 3 to 9 months ago (ignore any raise that happened <3 months ago) - pick the 5 that sell to the same kind of customer - find their founders on X - read their last 100 posts - pull out every question someone asked them about the product (skip the ones the founder replied to) 1. why do all this? [bookmark this right now, you’ll forget this by tomorrow] because the replies under a founder's posts are people telling you, in their own words, what they want. - people asking for alternatives - anyone annoyed about the price - "does it do X yet?" type questions - people who signed up, got stuck, and gave up put all of it in a sheet. that sheet is now a list of possible customers, the problem each one has, and the exact phrasing they use for it. next problem: 2. how do these people end up noticing you? - take the 10 questions that come up most - make one useful piece of content for each - leave your product out of it - answer the question better than the startup did - tag the startup when you post it. if it helps their users, their team reposts it and you borrow their audience - if an alternative does something better, tag them. - if your answer needs 2 or 3 products chained together, write that down. that combo is your tool in step 4 >important< someone asking whether an AI tool can do a thing? - record a 30-second clip of you doing it. when the complaint is pricing.. - line up 5 alternatives and show what each one costs once you add everything up. if a workflow keeps tripping people up.. - build a free template that handles it. do this for 30 days. 3. then check which posts sent people to your profile. - ignore likes - more bookmarks than likes means people plan to come back. repeat that topic - replies that ask a follow-up question count more - anyone who went and used one of your templates - and note which problems keep bringing in people you haven't seen before drop the topics nobody bit on and keep going on the ones that pulled people in. 4. now build a free tool for the problem that came up most. one small tool is enough for now. the full SaaS can wait. - put the link in your bio - drop it under conversations where it fits - send it directly to the people who asked for exactly this - ask users what they still can't do with it now you've got: a) an audience that cares about one specific problem b) a list of people who have already said they have it c) a free product they have a reason to try d) feedback from real users on what to build next 5. now add a paid feature. dm your 20 heaviest users first with the price and two lines on what it does. > 5 say yes, build it. > fewer than 5, the feature is wrong, the price is fine. Goal: - $10/month - 100 paying users - $1k MRR that's the target. the order is the whole trick: customers first, then what they wanted, then distribution built around their problems, and something to sell only at the end. If you read till here, reply “I’m a reader” helps me understand if I should keep my content this long. a like, repost or a reply also encourages me to keep posting. ✨

The dirty secret of SAAS is that subscription pricing allows you to keep charging customers who aren't really using the product. The downside of this is that when your subscriptions finally churn, it's a *lagging indicator* of your business failing. I strongly suspect that there are many, many "dead men walking" now in SAAS, both AI-native and traditional: businesses where the financials may still look fine -- just a quarter or two of stagnant growth, margins are still great, maybe there's an AI narrative going forward, etc. but the *product* is losing utilization and they will lose every single customer to {{AI-native competitor, possibly the big labs themselves}} as the customers encounter those solutions. Those customers become dormant users, but the subscriptions still run for the while. The actual revenue churn only occurs months or quarters later when the question of "is anyone still using this? do we need to keep paying for this?" is finally answered with a "no" rather than an "i'm not sure".

We hit $900K MRR by doing the opposite of every SaaS advice you've read. Here's 5 counter-intuitive hacks that got us there: 1 - Don't chase paying users. Chase free users. Most SaaS hide everything behind a paywall, so nobody feels the value before paying. On Trendtrack, our data is free but the day you want to analyze one specific brand, usually your competitor, you have to pay. Every free user is a lead you own. You can email them, retarget them, push offers in the app or message them on support. Give enough value for people to want more. Then charge for the "more". 2 - Add friction to your onboarding. Everyone tells you to remove steps. I add questions instead: I ask about their goal, their job and where they come from. If someone wants to analyze trends and works as a creative strategist, we show them the right filters on day one. They get the value in 2 minutes, and every email after that speaks to their goal. 3 - "Too expensive" doesn't exist. It's our #1 churn reason. So I called the people who left, one by one. Nobody left because of the price. They left because they never reached their goal. If you find your dream house, you find a way to get the loan. "Too expensive" just means they didn't get enough value. Just fix the path to their goal. 4 - Launch boring features like they're huge. A launch is marketing, not a feature. Three things make it big. You need an angle: one company called a basic contact feature "the Tinder of sales". You need a motion video, because it always beats a facecam. And you need distribution: we asked the users who love us to help push it. 5 - Do by hand what everyone automates. Every week I watch the best creator videos with my small notebook. I write down the hook, the tone, the thumbnail and the exact moment the story starts. Then I turn it into scripts for our next creators. No tool can tell you why a video worked, you have to watch it. Before you automate something, do it 100 times by hand. You know me now, nothing fancy here. It's just logic and a lot of reps. Let's get in the mud.

my unpopular opinion is that ChatGPT apps are the best distribution play rn we spent last month shipping these for agency clients and... +50-200% on income those apps were already doing just you literally get an access to ~900M weekly users for free + you're not struggled with onboarding, since it's built on top of ChatGPT and for user who never used your product, much easier to get in via gpt interface same product, same pricing, just new way of using your product and the fear that OpenAI just clones you is backwards cloning your niche is the ONE move that costs them more than it returns... they'd rather buy you and ship it out of the box here's exactly how to launch it: 1. pick a workflow the client already gets paid for > not a new idea > an existing paid workflow with proven demand 2. build it as an MCP server > streamable HTTP on public HTTPS, usually at /mcp > that server is the whole product surface > UI is optional, tools come first 3. name and describe every tool like the model is reading it, because it is > action-oriented name, a human title, a description of when to use it > accurate annotations and a real input schema > that metadata is what decides whether you get called at all 4. add the UI after the tools already work > expose it as an MCP resource with a ui:// uri > set the type to text/html;profile=mcp-app > your built js gets inlined into that resource and runs in an iframe 5. connect it at chatgpt.com/plugins and break it yourself > plus button, add custom MCP server > paste the url with /mcp, create as a plugin > run MCP Inspector first and catch the schema errors there 6. submit at platform.openai.com/plugins and overprepare > a zip of the built plugin and publisher verification > a privacy policy url, no privacy policy means no review > 5 positive and 3 negative test cases > release notes and a demo video for the reviewer > a domain token hosted at /.well-known/openai-apps-challenge 7. keep billing on YOUR backend > OAuth 2.1 into the account system you already have > enforce authorization on every request, not through the model > there is no revenue share > the plugin is the channel and the MRR stays yours that's absolutely free traffic and by some reason most of products skip it... the guy below is a good case which shows real efficiency of this approach (he literally made around +$40k monthly income)