Studying CS from when I was in 5th grade I had a dream to be a startup founder and to proudly tell people about a cool app that I made. Simply put, my innocent ass wanted to be the next Pakistani Zuckerberg. But little did I realised the amount of hard work that goes into just creating something that is functional and helpful, and then crying a river on how you got no visibility.
I started building Ideafloww[1] from end of dec 2024. I was actually looking for more affordable alternatives to a good LinkedIn post generator (since I was posting a lot on the platform at that point) but couldn't find one that was
a) affordable
b) does not make me sound like a robot.
Till that point I was so fed up using chatgpt and prompting it multiples times with prompts that were the size of a book. One of the biggest problem was that I only knew python and my mind was stuck on the madeup fact that python isn't for "SaaS" apps.
I started using bolt when it came out. I used it to create a UI from a sketch I made. It was good but it was not functional. Also writing backend code was also not easy. But then I made some mistake and lost the bolt project.
What could I have done? I started over again, just to find myself crying at 3am bc cursor composer has changed my whole SaaS project A-Z to fix some kind of bug it thought my app had. I lost it at that point wanting to smash my laptop screen.
Somehow, I still managed to find enough courage and motivation to start again since I also wanted to have some kind of SaaS app on my resume/college essay(Harvard or stanford maybe, in future) to flex.
So this time we made it!! The app was ready. The endless nights I spent learning how to code a SaaS app, how to fine-tune AI models and all that, everything paid off. I reached out to few connections on LinkedIn to ask them to test it out only to get ghosted by them.
But then a very beautiful accident happened. I posted on hackernews about it and I got some visitors like about 1000 something. But then, some paid and very expensive directory had listed me on their website (ofc as a way to convert me for paid feature) but still to this point that site[2] has brought us 95% of the traffic and ofc these 300 users.
I haven't made any money from it yet but having an app with 300 users, given that I have failed in building a "startup" 2 times before, this was a big win for me.
I know this subreddit has a lot of people who might have made it in life. So I am in search of some advice. I have my AS level exams in about 60 days. How do I manage the marketing of this SaaS and my college exams??
[1] https://www.ideafloww.com [2] https://theresanaiforthat.com/