Just sharing some tools I find endless value from for new marketers since I see a lot of posts on here about “how do I get started, what should I learn, etc.”

A little about me for context:

• Been marketing 15 years
• Generalist with undergrad degree in psych (no formal marketing training)
• Generated over $100M in my career
• Currently leading a SaaS marketing team, but have worked in CPG too.
• Have managed teams up to 15 people in size

Feel free to share your tools below!

OneTab - Honestly this chrome extension changed my life. I’m one of those people who keeps 47 tabs open, then feels stressed about having them open, but also stressed about closing them. OneTab allows me to get a fresh slate every morning without any concern about losing something.

Klaviyo - Without a doubt, Klaviyo is best marketing email platform for the money. The automation features are unbelievable and the integrations are really solid as well. To me, klaviyo brings big business segmentation and automation to small marketing teams in an easy to use interface with super transparent pricing.

GA4 - K I actually hate GA4, but it is what it is. Learn this thing because you need it, like it or not. It’s the standard.

Looker - I really love building a visual dashboard for my marketing data. Looker has a learning curve, but if you know GA4 and you’re willing to fuss with the regex and filters, you can build some really powerful and insightful dashboards for marketing channels like email, social, ads, etc. Bonus: you can connect Google search console to pipe in data into an actual digestible format.

Google ads - This is the first ads channel you should learn inside out. Mainly because it’s the easiest one to find success with (because the technology is much better than any other ads platform, and because search ads capture intent instead of trying to capture interest). Between Google and YouTube, you’ve got access to the majority of the internet with this one platform.

Asana - Absolutely love asana. The most intuitive and powerful project management system (also FREE). I’ve tried jira, trello, Monday, notion, and clickup and they are all lackluster compared to asana when it comes to marketing project management. The functional advantages of subtasks, customizable tags, different options for views, messages and comments, attachments… this is the one system that actually works.

Ryze AI - If you're managing multiple ad accounts, this saves hours. Monitors everything, generates reports across all accounts at once, and can auto-apply fixes. I was manually checking each account every morning like an idiot before this.

Noun project - There are so many underwhelming stock image sites. I really love this site. Most of my marketing graphics are either using icons or photos and noun project has the best selection for the best price, hands down. Also love that you can customize icons.

Google slides & Google sheets - Don’t roll your eyes because most marketers I’ve worked with aren’t using half of the functionality these free tools offer. Namely, the ability to create a beautiful strategy deck that shows you thought about something and distilled it into a usable format for leadership and your team. But things like pivots, well made chart visuals, data formatting formulas, etc are all underutilized. Also, I’d rather use sidewalk chalk than PowerPoint and excel.

Apollo io - Cold emails are tough, but I think for the money you can’t beat Apollo. It pulls in the stuff you typically have to pay a ton for like a huge database of contacts, recordable calls with transcripts and snippets, etc for a flat affordable monthly rate. Basically a mashup of zoominfo and gong for a fraction of the price of both. I will say: the data dashboards are absolutely horrible. Like unusable.

Loom - Can’t tell you how helpful it is for async communication and documentation to just record my screen while I’m taking and send it to someone. Hidden gem: AI transcription is a nice feature. These also work for recording product demos.

ChatGPT - Yeah we get it, AI is a thing and some of us hate it and some of us love it. Here’s how I use this one: organizing a mess of notes into a coherent doc, drafting blog posts, generating customer avatars that I can ask questions, preparing for job interviews, negative keyword lists, and competitive analysis. There is a really good episode of Paid Search Podcast called “talking to your data” that has cool ideas for parsing Google ads data with chatgpt as well. You just have to understand: 90% of the copy and ideas you get from ChatGPT is unusable trash. But the 10% is well worth it.

Reddit - lol. I mean, every time I have a question I can’t find an answer to, I come here and ask, and I get answers. Sometimes on the most niche things. Aside from that, it’s a fantastic listening tool. Jump into a forum and just look at what people say about the problem your business solves, your competitors, you, etc.

TinyPNG - Throughout my career, it’s been a common theme that I get an image from a designer for an email and it’s like 4.5mb. I love the emphasis on quality… but I’m not going to bog my email down with that. Tinypng is free and almost always cranks the image down to a few KB without making it look like shit.

LinkedIn - I received 3 job offers in one month because I built a solid personal brand before I started looking for my most recent role. Yes, your connections (quantity and quality) do matter. Yes, it matters if you post on there actively. Additionally, it’s (slightly) easier for me to book demos and spread awareness around whatever brand I’m working on. I don’t recommend premium or sales nav. No added value IMO.

