Solopreneurs Build AI Tools, Can't Sell Them

“I'm a paramedic in Singapore and I taught myself to build after shifts. OnTheRice (OTR) is the thing I've spent the last while on, working solo. This is how it actually works, not a pitch. The idea came from my day job. On an ambulance you don't act on a hunch - you check what's in front of you, work out what it means, then act, and you write down what you did so it can be checked later. I wanted a market and world-news tool that ran the same way, because most consumer feeds tell”

“I’ve been working on a self-hosted personal AI agent called AIDA. It runs on your own server, you bring your own API keys, and it focuses on daily workflows like: - Morning briefings - Inbox triage - Google Workspace / Microsoft 365 / Built-in RAG with citation - Creating docs & spreadsheets from chat - Telegram / WhatsApp / Discord access It’s closed source with a one-time license instead of a monthly subscription. I’m trying to figure out the right positioning for something like this. For”

“Thanks for the answer. It’s a solid automation solution. Were there any significant regulatory hurdles you had to overcome?”

“I run my own AI startup, and I've built three AI products over the past eight months, from writing the code to landing the first paying users. I did it as a solo founder.I came to AI from an unusual direction. I studied clinical medicine, then surgery, and could have become a doctor. During my PhD I turned to AI and stayed with it: I've published a fair number of papers at top AI conferences like ACL, CVPR, EMNLP, and AAAI, hold several patents, and did a postdoc at Cornell.A record like that us”

“Yes, Rivo learns from your cash flow patterns. We pull the transaction history through Plaid to build an understanding of recurring bills, autopays, payroll, even things like an insurance payment that only shows up every few months. We also account for one-off expenses and weeks where several big payments hit at once. From that, we build a rolling forecast of how much cash you’ll need over the next few weeks. It’s not just a fixed balance you set once. The harder part is everything the forecast”

“Hi guys, I'm not pitching anything, but just an informal poll. How you feel about a system that handles customer outreach for you while you do other stuff? Basically an AI receptionist, one that also calls/texts/emails them, schedules appointments, etc. Are you averse to that level of technology and prefer someone handling the calls? Or are you more open-minded and willing to give it a shot, if you aren't already? Just curious. submitted by /u/obiganiru [link] [comments”

“I tried the 1% Club AI CFO recently and thought it was pretty interesting. That got me curious about how much of the analysis could be reproduced with my own data + an LLM, so I started experimenting. It's turned into a much bigger prototype than I expected. Right now I've got things like: portfolio/MF analysis concentration analysis XIRR FIFO tax lots + LTCG harvesting FIRE projections insurance analysis cash flow analysis I've tested it against my own portfolio and it's actuall”

We’re currently working on a project: an eco-friendly / carbon-neutral AI customer support assistant that could be an alternative to tools like Chatbase, Botpress, or SiteGPT. The idea is to help SaaS…

“That's great to hear, not the struggle part but the fact that you found a solution. I'd love to hear more about that!”

Sure

“OK… That is very smart and practical advice. I'd be so grateful for a little bit of your time if you want to share your operational flow. Indeed, I I don't want to spend the next three months debugging automations and you're right, that's almost inevitably going to be happening to a greater degree than I'm imagining. I'll DM you if that's all right.”

“I am trying to build a unified system to manage both my personal life and my 2-person HVAC startup. I record long, unscripted audio dumps (business strategy with my partner, client notes, and personal to-dos). I want to feed these raw transcripts into an AI "Second Brain" so it can categorize my life: pulling out HVAC sales pitches, logging client preferences, reminding me of personal tasks. As much as possible I'd prefer to utilize systems already in place (like iOS features) to a”

“Hi everyone! I’m looking for a few early testers to try ClinixSummary.ai. and share honest feedback on the user experience. I’d especially like to know whether the interface is easy to understand, the information is presented clearly, and the overall workflow feels intuitive. Any constructive feedback on what works well or could be improved would be greatly appreciated. Thanks to anyone willing to give it a try! submitted by /u/Brief_Ambition_4085 [link] [comments]”

