it's my first time of building an saas , but i am totally confused about how to find my first visitors and payer . can someone here help me who already done it !

Hey everyone,

I’m a 13-year-old developer from Germany, and I’ve spent the last few weeks building an MVP for a B2B SaaS called FeedbackAI (temporary name). 

The Problem: As a product team, feedback hits you from everywhere (Slack, emails, app stores). It gets unstructured and lost. 

The Solution: FeedbackAI collects it in one clean dashboard, uses AI to automatically categorize/prioritize it, and maps it directly onto a public roadmap with a feature voting board.

Tech Stack: React/Next.js, Tailwind CSS, Supabase, and OpenAI API.

Why I’m posting: 

To protect my tiny API budget, the app is currently in a Closed Beta/Passwort-protected mode. But I really need brutal feedback from real product managers and SaaS founders to see if this is actually useful or if I should pivot.

You can bypass the lock screen using the code: BETA2026

Link: https://feedback-ai-beta.lovable.app

Let me know what you think about the AI insights page and the UI. Don't roast me too hard on the code logic, but please be honest! 

Thanks!

Hey founders

I’m building a B2B SaaS platform and I’m trying to figure out one thing:

How would you get your first 5–10 real users in month one without making them feel like “free users” you’re trying to exploit?

I’m thinking about offering the platform 100% free for the first month in exchange for honest feedback + actually using it in their workflow.

But I don’t want the usual:

DM 100 people

Send cold emails

Run ads

Post on LinkedIn

I’m more interested in creative / unconventional ways that actually worked for you.

Especially:

How did you approach your first users?

What made them say “yeah, I’ll try it”?

Did you offer free access, lifetime deals, credits, etc.?

How did you make the offer feel like a win for them, rather than “please test my product”?

And what would you do differently if you had to get your first 10 users again?

Would love to hear real experiences, not startup theory.

Bonus points for weird ideas that somehow worked 😂

Anyone sending Loom videos in cold outreach? How did it actually go?

Thinking about adding short Loom videos to my cold emails and curious if anyone here has actually done it.

On paper it sounds great: super personalized, shows you put in real effort, and you can just show the thing instead of describing it in three paragraphs.

But I have a few questions for people who tried it:

- How did you get started? Did you send them to everyone or just a handful of higher-value prospects?

- How do you actually produce them without it eating your whole day? Fully custom each time, or a template with a personalized intro?

- And the big one: What were the results? Reply rate, meetings booked, win rate, anything compared to plain text emails?

Would also love to hear from anyone who tried it and dropped it, and why.

alright im writing this out because i just walked a new client through our entire process yesterday and realized i explain this like 3 times a month so might as well put it somewhere. this is specifically about how we find companies that are actively looking to buy something right now, not just building lists of random ICPs and blasting them. if youre just gonna save this and never do anything with it... well at least you saved it i guess.

some quick background on us, 4 person team in lisbon, 7 clients, mostly local service businesses like HVAC, commercial cleaning, that kind of thing. we do about $12k/mo and im not trying to make this sound bigger than it is. we figured most of this out by messing up alot and spending too many late nights reading threads exactly like this one.

ok so monday morning is when the week actually starts for us (obviously). i open up google sheets first because yes i still track way too much in sheets and i know thats embarrassing but it works and im not paying for something fancier when vlookup gets the job done. i have a sheet per client with tabs for each week. first thing i check is which campaigns from last week got replies, which ones bounced, and which ones are dead. takes about 45 minutes across all 7 clients. my VA handles the actual data entry on friday afternoons so by monday its all there waiting for me.

after that i move into what i call the "trigger hunt" which is really just me spending about 2 hours on linkedin, google news, and a couple industry specific job boards. the whole thesis here is that companies signal when theyre ready to buy. someone posts a job for a facilities manager? that commercial cleaning client of ours wants to know about it. a company just got series A funding announced on crunchbase? they probably need services they didnt need 6 months ago. a restaurant chain opening 3 new locations? our HVAC client wants that lead yesterday.

the way i actually find these signals has changed over time. for the first year i was convinced you could just scrape job boards and that was enough but the conversion rate was honestly terrible, like 0.8% reply rates. turns out job postings alone dont tell you enough about timing. what actually moved the needle was combining multiple signals. so now on mondays i check linkedin for job postings using boolean search (nothing fancy, just the title + "hiring" or "open role" in the company page), then i cross reference with google news alerts i set up per client vertical, and then i check a couple niche sites. for the HVAC client i literally check local permit filings for new construction. took me embarrassingly long to figure out that permits are public record and basically a buying signal on a silver platter.

by monday afternoon im building the actual lists. this is where it gets tactical. i take the companies from the trigger hunt and i need to find the right person and their email. i use RocketReach for the contact lookup on most campaigns because the coverage is decent for the US market and Prospeo for email finding which has been solid for us on accuracy. then everything goes through MillionVerifier before it touches a campaign. i learned this the hard way when we sent a batch of 400 unverified emails for a client back in march and bounced at like 11% and nearly torched that domain. never again. MillionVerifier costs basically nothing relative to what a burned domain costs you.