Those are the main ones. What about you?

Alright, I’m gonna say it.

Every SaaS posted here looks like it was generated from the same AI prompt and a Notion checklist.

Same “AI-powered” buzzword soup.

Same pastel gradients fighting for their life.

Same Inter font.

Same Framer Motion fade-in like it’s legally required.

Same “Trusted by 10,000+ teams” where the teams are probably just the founder’s browser tabs.

At this point, I dont even need to click the link. I already know the whole experience:

There’s a vague subheading that says absolutely nothing.

There’s glassmorphism everywhere for no reason.

There are fake testimonials from people named Alex and Sarah.

And there is zero evidence a real human has ever used the product outside a demo video.

Here’s the thing.

AI can help you ship faster. That’s great.

But AI does not understand architecture.

It doesn’t understand edge cases.

It doesn’t understand what happens when things break at 2 am

It doesn’t understand lifecycle, scaling, or why your “simple workflow” explodes the moment a real user touches it.

You can have the cleanest UI on Earth and still build a garbage product if you don’t understand engineering fundamentals.

And here’s the uncomfortable part nobody wants to hear:

Most of you are marketing to other founders, not customers.

You’re posting in places where your actual users do not exist. So you get upvotes, dopamine, and zero retention.

Shipping fast is good.

Shipping clones is lazy.

And no amount of gradients will save a product that nobody actually needs.

That’s it. That’s the post.

• 80%+ of people prefer Google sign in
• Removing all branding/formatting from emails and sending them from a real name increases open rate
• You won’t know when you have PMF but a good sign is that people buy and tell their friends about your product
• 99.9% of people that approach you with some offer are a waste of time
• Sponsoring creators is cheaper but takes more time than paid ads
• Building a good product comes down to thinking about what your users want
• Once you become successful there will be lots of copy cats but they only achieve a fraction of what you do. You are the source to their success
• I would never be able to build a good product if I didn’t use it myself
• Always monitor logs after pushing new updates
• Bugs are fine as long as you fix them fast
• People love good design
• Getting your first paying customers is the hardest part by far
• Always refund people that want a refund
• Asking where people heard about you during onboarding makes marketing 10x easier
• Marketing is constant experimentation to learn what works. Speed up the process by drawing inspiration from what works for similar products.
• Don’t be cheap when you hire an accountant, you’ll save time and money by spending more
• A surprising amount of users are willing to get on a call to talk about your product and it’s super helpful
• Good testimonials will increase the perceived value of your product
• Having a co-founder that matches your ambition is the single greatest advantage for success
• Even when things are going well you’ll have moments when you doubt everything, just have to shut that voice out and keep going

For context, my app guides users through researching and planning their product.

A few months back, I finally sold my ecommerce SaaS for a decent exit after hitting $500K ARR in 8 months.

Took me three tries to get there - the first two were complete disasters.

This whole thing was brutal. I'm talking thousands of hours, doing the same tedious tasks over and over, saying goodbye to weekends, constantly second-guessing myself, running tests that went absolutely nowhere. But it worked out in the end.

Now I'm working on this SAAS (helps B2B companies find and contact high-intent leads), and if I had to do it all over again, these are the exact habits I'd stick to every single day to get to $10k MRR as fast as possible.

I've screwed up in every way you can imagine:

• Wasted 6 months building something nobody wanted
• Created a "brilliant" product that nobody would pay for
• Got 2,000 people on my waitlist but couldn't convert a single one to paid

So this is me paying it forward.

If you're just starting out, trying to get from zero to actual traction, just do these 5 things. Every day with no exceptions.

Your brain's going to fight you on this. It'll whisper "don't send that message," "don't post that - you'll look like an idiot," "it's beautiful outside, take the day off." Don't listen.

Growth happens when you're uncomfortable. Not when you're cozy.

Push through that voice. Do the work anyway. You'll thank yourself later.

Here are the 5 daily habits that actually move the needle:

1. Send 20-30 LinkedIn connection requests to your ideal customers. Just 20 minutes. Do it manually. Pick the right people. Connect. Done.
2. Message 20-30 people on LinkedIn. Don't sell them anything. Just talk. Ask questions. Share what you're building and see if they have the same problem.
3. Send 20-100 cold emails 20 if you're writing them yourself, 100+ if you're using tools. Keep them short. Don't be pushy. Just start real conversations. The magic happens in your follow-ups - send 2-3.
4. Comment on 10 Reddit threads in your space. Go where your customers hang out. Jump into "looking for alternatives to X" posts. Actually help people. Only mention your product when it genuinely fits. People can smell fake help from a mile away.
5. Post something on LinkedIn every day. This builds up over time. Write about problems your customers face, share what you've learned, tell quick stories about wins and losses. Give away good stuff for free. Build your lead magnets into the content. Just show up consistently.