“Thanks, I'm building zoft. Yet to launch. We have 8 enterprise pilots using it. We just revamped the landing page, STill not fully finished. Zoft is AI that runs your company - They answer calls and chats, finish the work (book, update CRM, ticket, remind), and hand off to a human when it matters — voice, chat, workflows, and desk on one engine https://www.zoft.ai/”

“First some background: For many years I worked as a consultant implementing ERP systems in the B2B area. In nearly all these projects there was one bottleneck: transferring business requirements to the programmers. Whe…”

Okay thanks 🙏

“I work in telephony (FreJun) so take this with a pinch of salt, but the first thing I'd do is split "outbound calling, monitoring, sales cycle automation" into separate problems, because no single tool does all three well and the ones that claim to are usually a dialer with a chatbot bolted on. Monitoring (recording, transcripts, call scoring) is basically a solved feature in most cloud dialers now, so don't pay extra for an "AI call center" just to get that. For the”

“I’m building an AI voice scheduler and want some genuine feedback. Instead of manually adding things to a calendar, you just talk: “Meeting tomorrow at 10, gym at 6, and remind me to call John.” The AI understands you and automatically schedules everything. You can also speak in your own language — Nepali, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish, etc. — and schedule meetings/tasks naturally. It can remember future plans too and follow up when needed. Basically: talk for 1–2 minutes → your schedule is organized.”

“I build AI agents and kept hitting the same wall: chat was the bottleneck, not the model. WhatsApp = phone number required, bot approval bureaucracy, no group bots via official API, arbitrary bans. Telegram similar. Rolling my own chat = rebuilding encryption, sync, mobile, notifications. So I built a small open-source chat reimagined for bots (MIT): Identities are keypairs, no phone/email. Create unlimited (human or bot), manage in one app. Portable address book if provider changes. E2E encrypt”

“Just signed up, the self-hosted part is what sold me honestly. Working on a customer service agent that handles refunds so exposing PII is my nightmare scenario Curious how it handles multi-turn injection attempts, those can be sneaky”

“Hi everyone, I’m building The Scam Hotline and I’m looking for early feedback on the first thing I’m testing: a voice clone scam demo. The idea is simple: most people know AI voice cloning exists, but it doesn’t really hit until you hear how believable it can feel. I’m trying to find out if this demo makes people curious enough to keep going, and whether the next step feels useful or confusing. I’m looking for blunt feedback, especially on: Did the page make you curious enough to try it? Did the”

“I created mine for that exact reason. Let me know if you're interested in having one, its great for small businesses, especially those 1 and 2 staffed businesses.”

“Yeah, tried this recently. Set up an AI persona: a small business owner in the US, like someone running a local shop, juggling QuickBooks and customer emails, not super technical, and ran it through our onboarding flow. Caught a solid chunk of real issues; felt like about 70% of what a real tester ends up catching: confusing steps, a button that led nowhere, copy that assumed too much. Saved me time before bringing in actual people. The other 20-25% it just missed, mostly anything emotional. A r”

“I started this project to answer a fairly personal business question: can a non-technical person use current AI tools to build a useful niche website, get organic traffic, and eventually turn it into a small company? The result so far is Escapadas con Perro ( https://escapadasconperro.es ), a Spanish site for people looking for routes, beaches, restaurants and short trips they can enjoy with their dogs. The problem looked simple at first. In practice, dog-friendly information in Spain is scatter”

“Most “AI assistant” demos feel useful for 10 minutes, then die when real business context gets messy. The problem I’m building around is simpler: An owner has meetings, client promises, follow-ups, files, notes, DMs, and decisions spread everywhere. The business still runs through their memory. Meridian is meant to become the private operating memory for that person. The first version would take messy inputs like: - meeting notes - voice notes - email threads - task lists - client updates - foll”

“Summarises my emails in the morning and prioritises what is the most urgent or needs to be looked at first.”

Ok, just give me the ad now.

“All those words and you can’t even tell us what it does or show us anything interesting. Nobody cares about your life story show us the results and how it works”

“I have been coaching a team of PMs to prototype. We are B2B saas with regulated data so lovable banned and we don’t have budged for Claude code (Anthropic won’t take a phone call for a contract thats less than a million) What I have notice when the team prompt they jump into the WHAT, not start with the WHY. The PMs enter poorly define prompts and then get frustrated by the results, like they forget product fundamentals when using AI…. The outcome is more tokens burned without coming close to a”

“If research is part of the role, define what “research” means. A spreadsheet of links? A one-page recommendation? Prices checked? Sources verified? Competitors compared? People can spend four hours researching and still deliver something completely unusable if the output isn’t defined.”

