Solopreneurs Build AI Tools, Can't Sell Them
Independent creators are investing significant time and resources into building AI-powered solutions for businesses, often targeting specific industries like home services or local practices. Despite creating functional and seemingly valuable tools, they struggle to convert leads and achieve paying customers, indicating a disconnect between product creation and effective sales/marketing. This highlights a challenge of getting the product into the hands of those who need it.
SOURCES (60)
“no-code apps at 90k makes sense, loads of people want something built and can't stretch to a developer. you build someone their app, it flies on the demo, then their real data lands and the afternoon's gone on inputs the tool never expected. i run…”
“For about six months I was quietly convinced AI was going to kill my product. Anyone can rebuild what I do in a weekend now, right? I let it wreck my focus. So I finally did the thing I should have done first. I called 12 of my paying customers and just asked why they stay. Not one of them mentioned a feature. Every answer was some version of: it works every time, and when I email you a human replies fast. Reliability and response time. That is apparently the whole moat. So I leaned straight int”
“Quick reality check for anyone running a chatbot on their site. On August 2 the EU AI Act starts requiring you to tell users they're talking to an AI. Applies if EU people can use your bot, doesn't matter where your company is based. I assumed this got delayed with everything else earlier this year but no. The delay only covered the high risk stuff, the chatbot transparency part still lands on Aug 2. Fines go up to 15M euro or 3% of turnover. Small companies get the lower cap but still n”
“I’d be a bit careful using a chatbot for the full journey, especially with products going up to £5,000. It’ll probably work well for filtering 1,000 products and answering basic questions, but higher-ticket buyers usually have very specific concerns around compatibility, setup, differences between models, and whether the extra cost is actually worth it. For those customers, I’d make sure there’s an easy way to reach a real product expert. AI can help narrow things down, but I wouldn’t rely on it”
“Haha, fair. I write like a corporate robot even when I try not to bip bip. It's a real thing I built for my own rentals, happy to send screenshots or a demo if you want proof. And yeah, SideProject is maybe the wrong room but I need karmas soooo. Appreciate the airbnb group tip, that's where I should be.”
“Some well done chatbots are already helping with refunds and claims. They are helpfully and real time savers. But if not done well, they’re a hazard to the brand and user experience.”
“Hi everyone, I’m validating a SaaS idea and would love honest feedback. The idea is an AI platform where pet businesses (vets, trainers, shelters, daycare centers, breeders, and pet insurance companies) can upload a 10–30 second video of a dog and receive an AI-generated behavior analysis. The platform could detect signs such as: 😊 Happy 😌 Relaxed 🎾 Playful 😟 Stressed 😨 Scared ⚠️ Possible discomfort or anxiety The long-term vision is much bigger than emotion detection. Features could includ”
“I know exactly what customers care about. And I've seen many ai web pages that work great and look fine. Not a lot around here though. And I get it, everyone can vibe code a product and web site, but 98% of you are not vibe coding your way to sales. As much as you want to believe you and your computer can do it all alone together, you can't. At a certain point, like when you're not making money, you need to accept that experts still know what they're doing My company has aquired”
“Founder from Bergen, Norway, building Companion, an AI mental fitness app positioned as a coach that challenges you rather than validating you like a general chatbot does. The niche: people who want structured personal development, not meditation/calm apps and not a $150/session human coach. The wedge is that ChatGPT and Claude just agree with you; Companion is built to push back by default. Where I am: 250 users so far. Honest problems I’m still working through: getting people from signup to an”
“When you’re running a small business, time is your most expensive currency. AI hasn’t magically solved everything for me but it has taken a lot of mental load off. And that alone is a win. Marketing : This is where AI shines the most for me. I don’t use AI to replace my voice I use it to get me unstuck. I’ll give it one rough idea or half-baked thought, and it helps me: Turn that into multiple caption styles Brainstorm hooks and opening lines Rework the same message for different platforms Test”
“This is really useful thank you! Yeah building an agent to automate that step is probably the best move and then drafting the personal emails by hand as like you said, business owners are gonna ignore anything that looks like a template. Thanks a lot for your advice, I really appreciate it! 🙏”
“Thank you! Really appreciate your advice, I like the idea of taking on one type of service business first, I had been trying to tackle them all at once 😅. The onboarding call is a smart idea too, just a quick 15 min calendy invite could work perfectly”
“I have worked over a year on electryion.com , a team of 6 AI employees (email assistant, recruiter, social media, lead gen, tenders, requirements) for small businesses and solo founders. The idea in one picture: you wake up, open the dashboard, and the work is already done. Your inbox was sorted overnight, reply drafts are waiting for your review (nothing ever auto-sends), the recruiter found new candidates matching your search and prepared outreach messages, and each employee posts a morning st”
“I’m taking the exact same approach with a project I'm building right now with an AI chatbot for football data and analytics. Instead of a web dashboard, I’m using the Linq API to run the entire bot through iMessage natively. I feel like its a lot easier to use when the bot lives directly in your messages.”
