Product Hunt gave me almost no traffic, so I built a free tool around the problem
I launched my B2B SaaS OS on Product Hunt earlier this month.
The result was basically zero traffic and zero sales.
Instead of adding more features, I started looking at the acquisition problem.
The product is a $249 one-time source-code foundation for developers building B2B SaaS with Next.js, Supabase, PostgreSQL and Stripe.
I realized asking someone to immediately spend $249 on a developer infrastructure product gives them very little reason to trust it.
So I built a free tool as the entry point:
SaaS Production Readiness Check
It checks 10 areas that can cause problems in a multi-tenant SaaS:
Tenant isolation
Supabase RLS
Authorization
RBAC
Stripe webhook authenticity
Stripe webhook idempotency
Stripe state synchronization
API key revocation
Invitation race conditions
Auditability
It's a self-assessment, not an automated security scanner or certification. No account required.
You can try it here:
I'm now testing whether giving developers something genuinely useful first can create a better path to the paid product.
If you're building a SaaS, what production issue would you add to this checklist?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Interesting take. Would you still recommend this approach to someone starting today?
Thanks for writing this up. Bookmarking it for later.
Curious how long it took before you saw the first real results?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Interesting take. Would you still recommend this approach to someone starting today?
I'd split tenant isolation into two checks: requests made by a signed-in user, and work that runs later without that request context. A scheduled email or export job can fetch a record by ID and accidentally skip the company scope even when every API route is correct. A test with two tenants and the same kind of record would make that boundary much easier to verify.
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Hey Wendel, building a free diagnostic tool to solve the acquisition problem is a much better long-term play than relying on a Product Hunt launch.
Since your foundation uses Next.js and Supabase, here are two production issues I'd definitely add to that checklist:
Database Connection Pooling: Deploying serverless Next.js without proper pooling (like PgBouncer) will quickly max out Postgres connections under load.
Domain Authentication (SPF/DKIM/DMARC): You listed invitation race conditions, but a more common production failure is having B2B invitation emails land in spam because the sending domain isn't strictly configured.
This is a perfect entry point to build trust for a $249 technical product. Great pivot.
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
The shift from trying to sell the full product straight away to giving people something useful first makes a lot of sense, especially for developer infrastructure. $249 isn't necessarily expensive for the right buyer, but there's a pretty big trust gap when they haven't seen the product in action yet.
One thing I'd add to the checklist is observability around background jobs and async workflows. It's easy to test the happy path and forget about what happens when a job fails, runs twice, gets stuck, or processes something out of order. Those issues can be surprisingly painful once you have real customers using the system.
I'm also curious whether the free check ends up being more useful as a lead generator or simply as a way to learn what problems developers are actually worried about. Either way, it seems like a much more interesting experiment than just adding another feature and hoping the Product Hunt traffic improves.
The pivot from “add features” to “earn trust” is the real launch here. A free readiness check makes the $249 ask feel less like a blind first date—I’d watch which checklist item turns the most visitors into curious buyers.
Once developers use the readiness check, what behavior would tell you it is creating qualified demand for the $249 product rather than just attracting free-tool usage?
On my case, PH gave me great boost!
One I'd add: what happens when a Stripe webhook fires but your own downstream action against it times out or comes back ambiguous — not "webhook was malformed," but "we got the event, tried to act on it, and don't actually know if that action landed." Idempotency covers duplicate delivery, but it doesn't cover your own side failing silently mid-response. I've been stuck on exactly this for a confirm-before-execute product (action dispatched, result unknown, don't want to blindly retry since retry itself can be the dangerous move) and haven't found a clean answer yet — curious if your "auditability" item already covers that gap or if it's really a separate one.
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Nice progress. What is the next thing you are focusing on?
Thanks for writing this up. Bookmarking it for later.
Clear and practical, thanks. Did anything surprise you along the way?
Really relatable. How much time do you put into this each week?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Thanks for sharing the numbers, that makes it much easier to follow.
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
What made you pick this stack over the alternatives?
Appreciate the honesty here, most people only share the wins.
Same pattern here, so I can share how it looks from the inside a bit further along. UtilitySEO's entry point is a free scan (up to 2,000 pages, no account) for exactly your reason: nobody spends real money on a tool from a site with no reputation. But our domain authority is 3 and search sends us about 4 visits a month, so the free tool hasn't solved discovery by itself. It converts attention you already have; it doesn't create it. The checker has to go where your buyers already are. For yours, I'd take the Stripe webhook idempotency item into Supabase and Stripe communities as a standalone post, since it's the one I'd bet most people fail without knowing. Which of the 10 gets the most "fail" answers so far?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
Solid lesson. Which channel has worked best for you so far?
Makes sense. Are you planning to charge for it, or keep it free for now?
This is useful. How are you finding your first users so far?
That shift from adding features to earning the first bit of trust feels right. For a $249 infra product, I’d keep the checker narrow and show one concrete failure, then let people decide if the paid foundation is worth exploring. Otherwise “production readiness” can become another generic checklist. I’d track which check actually makes people continue, not just how many finish it.
Really good writeup, thanks for sharing it. What's the next thing you're planning to try here?