“Hi. Not really, but I moved on from the idea a bit. The concept was for a business owner to self-identify the automation opportunity in his company. Turns out that gathering all the data and mapping out the process might be too much to ask for. So the new pivot/service is that I do this myself for the SMB before proposing the automation solution. What do you have in mind?”

“I built 1Dial because LLMs have become great at telling you what to do, but I still find myself making calls, waiting on hold, finding appointments, getting quotes, etc.With 1Dial, you call or text one number and tell it what you need. It can search, call businesses, follow up and coordinate the task.We've processed about 100+ tasks in our early beta so far. 81% were completed better than what a human would have done.You can try it at 1-844-440-3463 (Call or Text).Would particularly love feedbac”

“I'm a founder of a Voice AI and CRM platform. I can probably answer this. Don't let prompts dictate what it can and cant do. Fine tune your tools. Use dynamic variable based controls that tie into a dashboard. And its sent on every new call, fetched from your backend. Your policies you change will be immediate on the next call. Every service and its prices, duration, description is not sent through a prompt, but fetched using a tool during calls. Every appointment duration is never based”

AI-powered automatic chat organization into Projects

“I'm Faheem, a paramedic in Singapore. I taught myself to build over the last couple of years, mostly at night after shifts, and OnTheRice (OTR) is the project I keep coming back to. It's a solo build. The idea came out of how I work in medicine: you check the evidence, understand the situation, then act. You don't act first and justify it later. I wanted a market and news tool that behaves the same way instead of just sounding confident. How it actually works: It reads the world earl”

“Hi everyone, I’m a Canadian entrepreneur building RoboStead, a bilingual English/French comparison and decision platform for autonomous home products. It isn’t only a robot-vacuum selector. The broader goal is to help people choose across different home-automation and pet-care categories — including robot vacuums, automatic litter boxes and other autonomous household devices — based on their real situation instead of a generic “best products” list. The recommendation flow considers practical det”

“actual question first: from the moment you log in, how long before it does something that makes you go oh ok, I think it should be under five minutes, but I've been looking at this thing every day for months so I have no idea anymore. what it does: you give it a job in plain words, or forward it an email. It goes off and does the thing, comes back with the work and the sources it used. It writes what it learns into a notebook. That notebook is also its memory, so it gets better at your stuff”

“I have been selling and building SaaS products for few years now, last month I sat down and built a system that is cutting down 40% of work for realtors across globe and has increased their sales 20% within a month. Just curios to know the thoughts of community and see what else I can do with SaaS submitted by /u/Pretty-Ad3400 [link] [comments]”

“Great idea, never heard of such solutions before. What was your market / user research like? How did you validate the idea that convinced you to go ahead and build? How long did you wait / what ARR or volume of users did you wait before you went and asked for investment?”

“I spent about a year building website chatbots for local clients - salons, a dental practice, two repair shops, a driving school. Same job, eleven times. What was actually true turned out to be pretty different from what I assumed going in. Nobody wanted "AI conversation." Every client wanted six to ten questions answered correctly (hours, price range, parking, walk-ins, do you do X) and then a name and a phone number captured. Open-ended chat was a liability - it invented prices twice”

“Yeah, that makes sense. Heard there are some AI tools/apps that can handle or reply to customer inquiries when you’re not available. Have you ever tried any of them? Wondering if they’re actually useful in practice.”

“That’s a really good point. I hadn’t thought about the migration risk being a bigger barrier than the competition itself. Starting with after-hours overflow and integrating with the tools they already use sounds much easier to sell. I’ll definitely consider this as the entry point instead of asking businesses to replace their existing setup.”

“That’s actually really useful, especially coming from someone who has built a similar product. I agree the market is crowded, so I’m trying to understand where the real gaps are rather than just building another chatbot. The customer engagement suite direction is interesting too. Appreciate you sharing your experience!”