Hey everyone. I build custom backend automations and B2B lead pipelines (mainly using n8n, AI agents, and custom scraping). I know how much time gets burned moving data between CRMs, scraping Google…
“Service businesses being underserved matches what I have seen too, most of the tooling attention goes to ecommerce because that is where the funding and case studies already are. On trust with non-technical small business owners, the thing that worked best for me was not pitching the product at all in the first message, just showing I had actually looked at their specific business. A coach or clinic owner ignores anything that reads like a template, but they will read a message that references s”
“Spent the last few months building Chirpy, an AI receptionist for websites, with my co-founder. The biggest thing I've learned is a positioning one, and I think it applies well beyond my niche. When we started, we assumed we'd compete in the ecommerce chatbot space, because that's where all the money and attention is. But it's extremely saturated. Gorgias, Tidio, Intercom, all well-funded and deeply integrated in shopifies ecosystem. What almost nobody is building for is service”
“We used Tidio before and switched to algoshop AI Chatbot. It works well for us after syncing our products it handles most FAQs product questions and recommendations pretty well. The pricing is also much easier for a small store. The only downside is that returns or exchanges still need human approval but it saves a lot of time on repetitive questions.”
“I use AI every day, but I'd never let it make business decisions for me. I think that's where a lot of people go wrong. AI is incredibly good at helping you think through a problem. It'll point out blind spots, challenge assumptions, summarize research, compare options, or even argue the opposite side of your idea. But it doesn't know your customers. It doesn't know your cash flow. It doesn't know your margins, your brand, your team, or the hundreds of little details that”
“Hello, wondering if creating a Rag based chatbot will help to get some MRR with cold calling here in India. targeting real estate, restaurants, small businesses. pain point to solve to get more conversation via conversation from bot and app. I have seen many in market and yet they still gets customers. need your brutal feedback. submitted by /u/fullstackdev-channel [link] [comments]”
“Honestly, that sounds way more useful than most weekend AI projects. If it can answer the phone, collect the job details, and give a rough range while you're busy, that's a real business problem solved. You're definitely not the only one spending a Saturday night staring at a screen building something 😄”
“I am building Chirpy, it is an AI receptionist that answers your website visitors' questions 24/7, trained on your own content and live in two minutes.”
“Hey everyone, Over the last few years, I’ve worked with B2B companies that spend thousands of dollars every month driving traffic through Google Ads, LinkedIn, and SEO, only to watch 95%+ of visitors leave without ever speaking to anyone. Most websites still follow the same flow: Visitor → Read a few pages → Fill a form → Book a demo → Wait for someone to respond. The problem is that most people don’t read through the website or want to fill out a form or commit to a meeting on their first visit”
“I have built multiple products over the years and failed multiple times. Everytime i used to wonder, why is the the traffic dropping off. So I finally built a tool that sends an AI agent to your website cold like a stranger would. It analyses the page, follows the obvious journey, clicks on your primary CTA and prepares a detailed report with ready o paste fixes. Drop your website link and what you want the visitor to do next. I'll review and reply with the things that I'd fix first befo”
“Spent most of today trying to build an AI receptionist for my asphalt business Still got a long way to go but its been fun learning The goal is simple answer calls ask a few questions and save me some time spit out a rough price as i cant take private call at work. Anyone else building something this weekend or am I the only one sitting in front of a screen on a Saturday night submitted by /u/divvychugsbeer [link] [comments]”
“We have several new support hires who use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to answer client tickets. AI can help draft a response, but the replies are sometimes not validated against the product, client environment, or troubleshooting evidence. When clients ask follow-up questions, the new hires often ask the team for help in public Teams channel by tagging people. If the client does not reply, the ticket gets closed, and the same unverified response may later be reused for similar cases. My concern i”
“Sounds about right. Small biz owners often don’t see the value until they realize how many leads slip through the cracks. If your AI can actually help them close even a couple of those leads, they'd probably start seeing it as an investment rather than an expense.”
