A Forum for Marketers

nothing to add!

nothing to add!

You don’t have to be a genius. You just need to be consistent and scrappy. Here’s a straight-up way to get your first 100 users: • Put your product everywhere. Launch on sites like Product Hunt, Uneed, Microlaunch, DevHunt, BetaList, Peerlist, AppSumo, Indie Hackers, Dailypings. If it lets you submit, then get your product listed. • Show up on socials like it’s your job. One post won’t cut it. Show up for 100 days straight. Study what’s working, copy the style, tweak it, and keep going. • Spy on your competitors. Look at where they’ve listed their product. Submit yours to those same spots. Do it manually or use a tool, just don’t skip this. • Run paid ads. Test out small budgets on X, reddit, Google, Facebook. Once you’ve optimized it, let them run. • Cold outreach works. DM or reply to potential users. Keep it real. Keep it short. One sentence is enough if it’s clear and helpful. Avoid spam. This is how you grow. Do the work, stay consistent, and the users will come. First 100, then 1000. Keep showing up by: PhysicsWeary310 -reddit(r/saas)

Ruurtjan built a free DNS lookup tool in 2020. No team. No funding. No ads. Just a cleaner version of something devs already Googled every day. Today it makes $4K–$5K/month, enough to replace a full salary. → Found a keyword devs already searched. Built the best tool for it. → Saw competitors and thought thriving in that space and knew it's a tool that's in demand. → Let SEO compound quietly for years. 500K+ monthly users. → Monetized with ads, sponsorships, then a DNS course. → Never chased virality. Just stayed useful. I already know what some of you are thinking "But you can just check DNS in dev tools for free…" And that's exactly why you're still stuck. Most people don't know the technicalities. They don't want to. They just want something fast, clean, and simple. That gap between "it exists" and "normal people can use it easily" is where the money lives. While you're dismissing boring ideas, smart founders are quietly printing $5K/month from a DNS tool, a PDF compressor, a unit converter. Meanwhile, most people are on their 10th AI startup in 2 years with little to nothing to show for it. The boring niche isn't beneath you. It might just save you.

Stripe just hit a $159 billion valuation — up 74% from $91.5 billion just one year ago. Every year, Patrick and John Collison run a secondary tender offer letting employees cash out, and every year, the number gets bigger. This time, Thrive Capital, Coatue, a16z, and Stripe itself were the buyers. The big story behind the number though? Stablecoins. Global stablecoin payment volume doubled to $400 billion in 2025, with 60% of that coming from B2B payments alone. Stripe saw this wave coming early — they acquired crypto wallet Privy, launched their own blockchain called Tempo, and their stablecoin platform Bridge more than quadrupled in volume. Still private. Still growing. Still printing.

Most startups don’t blow up because of one dramatic mistake. They quietly bleed out from boring, predictable problems: nobody really wants the product, the cash runs out, the business model never adds up, the team fights, or they scale way too early. Here’s the spine of the whole thing: - Start with a real problem, not a clever idea. Talk to a ridiculous number of customers before you touch code. If people aren’t chasing you or paying you, you don’t have it yet. - Treat cash like oxygen. Know your runway in months, every week. Spend behind proof (revenue, retention), not behind hope. - Design a business, not just a product. Decide who pays, how much, and why it’s obviously worth it to them. If your unit economics suck at small scale, they’ll be worse at big scale. - Obsess over the team. Complementary co‑founders, clear roles, written agreements. Hire slowly, fire kindly but fast when it’s clearly not working. - Don’t get seduced by “growth”. Nail one narrow wedge of the market, for one tight customer, via one main channel. Only then earn the right to scale. - Protect focus and energy. One core problem, one main metric, one plan for the next 90 days. Say no to almost everything else so you don’t burn out doing busywork. If you bake these habits into how you work, you won’t guarantee a win — but you massively reduce the chances of dying from the same obvious causes as everyone else.

We wrote a post on how doola.com scaled to $1M/month in revenue. Give it a read

Spent a week analyzing marketing strategies of 15 startups earning $10k+/month—and how they scored their first customers. Result: A 42-page Google Doc packed with insights to supercharge your own growth. https://marketingcrafted.com/how-15-real-startups-hit-10k-month