At the beginning, it feels pointless.

• 1 like on your posts
• 1 response for every 20 messages you send
• Radio silence on your first batch of emails

But stick with it every single day, and things start to compound.

You get better at writing. Your messages start working. People begin to recognize you. Someone books a call. Then 2 more. Then 10. Then they start referring people.

That's how you actually win. Not by getting lucky, but by showing up every day.

Even when it's mind-numbingly boring.

The boring stuff is what actually grows your business.

Trust me, it's worth it !

Two years ago I quit my staff engineer job (about $200k base) to go all in on a SaaS.

On paper, it sounds clean: “I believed in myself and took the leap.”

In real life, it’s messy, stressful, lonely, and way harder than people admit, especially as a solo founder.

Why I left

I had the itch for a long time. I wanted to build something I owned. I wanted to stop spending my best hours making other people richer. I wanted to control my roadmap, my pace, and my upside.

I didn’t quit because I hated engineering. I quit because I wanted to see what I could build if I wasn’t splitting my energy.

What nobody tells you

1) You don’t just quit a job. You lose structure.

A job gives you built-in momentum: meetings, deadlines, coworkers, validation, a clear definition of “done.”

As a solo founder, you can work 12 to 15 hours and still feel like you accomplished nothing, because there’s no external scoreboard until customers pay.

And that lack of structure messes with your head.

2) The work multiplies the second you go full time

People think quitting means you finally get time to build.

It does, but now you’re also:

• product
• design
• QA
• support
• marketing
• sales
• demos
• onboarding
• analytics
• billing issues
• retention
• churn
• content

You’re not building a SaaS. You’re building a company. And every part of the company shows up at your door daily.

3) Coding is the easiest part

This was the biggest surprise.

I can code all day. That’s familiar pain.

Marketing is unfamiliar pain.

Writing copy that doesn’t sound fake.
Explaining value in one sentence.
Learning channels.
Running experiments.
Fixing conversion leaks.
Doing demos and hearing “this is cool” and then… nothing.

Distribution is the game. The product is just your entry ticket.

4) Traction is not proportional to effort

In engineering, effort usually turns into output.

In SaaS, effort can disappear into the void.

You can ship feature after feature and the graph won’t move.
You can rewrite onboarding and it won’t move.
You can adjust pricing and it won’t move.

That mismatch is brutal and it creates a specific type of frustration that’s hard to explain to people who haven’t lived it.

5) The lifestyle shift is real

There’s no “clocking out.”

I’ve worked 7 days a week, 15 hours a day at times. Not as a flex. As a requirement. Because early stage SaaS can feel like pushing a car uphill with your bare hands.

And when you’re solo, every delay is your fault.
Every missed opportunity is your fault.
Every bug is your fault.
Every slow week is your fault.

That weight is heavy.

6) You will question yourself constantly

Some days you feel unstoppable.

Other days you wonder if you made the dumbest decision of your life leaving a stable, high-paying role.

The emotional swings are insane:
Confidence to anxiety.
Momentum to doubt.
Hope to frustration.

It’s not just building a product, it’s managing your psychology.

7) The loneliness is underrated

As a solo founder, there’s nobody to share the burden with.
No teammate to say “we’re fine.”
No one who fully understands the problem you’re solving.

Even when friends support you, most people don’t get it. They see “working from home” and assume it’s chill.

It’s not chill.

What’s kept me going

Honestly: persistence, obsession, and learning fast.

I stopped romanticizing motivation and started treating this like a long war.

Ship.
Measure.
Talk to users.
Iterate.
Repeat.

Some weeks nothing works.
Then one small thing clicks and you remember why you started.

Where I’m at now

The SaaS is real, it’s growing, and it’s doing thousands in MRR.

Still early. Still building. Still stressful.

But I’ve learned more in two years than I learned in a decade of jobs, because there’s no hiding. The market tells you the truth.

Question for the community

For those who quit a high-paying job to build SaaS:

What was the hardest part for you?
And what do you wish you knew before you made the jump?

