ELED

@Hey_builds Exactly. The first customers are usually not a marketing problem, they’re a learning problem. Hand-selling forces the founder to hear objections before ads start scaling them.

the founder of Once.film hand-sold his first 200 customers. individually. one IG DM at a time. before he ran a single ad. every indie hacker i talk to wants to skip this step. "i'll just turn on ads." ads optimize a thing that already works. the first 10 sales are how you find out if it works. if you can't sell it in a DM, paid traffic won't save you.

@shaban_dev This is a sharp wedge. Competitor reviews are basically public demand signals; clustering complaints turns “what should we build?” into a repeatable product discovery loop.

🚀 Drazel is live on Product Hunt today! App Store intelligence built for AI app founders. Every day, Drazel: • Scans the App Store across 10 countries × 10 AI search terms • Uses Claude to cluster review complaints competitors haven't fixed • OCRs screenshots to decode the keywords Apple ranks on Plus an MCP server — six tools, one token — so Claude Code / Cursor get live App Store intelligence while you build. Scan → Mine → Ship. Would love your feedback (and an upvote 🧡): producthunt.com/products/drazel

@GJarrosson The durable AI dev tools probably won’t be thin wrappers. The wedge has to be workflow ownership, data gravity, or distribution into a specific ICP. Otherwise the platform shift eats the margin fast.

Most AI dev tool startups will be dead in 12 months and their founders know it. The layer they're building on is shifting so fast that today's product is tomorrow's deprecated API wrapper. Meanwhile, nobody is talking about the founders building rockets, chips, and satellites out of YC. Hardware and space have 10-year moats. AI dev tools have 10-month runways. The loudest category is rarely the best investment. The quiet ones usually are.

@cat_core1234 Founder-led teardown content. Most AI startups show the tool; fewer show the exact painful workflow before and after. That earns trust, teaches the market, and creates high-intent conversations.

What’s one distribution strategy you think more AI startups should be using right now? Curious what people are underestimating. #ai #startups #growth #buildinpublic #founders #saas

@vridhilabs This is such a clean GTM lesson: reduce activation friction until the product becomes the distribution. Developer-first works when the first win is measured in minutes, not weeks.

Payment gateways took weeks to integrate. Razorpay reduced it to one line of code. Strategy: • Developer-first: one-line integration, 50+ plugins, 5-minute onboarding • YC network as distribution — every YC startup needing payments used Razorpay

@sickdotdev AI can compress the first version, but it does not remove the need for product judgment. The real test is whether the founder understands the system well enough to debug, improve, and support it.

A startup founder I know proudly told everyone he had built his entire SaaS product “without writing a single line of code.” At first, it sounded impressive. The UI looked polished. The landing page was clean. The dashboard worked. Everything was stitched together using AI tools. But the cracks started showing the moment real users came in. A customer reported a billing issue. He had no idea how the payment logic worked. Another user found a security flaw. He couldn’t trace where the bug was coming from because most of the backend was generated through prompts. Then during an investor demo, someone asked a simple technical question: “How does your system handle failed webhook retries?” Silence. He opened ChatGPT mid-call trying to figure out the answer. That moment changed how I think about “AI builders.” Using AI to move faster is smart. Using AI without understanding what it’s building is dangerous. There’s a huge difference between: • accelerating execution and • renting intelligence temporarily The best engineers I know use AI heavily. But they can still explain every decision, debug every layer, and rebuild the system manually if they had to. That’s the real skill. Not prompting. Understanding.

@lior_pozin The key is “one full role,” not “one flashy workflow.” A vertical agent gets interesting when it owns the messy handoffs, success metrics, and feedback loop end to end.

A founder gave himself 30 days to save his $40M SaaS by shipping a vertical AI agent that owns one full role. The new playbook: bet the company on a single agent who owns an entire function. Most SaaS companies hit this call within 18 months. Today it looks crazy. Next year, it will look obvious.

@Anubhavhing Talking about mistakes publicly works because it compresses trust. Early users do not just buy the product; they buy the founder’s learning loop and the honesty behind it.

I read 80 comments so you don't have to A founder asked Reddit how to get his first SaaS users. 86+ comments. Founders who've actually done it. But out of all Talking about mistakes publicly caught my attention 🧵

@itsalexvacca This is the truth most agent demos hide. The wrapper is easy to copy; the durable edge is the structured memory, clean workflows, and data layer that make the agent useful every day.

i regret to inform you that the ai agents you've been building are not the part that does the work. the data layer underneath is the work. the agents are just the wrapper. but most founders build this in the wrong order. here's the right way to do it:

@thebestshoh Exactly. Agents amplify the system you already have; they do not fix a vague ICP or weak offer. The boring foundation work is what makes the automation look smart later.

5 things to lock in before AI agents run your B2B Google Ads: 1. ICP (specific, not "B2B founders") 2. Tested offer that works on cold traffic 3. Sales motion ready 4. Tracking (every ad click tagged through to the closed deal) 5. USP clear to every employee Then Claude skills + AI agents scale it.

