Yo Aso

I'm a solo founder from Japan. No team. No VC. No network in the West. Just me, building products and trying to compete globally. Starting with DunnAI @getdunnai — recovering Stripe payments that Stripe itself can't fix. Because most failed payments aren't a payment problem. They're a communication problem. Following along if you want to see how this goes. 🧵

DunnAI just got featured on @BetaList. Building this solo from Okinawa. Every small milestone counts. betalist.com/startups/dunnai

Someone asked me why I'm building a global SaaS from Tokyo. Honest answer: Because the problem is real everywhere. SaaS runs on Stripe worldwide. Failed payments drain revenue worldwide. And I wanted to know if one person, building alone, could compete globally. Still finding out. 🇯🇵

The moment I understood involuntary churn: 5–9% of SaaS MRR fails every month. Half of it comes back with smart retries. The other half needs someone to talk to the customer. Not a generic "payment failed" email from Stripe. A message from your brand, explaining exactly what happened and what to do. That gap is what DunnAI fills.

DunnAI just went live on @uneed_best. Built this alone from Okinawa. If you've ever lost a customer to a failed payment and wondered why — this is what I built. 👉 uneed.best/tool/dunnai

Built this because I got tired of watching expired cards silently churn. Stripe retries the charge. DunnAI talks to your customer.

DunnAI is now on the Stripe App Marketplace. Open any customer in Stripe → see their recovery status instantly, without leaving the Dashboard. Free until $49 is recovered. marketplace.stripe.com/apps/dunnai

Just shipped this to the Stripe App Marketplace. Took longer than expected. But here's what I learned building it: Failed payments split into exactly two types. → Timing problems (insufficient funds) Stripe retries work. Just need the right moment. → Communication problems (expired card) Retries never work. Someone has to talk to the customer. Most dunning tools treat both the same. That's why they underperform. DunnAI handles them differently. Free until $49 recovered.

@andersmarksen The agent-native angle is interesting. One friction point that shows up even in agent-facing SaaS: failed payment recovery still needs human-readable communication when a card expires or a bank declines. Agents retry. Customers need a message. Are you seeing that with postctl's billing yet?

@postctl is building for agents

build for agents ⬇️⬇️⬇️

@tomkaczocha The payment signal filter is sharp. One thing worth adding to that framework: not all failed payments are the same signal. Expired card failures are different from insufficient funds - one tells you the customer is gone, one tells you to retry. Most founders never look at that breakdown.

Stop adding features to save a struggling product. Start killing it and shipping the next one. 30 days. No payment signal. Kill it. Not 'pivot.' Not 'iterate.' Not 'maybe I need to market it better.' Kill. Start next experiment. Your attachment to this product is the thing blocking your first revenue.

@hridoyreh Stripe fees are one part. The other part most founders miss: failed payment recovery. Stripe retries some failures automatically, but expired/changed cards need a different approach entirely.

8 payment platforms and their fees: 1. Stripe: 2.9% + $0.30 2. Paddle: 5% + $0.50 3. Lemon Squeezy: 5% + $0.50 4. FastSpring: 5% - 7% 5. Dodo Payments: 4% + $0.40 6. Gumroad: 10% + $0.50 7. Polar: 4% - 6% + $0.40 8. Cream: 3.9% + $0.40 This fee is for each transaction...

Building DunnAI, I learned something uncomfortable: Stripe's decline codes tell you exactly why a payment failed. expired_card insufficient_funds do_not_honor stolen_card But almost no SaaS tool reads them. They just retry. DunnAI reads every single one — and decides what to do based on the actual reason. This is the whole product.

@nelsonpryan Manual follow-up is better than nothing, but the decline code changes what you should say. Expired card needs a different message than a bank decline. If you're curious what's actually happening across your failed renewals, I built a free diagnostic that pulls the breakdown from Stripe. Takes 5 minutes. Happy to share if you want to see the data.

@yoasoglobal Yeah we get alerts internally and then we follow up accordingly, but yeah that's probably our biggest source of payment failures.

We just crossed $6k MRR over the weekend! Still seeing steady growth driven by new user sign ups, particularly those on our new Pro plan. We continue to focus on closing feature gaps and shipping new features Progress - $6k 🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ (60%)

@FlorinPop17 Congratulations! That's wonderful! I'll do my best too!

First sale on the new app, $19 MRR! Let’s go!! 🤩 Next goal: $100 MRR

@KaiXCreator Marketing is about 100 times harder now. AI has made it possible to create amazing products all by myself. But marketing is still something I can't handle alone.

What’s harder for you as a solo-founder? - Building - Marketing

Up until the product development stage, working alone is the best option. A product created entirely by one person's soul can be superior. However, after the service launch, human effort is necessary for promotion. AI agents alone cannot yet drive sales growth. Human-to-human communication is essential in the final stages of selling.

Whats the best path in building a startup? 1. Solo-founder 2. Co-founder

@nelsonpryan That's the tricky one. The renewals fail quietly and customers don't always notice until access drops. The decline code usually tells you exactly why (expired card vs bank decline vs something else), and they need different responses. Are you doing anything with that data, or just watching it happen?

@yoasoglobal Thanks, yeah it has been awesome to see. Yeah for sure, we have noticed that, more on failed renewals though

Most SaaS founders treat all Stripe failures the same: Retry → wait → retry. That works for insufficient_funds. For expired_card, it does nothing. The card is permanently invalid. Stripe knows this. Your retry logic doesn't. getdunnai.com/blog/stripe-ex…

@tibo_maker Stripe loses on SEO but wins where it matters for multi-product founders, the failed payment data is granular enough to actually do something with. Running 5 products, do you handle dunning per-product or ignore it entirely?

🚨 latest 🚨 Lemon Squeezy beat Stripe in SEO 😱 found it with the new SEO audit tool I just built 👉 outrank.so/seo-audit see most SEO audit tools give you a tacky report and leave you stuck with jargons and numbers in red, so I built something different you can do 2 things here: 1. audit your own site get a full crawl across 8 SEO pillars - foundation, content, metadata, performance, crawl & index, media, architecture, and AI search readiness every issue is flagged, prioritized, and explained and at the bottom - one ready-to-use prompt you copy and paste straight into ChatGPT, Claude, or Cursor to fix everything 2. run an SEO battle between 2 competing sites enter your domain and a competitor's and get a head-to-head verdict, a radar chart across all 8 pillars and an exact breakdown of where you're leading, where you're trailing, and by how much 100% free - no setup, just takes a few seconds go fix your SEO 💥 (600+ websites audited in the last 24 hours btw 👀)

@kylegawley At that MRR, what are you losing monthly to failed payments? Most founders at that level are surprised when they actually look at the number.

I’m doing $43k MRR with trad code

@starter_story The $3k→$10k jump is where involuntary churn starts quietly working against you. Cards expiring, banks declining, nobody's watching it yet. Founders who make it through that range usually did so despite the leak, not because they fixed it.

Friends & family on your startup journey: $0/mo: "Wtf are you doing?" $1k/mo: "That's cute!" $3k/mo: "Why u quit your six-figure stable paycheck to make $3k/mo?" $10k/mo: "Businesses grow?" $50k/mo: "Is this legal?" $100k/mo: "You are a genius, I knew it all along" $250k/mo: "Can I pick your brain on this idea I have?"