“Really appreciate this perspective. I especially agree that the handoff and reliable state are more important than simply having more AI features. The idea of starting with one narrow workflow and measuring real business outcomes makes a lot of sense. I’ll definitely take this approach before building out the full platform.”

“Looking for a few people to genuinely test a receipt and warranty tracking app I’m building DigiWarranty, an app that lets you photograph a receipt and automatically turns it into structured purchase, product and warranty records. The idea is simple: instead of keeping paper receipts for years and trying to find them only when something breaks, you keep everything in one place and can search for the product later. The app is already live on iOS and Android, but I’m still actively improving it an”

“Spent the last month figuring out how much of freelance work is actually the service vs. the overhead around it. For me it came out to roughly 30-40% overhead — research, outreach, proposals, admin — none of it billable. The useful realization: those overhead stages are exactly the ones AI handles well, because they're repeatable. The delivery/creative part is where it still falls apart. The 4-stage split I landed on: Research — feed it a niche + ideal client, have it pull pain points and ta”

“This is a great experiment and you should socialize your findings. While AI can streamline operational like you mentioned, funneling issues, highlighting them, creating stories etc, you still need that human element in this function. You pointed out the gap on prioritization, but other area of this function is stakeholder alignment where automation won't work. You also mentioned reviewing user session but, that may give only 50% of the context without talking to the users. In many cases, use”

“If ever interested, I am building something that should help bank recs if you want to test for free”

“Migration risk will kill this before competition does. If a company already has a help desk and business number, replacing both before proving value is a brutal first sale. Start as an after-hours overflow lane: take missed calls, write the transcript and booked outcome into their current help desk, and let them disable it with one toggle. All-in-one can be the destination. It's a terrible onboarding requirement.”

“Stage: beta. Free. First edition sends as soon as you subscribe, then every Thursday. What it is: you tell it your job. It reads the AI week against that job and sends 4–7 items: what changed, why it matters for you, one thing to try. Two people at the same company get different newsletters. Who I need: not AI engineers. Recruiters, finance, ops, plant, marketing, HR. Anyone who is drowning in AI news that is not for them, or they don't know how does this apply to their actual job. What I ne”

“Built this solo over about 5 weeks. I'm a working bookkeeper, not a full-time dev — I got tired of manually prospecting for clients and built the tool I wished existed: an AI-assisted outreach pipeline that finds leads, drafts personalized emails, and manages the sequence, instead of me doing it by hand every night after client work. Stack: Next.js 14, TypeScript, Tailwind, Supabase (Postgres + auth), Microsoft Graph API for sending/tracking through a real Outlook/365 mailbox instead of a bu”

“Also a no from me. I just don't see the point? For me, AI should be taking time intensive low value tasks away so I can focus on the high value ones. Freeing up my time to focus on having discussions and collaborating with stakeholders is the main draw of AI to the world of PM, in my view. I'd be attending the meeting anyway so it's not freeing my time. I would be asking more pertinent and relevant questions anyway so it's not improving the quality of output. It might even distra”

“Neither do I haha, this for me is just a thought experiment because I stumbled into tools like this today and I’m gauging what this brains trust thinks. Appreciate the insight!”

“Immediate conversational context. If it exists in a project with project context, plus the live conversation and business understanding— it could immediately action, follow-up and manage in my mind. I’m just exploring ways to make my life a bit easier as a one person team spread across 9 projects and managing a program.”

“How is that different than using my own Claude in a call? I do that all the time.”

“Interesting and makes sense when you put it that way. What if it were to serve as an inquiry engine? Ie you’re in the call and you have questions about upstream and downstream impacts and teams it should influence within the project? Ie specifically supporting when prompted, but contributing on command, with the context of what’s discussed in the meeting plus whatever is built in as business context on the backend?”

“I would say it could be an interesting and useful tool, given: * The agent's contributions during the meeting would be clearly structured, i.e. only when prompted whether it has any questions, or clearly structured into the meeting agenda (i.e. agent has 2 minutes to throw up questions during rhe 30-minute mark). I wouldn't want the agent interrupting ad-hoc, can't see how that would reliably work. Potentially working alongside/incorporated in Meeting Facilitator. * The agent probabl”

“What do you mean? Like people getting distracted and just wasting the agents time?”