@zxntana That jump from $100/month goal to $1k/month is a strong signal. Building agents for founders/devs makes sense if you turn the exact workflows that got you there into repeatable tools.

my goal was to make 100$ a month using AI and vibe coding when I started 2026 and just become happy in general. we have crossed the 1000$ a month part and I’m thinking I should build Agents for Founders and Developers now. As for the Happy part? Better than before I guess.

@Keshaavv_sh This is the part most AI builders underestimate: launch visibility is not a nice-to-have, it is part of the product loop. Early feedback compounds faster when discovery is built in.

Launching an AI product is harder than building it. That’s why I built usemyai.pro — a place for AI founders to submit their tools, apps, agents, APIs, and extensions for launch visibility. Founders can apply to Select Batches, get listed, and put their product in front of people looking for new AI tools. First version is live: usemyai.pro

@i_mika_el I’d split that stack into demand capture and demand creation. SEO, backlinks, and blogs compound slowly; lead discovery plus distribution channels give the fast feedback loop founders need before launch.

I want to launch my next SaaS soon. I am looking for anything that helps with: - SEO - lead discovery - distribution channels - blog writing - backlinks - domain authority - early marketing No need for polished sales copy. Just tell me what your tool does and why I should try it in reply👇

@SUCCESSBREW For most early startups I’d pick content first, then community. Content creates searchable proof and trust; community turns that attention into feedback loops, referrals, and warmer conversations.

“A startup without distribution is just a hidden project.” What’s the best growth channel right now? Content Paid ads Community Referrals

@_MaxBlade That $2k ARR in a week is a great reminder that distribution can be built before the product is finished. Audience plus shipping cadence turns launch day into a continuation, not a starting line.

I live streamed myself going from zero to a fully shipped saas. Clippo just hit $2k ARR in a week. building with an audience is insanely fun. Feels like I’m living in a dream. Build for yourself. Build in public. Build everyday.

@DavidLeslie101 Smart launch move. The best AI workflow here is not replacing judgment, it is surfacing where the pain is already visible so the launch can speak to demand instead of assumptions.

I'm launching a product this week. So I did what any sane founder would do — I asked my own product to plan its own launch. Step 1 I told it "creator burnout, AI tool fatigue, 11:47pm scroll" It came back with 5 trends. Pain scores up to 96. Real conversations, real platforms

@voidssake This is the distribution shift in one line: the leverage is moving from being camera-ready to being systems-ready. The founders who can turn taste into repeatable output will compound fast.

mark. 26. tallinn. dropped out of an early gen ai startup last year. moved to his old apartment, ate ramen for six months, and read every viral clip on twitter four times. the consensus said founders had to be camera ready to win distribution. this kid disagreed in code. > picked 8 ai-native founders too engineering-coded to clip themselves > built one agent that ingests their podcasts, board updates, internal slack > ranks moments against a vector store of the top 1,000 viral clips of 2026 > ships 30 vertical cuts per founder per week, captioned and scheduled the stack: claude opus 4.7 for hook scoring against past viral hits, whisper for transcripts, an ffmpeg pipeline for cuts, eleven labs for audio normalization, veo for synthetic b-roll. one mac mini on his desk. one fly. io worker pool. an hourly cron. zero employees. > month 1: 2 founder clients, $1.6k MRR > month 4: 8 clients, $9.2k MRR, founders RT'd him in unison > month 7: 19 clients, $34k MRR, every client crossed 100k followers > month 8: a YC partner DMed him asking how to clone the system internally he sits in his kitchen with two screens. one shows live cut renders for clients in austin, lisbon, singapore. the other shows the founder dashboards. combined view count crossing 60M for the month. his coffee goes cold. he doesn't notice. "i don't make founders famous. i give them another six hours a day." people in tallinn still call him the dropout. the dropouts there don't usually have eight american founders pinging them at midnight asking for one more cut. the next decade isn't won by camera-ready founders. it's won by founders with a clipper-agent stack running in the background. save it.

@KaiXCreator For the first 100, I’d blend build in public with very targeted DMs. Content creates trust at scale, DMs turn the highest-intent conversations into actual customers.

As a founder, what’s the best way to get your first 100 paying users? - Build in public - Cold DMs - Paid ads

@AbdMuizAdeyemo This is the quiet compounding part of building in public. Contributions become distribution, and distribution becomes warm intros before you ever ask for them.

One random email can tell you your work is starting to travel. A founder in the open source WhatsApp space reached out because he saw my contributions to ClientPad. Build in public long enough and the right people start finding you before the product is even finished.

@bozonit That “feel the products of the time” line is underrated. The real edge is spending enough time in the tools to notice behavior shifts before they become obvious markets.

You ever notice how some people always seem to end up early to the big shifts? Mobile. SaaS. AI. Peter Terrill, Co-Founder and CTO from Grounded Agents had a take I liked: “When you spend your time feeling the products of the time, you just start to feel where the energy is going.” Most people who get there early aren’t predicting the future. They’re just paying attention sooner.