SaaS founders share what they'd do differently from day one
Founders in the r/SaaS community answered what they'd change if they could restart their SaaS journey. The most common regret: building before validating that real customers would actually pay. Starting marketing too late was another widely shared mistake.
Many founders described diving straight into development, only to discover months later that no one wanted the product. The top advice was to find paying customers before writing serious code — even a simple landing page or waitlist can reveal whether demand exists. Other recurring lessons included: targeting too broad an audience instead of a tight niche, neglecting SEO and content marketing until long after launch, and setting prices too low at the start (making it hard to raise them later). Burnout from trying to do everything alone was also a common theme, with many wishing they had delegated or partnered earlier.
Key points
- Validate that people will pay before building — a landing page test costs almost nothing
- Ship an MVP fast and let real-world feedback guide what to build next
- Start SEO and content marketing on day one, not after launch
- Pick a narrow, specific niche — competing everywhere at once rarely works
- Don't underprice early; it's much harder to raise prices on existing customers
Quick term guide
- founders
- People who are starting or running their own business or project.
- founder
- A person who starts a new company or project.
- r/SaaS
- A Reddit community where people discuss software subscription businesses.
- landing page
- The first page a visitor sees after clicking an ad, link, or campaign message.
- waitlist
- A list of people who sign up to be notified when a product becomes available, collected before launch
- content marketing
- A strategy where you regularly publish useful articles, posts, or videos to attract potential customers over time.
- Content
- Information or experiences, like articles or videos, provided through digital media.
- feedback
- A response that tells a user what they did well or should fix.