“It’s mostly because I don’t exactly have a warm network there yet The product is an AI agent that solves a specific problem in admin work for mid sized construction MEP engineering firms How do I go about the last pieces of advice you gave me? Really appreciate it”
“If your business gets enquiries on WhatsApp, I can build an AI assistant that responds instantly, answers common questions, recommends products, collects customer details, accepts payments, and hands conversations to your team when needed. Ideal for: * Shops * Restaurants * Salons * Schools * Clinics * Insurance companies * Real estate agencies Everything is custom-built for your business and works with your existing workflow. If you're curious about what it could do for your business, send”
“the idea is simple. right now if your customers wanna do something complex in your app they have to click through a bunch of UI. we think a lot of that should happen through an agentic layer instead, sitting on top of the UI. so instead of digging through menus, they just say what they want and the agent does it. especially useful for big saas systems where the real operations are buried deep. the engine lets you integrate that in about an hour, with an architecture that keeps each agent focused”
“the idea is simple. right now if your customers wanna do something complex in your app they have to click through a bunch of UI. we think a lot of that should happen through an agentic layer instead, sitting on top of the UI. so instead of digging through menus, they just say what they want and the agent does it. especially useful for big saas systems where the real operations are buried deep. the engine lets you integrate that in about an hour, with an architecture that keeps each agent focused”
“It's hard to parse what's happening here. Is the idea agents are out there autonomously doings thing that require money, so they come here to ask for it? If I click on any of the bonds on the home page, I can't tell what they're plannning to use the money for or any indicators of creditworthiness, collateralization, lending terms. Does every borrower just get the same rate? When does repayment happen? Monthly, weekly, all at once at maturity? How are you supposed to know what person or legal org”
“Full disclosure: I'm the founder. But I'd genuinely rather get feedback from this crowd than signups. I tried other chatbots for my other business, but it was very expensive and since I am developer I created one for myself and then I tried to market it. And what started as side project became my obsession 😄 . The idea was: cheaper the other chatbot widgets, easy to use, easy to train, easy to take over when I want to. What's in it : - Operator handoff ("Take Control"): AI”
“I run a small RAG-based FAQ chatbot for businesses called FAQSURE. Sharing where we're stuck and want some genuine advice from fellow founders. Why we built it: Small businesses kept drowning in the same repetitive customer questions, and the existing "AI chatbot" options were either black boxes, priced for enterprise, or not accurate enough to trust for real customer-facing answers. So we built one on retrieval-augmented generation; it answers from your own docs (PDF, CSV, TXT) in”
“This is a demo concept for something I want to make to help people who don't have wifi access at all times or access to teachers or therapists, they can then talk to their SpiralOS and help learn new things from trusted sources only pulling from real books.These real books can be accessed and read by themself inside the app even.Long term would love to get this on a handheld to be able to ship out with a small screen, thinking like a gameboy color or something. Kids could talk to it or type with”
“Hi I am 22 yr started my agency previous month I am working on First client for free.I am helping coaches by automating their bussiness.soon I will get more clients and scale my AI agency to 7 figures. submitted by /u/Anxious_Doctor_158 [link] [comments]”
“I recommend that every AI user start with Gemini as their first AI.Use ChatGPT, and it's ask a question, get an answer, done. Tell it to code, get the code, done.But use Gemini? You get burned by the hallucinations Gemini casually spews out on a daily basis.You develop a habit of fact checking every single answer.You learn that blindly trusting the AI's response will get you absolutely screwed.AI answers must always be cross verified.That habit prevents a major disaster later on.It thinks the cu”
“Sounds like you have a solution looking for a problem. Instead of: how do I use AI with dashboards It should be: How do I solve the problem my customers are having? Maybe AI helps with solving the problem, but that should be the order of operations.”