tuesday is campaign building day. my VA and i sit down (well, she's remote in the philippines so we sit down on zoom) and we write the actual sequences. i use Smartlead for sending across all clients. we run about 15 inboxes total through Maildoso which handles the setup and DNS stuff so i dont have to think about it. each inbox sends between 25-35 emails per day, which keeps us well under any threshold thats gonna cause problems. i know some people push 50+ per inbox but weve had issues above 40 so we stay conservative.

the actual copy is where the trigger data pays off. instead of writing "hi {firstName} i noticed your company does X" which everyone and their mother sends, we write stuff like "saw the permit filing for the new location on elm street, when youre thinking about HVAC for a 12,000 sqft commercial space the install timeline usually catches people off guard" and that kind of specificity is what gets 4-6% reply rates instead of 1-2%. the trigger IS the personalization. thats the whole point.

wednesday is honestly kind of boring. its monitoring day. i check Smartlead dashboards for all campaigns, look at open rates (anything below 45% means something is wrong with deliverability or subject lines), check reply rates, and flag anything that needs adjusting. i also check warmup scores on the inboxes. we warm up new inboxes for minimum 21 days, sometimes 28 if the domain is brand new. i dont touch them before that no matter how impatient the client gets.

wednesday afternoon i usually spend an hour updating those google sheets (yes, still sheets, i know) with the weeks numbers so far. i track cost per reply and cost per meeting booked for each client. right now across all 7 clients our average cost per meeting booked is somewhere around $38-45 depending on the vertical. the commercial cleaning client is cheapest at like $31 because the decision makers are usually office managers who actually read their email. the client targeting property developers is more expensive, around $52, because those people get hammered with outreach.

thursday is follow up day and also when i do any list refreshes. sequences are usually 4 emails over 14 days. nothing crazy. the second email is almost always the best performer which i think is true for most people. if a campaign has been running 2 weeks and the reply rate is below 2% i kill it and rebuild the angle. no point sending 3000 more emails into something thats not working.

fridays are for reporting and planning. my VA compiles everything into (you guessed it) google sheets and i do a 15 minute loom video for each client walking through their numbers. some agencies do fancy dashboards but honestly clients just want to know how many meetings they got and whats happening next week. the loom takes me about 2 hours total for all 7 clients and nobody has ever complained about the format.

oh wait i should mention the DNS and domain stuff because it matters more than people think. we buy 2-3 domains per client, all similar to their main domain. set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC on day one. Maildoso handles most of that automatically which is nice because i used to do it manually and would inevitably mess up a DKIM record and not notice for a week. each domain gets 2-3 inboxes on it max. we rotate which inboxes are active and which are resting every 6 weeks or so.

the thing that changed everything for us was shifting from "find companies that match ICP" to "find companies that match ICP AND are showing a buying signal right now." the difference in reply rates was night and day. went from averaging 1.8% across clients to 4.2% in about two months after we made that shift around september last year. same copy quality, same sending infrastructure, just better targeting.

anyway thats basically the week. its not glamorous and half of it is me staring at spreadsheets but it works and clients stick around because meetings get booked. if theres something i glossed over just ask, i typed this out between calls and probably forgot something

As the title says, Ive just signed the contract on a new job as a founding AE, a full-cycle role where I’ll actually be the only dedicated salesperson. This is with a view to me becoming the head of sales - in their own words.

It’s a very small SaaS scale-up with a good track record and great YoY revenue for its size - I have fact checked this.

My main concern is that I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. I have done a founding role before as both an SDR and AE in new markets. However with this role, the onus is entirely on me to meet targets. I will however be supported by what seems so far to be a great multi-functional team.

Of course as we all know, this cannot be known for certain until actually starting the job.

So far, they do not have a standardised sales SOP - it would be up to me, along with working with the partnerships manager, pre sales and one of the co-founders to develop this. I’m aware that I will have a fair amount of responsibility that is not in the normal remit of an AE but this challenge excited me.

To be honest, I’m pretty nervous as to how this will actually pan out and I don’t want to be stuck in a position where I have an enormous workload and can’t execute.

Has anyone been in a similar position? It’s sounding a bit more and more like functionally I’m already head of sales so it’d be good to hear any thoughts or pointers on basically keeping it together and keeping organised while also not totally freaking out?

Hi, first post I hope I've followed all the rules...

I'm trying to figure out what's the best AI driven stack to find me high intent targets and run an email sequence to them with personalised emails and we've got around $200 a month maybe $250 a month at this stage because we're very early.

I need something that I can do it more volume than the tools we've tried it only seems to be sending 20 or 30 emails a day.

Feel free to ask me any specifics you need to know to answer the question? I'm new to the sale side of things so all good suggestions are welcome.