I’m building a Bubble-based SaaS for early-stage founders.
The product is a personal AI business mentor that helps solo founders:
– get clarity on what to focus on
– break down next steps
– and avoid getting stuck or overwhelmed while building alone
Current state:
– I have registrations
– but no active users
I’m improving onboarding and messaging, but I want to sanity-check something fundamental:
From your experience, does this usually mean:
– normal early SaaS friction that takes time
– weak activation / unclear value delivery
– or a deeper issue with positioning or ICP
I’m trying to decide whether this is a case of:
– keep iterating patiently
– narrow the use case
– or seriously rethink the direction
I’m not looking for motivation or validation.
I’m trying to decide whether to double down or rethink the direction.
I’ve been working on it for 9 months, launch (after beta) for 5 months, my goal is to get the first paying subscriber within 4-5 months.
The beginning was quite lengthy, I’m still a beginner, but I’ve improved a lot and will continue to do so.
I can share more context (including what I think might be wrong). I’m grateful for any feedback.
My first thought was “another one?”. Decided to try it anyway. My suggestion is to pivot.
I’ve tried similar products, many popped up when the AI boom first started. Just like the others, there’s nothing being offered that you cannot derive from ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude.
No offense…you are seeking advise for your business from the forum, for a product that’s supposed to already do that. That proves a point already.
I thought the SaaS you built would provide that answer? If not, I’d say pivot. And I share the feeling that most AI startups just create a new UI and deliver same mediocre results the underlying LLM they use. I don’t imagine many users paying extra for a UI layer and pre programmed prompts.
I’m generally pessimistic about AI and believe it’s a waste of resources most of the time and will in 16-22 months see major drops in stock price as by then enough research will clearly show it is not worth much in most business applications.
The AI startups that can gain traction through a different UI layer compared to the LLM provider will be those whose founders have advanced expertise in the subject matter they pre programmed prompts for.
Have been in the startup world for 10 years and offered many services and products with the similar goal/idea you have but just tried different ways of delivering it.
My honest feedback also based by 10 years in the business are the following bullet points:
Building a company is all about energy and feeling. The minute you need to make things rational and sit behind a computer entering data, energy is leaking and feeling is nowhere.
People don’t necessarily want to do the correct thing, they want to have the feeling that they do the correct thing which is good even when it is actually wrong
The longer people have invested time in their decision being a purchase, a relationship, anything really, they will repeat their version of the story such that it supports their decision. No matter what. So if you have done the hard part for a year already on your startup you don’t like a tool that exactly tells you why you were wrong all that time.
People do not easily switch habits. They only do when the trigger is very clear. So your ideal customer must have a problem and already knows that your product with all that text and flows and what not is the solution. If one of these two is missing there will be no natural trigger and nothing will happen
People listen to familiar people even when they have no idea if they are capable or not. You are new, no authority. If a farmer friend tells a Saas founder to go left and your product tells it to go right, the founder will go left
What I would do:
try to find common painpoints that do not have a direct connection with the feelings of the founder. For a founder the business idea/strategy/goal is very personal. Advising in that matter requires a deep relationship which is hard to forge online. maybe you can make their process easier without telling what they should. If they use your product to make their life easier you might be able to build a relationship and trust after which you can add more on top of it.
Examples (mental model: not telling the founder what to do but help doing what the founder want):
PA for founders (making things like marketing/sales less cumbersome)
Founder mind that summarizes from many different content items actionable next steps. So founder uploads voice recording with his ideas or concerns or whatever and gets a nicely formatted actionable document or perhaps in a form that allows it to easily add to calendar, adding digital ads etc, setting reach out in crm to call people to stay in touch etc