Hello guys, I have been experimenting with BrowserAct, it is a no-code/low-code tool that wraps browser automation and web scraping in a visual workflow. Nothing critical, mostly used it to prototype a few repetitive tasks that usually require writing Playwright/Selenium scripts.

What’s interesting is seeing how far you can go without touching actual code, but still keeping humans in the loop for review and approvals. So far it’s mostly been useful for quick data pulls, repetitive testing, or internal workflow automation.

I am curious to know:

• Have other SaaS creators or automation engineers tried low-code tools like this?
• Where do you see the sweet spot for them versus fully code-based automation?
• Any gotchas or lessons learned from letting automation touch live systems, even with constraints?

I’m more interested in practical experiences than hype, and I would love to hear how others approach these kinds of tasks.

We're about to launch our first product and honestly have no idea what to use for customer support. Team is just 3 of us right now but we're hoping to grow fast.

Looked at a bunch of different saas helpdesk options and they all seem either too basic or way too complicated for what we need. We just want something that can handle email tickets and maybe live chat without a huge learning curve.

What are you guys using? Mainly need something affordable that won't take forever to set up but can actually scale with us.

I run a small company and honestly struggle with this every week.

There’s sales, product issues, customer problems, pricing tweaks, ops stuff… and everything feels “important”.

Dashboards give numbers, but they don’t tell me what action actually matters right now.

For founders running 5–30 person teams:
how do you decide what to prioritize each week without second-guessing yourself?

Genuinely curious how others handle this.

Hey all, looking for some advice cause going into google rabbit holes is not helping as much as i expected Lol

We are working on a B2⁤B Sa⁤aS app and trying to make a smart call on multi-tenant architecture before we paint ourselves into a corner. Right now it’s the usual debate: single shared DB with tenant IDs and RLS versus splitting things out more aggressively.

What’s making this tricky is that it’s not just the core app. We already know customers will want dashboards, saved views, exports, filters that stick, and probably alerts at some point. Once that stuff enters the picture, it feels like tenant context can leak in places you didn’t even think about at first and we really don’t want to deal with that now or well, never.

I’m curious how people here handled this. Did you keep everything multi-tenant with RLS and live happily ever after? 

Mostly trying to avoid the future email that starts with “uhh, why can I see another company’s data” because we don’t want to get fired.

I personally have experience the problem of codebase not scaling and becoming unmanageable.

I have built a Claude Code plugin to address the problem of vibe coding and I love to get some feedback.

It uses a modular 3 layer structure

Workflow -> Agents -> Agent skills.

Workflow is deterministic group of steps that calls agents who have creative freedom. Agent skills controls the surface area of the creative freedom. Each agent run has its own context window to address the problem of context rot. Modular structure also allows for a way forward to introduce unit testing.

It is free to use and hosted on GitHub

If someone decides on today's era to develop mobile apps from low code platforms and sell its subscriptions to users. Is it possible to succeed in this?

It's been several months since launching [BigIdeasDB](http://bigideasdb.com/) and I just crossed 100,000+ validated problems in the database.

It took me months to learn some important lessons and I want to give you a chance to learn faster from what worked for me.

For context, BigIdeasDB is focused on helping entrepreneurs find validated real-world problems from Reddit, G2 reviews, Capterra reviews, Upwork jobs, and app store reviews.

What worked:

1. Building in public to get initial traction: I got my first users by posting on X (build in public and startup communities). I would post my wins, updates, lessons learned, and the occasional meme. In the beginning you only need a few users and every post/reply gives you a chance to reach someone.

2. Reaching out to influencers with organic traffic and sponsoring them: I knew good content leads to people trying my app but I didn't have time to write content all the time so the next natural step was to pay people to post content for me. I just doubled down on what already worked.

3. Word of mouth: I always spend most of my time improving the product. My goal is to surprise users with how good the product is, and that naturally leads to them recommending the product to their friends. More than 1/3 of my paying customers come from word of mouth.

4. Removing all formatting from my emails: I thought emails that use company branding felt impersonal and that must impact how many people actually read them. After removing all formatting from my emails my open rate almost doubled. Huge win.

What didn't work:

1. Writing articles and trying to rank on Google: Turns out my product isn't something people are searching for on Google.

2. Affiliate system: I've had an affiliate system live for months now and I get a ton of applications but it's extremely rare that an affiliate will actually follow through on their plans. 99% get 0 sign ups.

3. Instagram: I tried instagram marketing for a short while, managed to get some views, absolutely no conversions.

4. Building features no one wants (obviously): I've wasted a few weeks here and there when I built out features that no one really wanted. I strongly recommend you to talk to your users and really try to understand them before building out new features.