Thank you…I have to do that if I want real answers…no doubt…
Here's a quick 1-min recording of the handoff flow in action. https://reddit.com/link/oxvoylq/video/djloobgialdh1/player Shows both sides: the chat where the intent-shift triggers (pricing question), and the dashboard queue with context preserved and a…
“Founder of Contracko here. We're a new CLM suite focused on small to medium size enterprises. If you're a small in-house legal team, it will do everything you need from AI contract extraction, risk analysis, setting automatic deadline reminders and signatures. I personally love our Clara AI conversational assistant which makes using the platform a breeze. We have a free trial and I'd be happy to demo a best practice - you can book a demo with me on our site .”
“I run a real time scanner intelligence product. It transcribes public scanner feeds, geocodes them, and serves a live map plus an API. Started in Chattanooga where I live, now running in a few metros. Free tier is the public map covering the last 24 hours. Money comes from a Pro tier with analytics, history, CSV export, keyword alerts, and LLM Q&A, aimed at logistics, newsrooms, event security, and researchers. There's also a pilot API. Where I want a reality check. Which of those vertic”
“Solo founder. Spent a week building an AI concierge for med spas, answers enquiries in under 60 seconds across WhatsApp/Instagram, checks a live diary so it never double-books, hands the lead to the clinic's team. Cold emailed ~35 clinic owners. One replied enthusiastically: "I would love to see what you can demonstrate. So it's a YES from me!" Best possible signal, I thought. Sent her a live demo she could actually message herself, built on her clinic. She opened it. Then neve”
“I wanted to build an agent that takes a one-line brief like 30s promo for a coffee brand morning vibe and outputs a structured shot list then calls video models for each shot. The flow is basically planning model breaks the brief into a script, outputs a JSON array of shots (character, action, camera, duration, mood). Then each shot gets passed to a media generation tool. I wanted the planner to return something boring and strict, roughly like this: {"brief": "30s promo for a coff”
“This is a new frontier, your clients don’t know what they want yet because they haven’t seen it. Speak to them, ask what problems they face, ask what they do over and over but hate. Solve for that.”
“We run paid ads. I posted a thread about it last year. Since then, we've definitely evolved more AI into our process with AI content creators. It's helped a lot. One of the biggest bottlenecks for client success was that they didn't want to film, so we've helped them with that now”
“That’s some impressive growth - nicely done! What kind of marketing, and how is AI impacting you out of curiosity?”
“I have one set up for my web agency. I do sell "her" as a service but I'm fine with it if I'm the only one using it because she's working for me. And it's only been live for a couple of weeks and she's helping me out a lot. So I guess what I am concentrating on now is just working on selling my other web services and if the opportunity presents itself, sell the AI Receptionist and I'll be its best "use case customer" to prove that the system works.”
“3 clients in is way too small to read as saturation. the line that stands out is 'none of my calls seem to need good automations', for most firms under 20 staff that's just true, the volume isn't there and by hand's quicker. the ones where there's actually something to build already know the exact task eating their week, everyone else you're kind of inventing a problem for. no idea if that's your funnel or adoption just being lower than it looks online.”
“Hello everyone, founder here. I've spent 12 years running growth for my companies, and over the last year I ran 355 custdev interviews. The same pattern kept showing up: businesses don't lose because they can't produce marketing. They lose because nothing connects. Sales hears the same objection for months and the website never changes. Support answers the same confused question daily and the next campaign ignores it. Experiment #12 gets launched by someone who never heard about expe”
“Awesome testimony on the power of ethically programmed AI and how it can help. Good luck with everything!”
“Step 1: Bought an AI subscription. Step 2: Built another SaaS in a weekend. Step 3: Posted "Launching soon 🚀" Step 4: Got 17 website visits (12 were me). Step 5: Repeated the process with a new idea. Meanwhile... The AI company got another monthly subscription. I got another unused GitHub repository. At this point, I'm starting to think the easiest AI business isn't building AI products... It's selling AI to people like me who keep building products nobody asked for. Maybe”
“I am just starting to explore integrating an AI chat bot for helping customers find the right product, and would appreciate any recommendations for a decent app (or also let me know any horror stories!). We have around 1,000 products on our site, hobby niche, prices from £5 to £5000. Thanks in advance! submitted by /u/AlephMartian [link] [comments]”