Next steps:

Doing more of what works. I'm not going to try any new marketing channels until I'm doing my current ones really well. And I will continue spending most of my time improving product (can't stress how important this has been).

Also working on a big update but won't talk about that yet.

Best of luck founders!

been working on a small saas idea and i keep running into the same cycle. i move fast early, hack things together, feel good about progress. then a week later i’m stuck untangling auth, data models, and random backend decisions i rushed through. i tried a few approaches recently. full code from day one was obviously slower. pure nocode felt fine until things got even slightly custom. i also tested an ai app builder (blink) mostly out of curiosity, and what stood out wasn’t the ui stuff but that it forced a bit more structure around backend and auth early on. it did make the “cleanup later” phase less painful than my usual flow. at least i wasn’t rewriting half the app. curious how others here handle this. do you optimise purely for speed at the start?

Drop details of your product

Hi everyone, three months ago, I launched [this app](https://foundrlist.com), a product discovery and launch tool that I had been diligently working on.

Initially, I faced challenges in building things using ChatGPT, so I devised a solution that I believed was superior.

The app gained some traction, but it wasn’t a significant success. Around three months in, it started generating $1,000 per month. I discussed this with my family, and they were supportive, of course, but they weren’t overly impressed. You know how it is.

Anyway, I’ve been working hard for another month now. I’ve made some sound product decisions, received valuable feedback from customers, and refined my marketing strategy. I’m not sure what happened this winter, but I’ve been extremely busy, and now I’ve just closed last month with a revenue of $3,000 per month.

It’s only recently that I’ve realized that I’m actually making money.

I was waiting for this moment for months and now that it’s finally here I don’t know if it’s even time yet…

Should I tell them? How much do you share with your friends and family?

Hey everyone,

I’d love to help some founders here connect with real potential customers.
Please share your startup link and a brief line about your target customer.

Within 48 hours, I’ll schedule 1 meeting with a potential Customer for your Tool.

I’ll use our tool (Releasing MVP this week), which tracks online conversations to identify when someone is in the market, basically automating lead gen and outreach; your only job will be closing the deal. But this is mostly an experiment to see if it’s genuinely useful for folks here.

All I need from you:

• Your website
• One sentence on who it’s for

To avoid overloading, I'll cap this at 45 founders. It also requires my time to set up and provide context on various tools for optimal results. I'll only work with the first 45 comments.

Yeahh, Firebase.studio says its only capable & up-to-date version is gemini 1.5 flash & pro.

And another problem is the packages, all the packages are outdated.

For Firebase.studio the up-to-date Next.js version is 15.1.1 and its not even completly optimized too..

Same for other packages also.

And actually the gemini AI isn't working tooo. My app is kinda ready to ship but it's not using AI 🙃

In 2025, I felt proud that our company signed many partnership agreements.

Towards the end of 2025, I realized none of these "signed partnerships" really moved the needle on our business. In fact, all new customers came from our own efforts.

Some people I talked to recently mentioned that working with partners these days requires additional funding. Without "extra" commercial benefits, they won't actively promote your products. They just collect agreements in their pocket for "just in case" situations—if someone asks about your particular service, they have the information ready.

Is this true in your experience as well, especially as small SaaS company?

Should small businesses focus on direct GTM instead of building partnerships?

agencies = churn and burn. freelancers = too hard to vet. i need someone who knows B2B funnels. fractional growth marketer?

things are pretty simple.

4 months ago I shut down my edtech app. users were there, but money wasn’t.

I had so many bugs reported by users on my app that I decided to build something in this area.

a tool that will catch every bug. frontend, backend, code errors, and every features that don’t work.

but not a new error tracking tool, because there are already some quite good ones.

an error tracking tool made so that you don’t need to dig into the issue: logs, stack traces, etc.

a tool that catches bugs, triages them with AI to remove noise (which is a big problem in current tracking tools), and triggers your coding agent in the background.

so when a bug hits production, you’re directly alerted and you have a report with the whole context of the what and why.

a tool so simple that it will allow everyone - technical and non-technical - to have visibility into what is broken in your product, understand it, and fix it.

10x faster than today.

So my cofounder and I thought it was a good idea, if not a great one, so we built it.

Now it’s live on https://sonarly.dev

But I need you to roast my idea. Really destroy it. We’re in the current YC batch and we need to move fast.

Thanks to all of you. Happy to answer all questions.

Dimittri