I built a SaaS for personal trainers in under a week. Turns out that was the easy part.
I'm a solo founder in the UK. A little over a week ago I shipped CoachDesk — an all-in-one tool for self-employed personal trainers to handle clients, bookings, invoicing and workout plans in one place, instead of juggling WhatsApp, spreadsheets and a notes app.
Building it was the fun bit. The humbling bit has been everything since.
Honest status: I've had a handful of trial signups and zero of them converted — and when I looked closely, none were even real prospects (one came through a dating app, went quiet, and that was that). So I'm basically at customer zero and learning that "build it and they'll come" is a myth.
What I've been doing this week to fix that: getting listed on the review directories (G2, Capterra, SaaSHub), publishing honest comparison pages vs the bigger players, setting up TikTok/Instagram/LinkedIn, and starting to message personal trainers directly.
What I'd love input on from people who've done this:
For a niche B2B tool like this, what actually got you your first 10 paying customers?
Did cold outreach (DMs/email to your exact user) work for you, or was it all content?
Happy to share anything about the build or the (messy) numbers. Link's in my profile if you want to poke around.
Every indie hacker hits the wall. The ones who make it work are the ones who adjust, not quit. What's your next move?
The biggest risk here is spreading the first-customer hunt too wide.
Directories, comparison pages, TikTok, LinkedIn, and cold outreach can all help later, but with zero real prospects right now, the next test should probably be much narrower.
For CoachDesk, I’d focus on one painful PT situation first: trainers juggling bookings, invoices, client notes, and workout plans across WhatsApp and spreadsheets, but already busy enough that the mess is costing them time.
The first 10 customers probably won’t come from broad content. They’ll come from a very specific direct outreach loop to trainers who already look overloaded.
Happy to map the tighter version if useful. The key is deciding the first PT segment, the outreach angle, and the shortest path to paid conversations without wasting the next two weeks on channels that only create activity.
Yeah, you've put your finger on the thing I've been half-avoiding admitting. I've got a lot of motion right now — directories, TikTok, comparison pages — and almost none of it is actual conversations with real trainers. Feels productive. Isn't, really.
The segment that rings truest is the "too busy to fix the mess" one: trainers with maybe 10–20 clients who are past the hobby stage and genuinely losing evenings to admin, but not big enough to have sorted proper systems yet. That's the exact person CoachDesk was built for.
I'd genuinely take you up on mapping the tighter version. Where I keep getting stuck is the outreach angle — how do you message someone who looks slammed without it landing as "hi, buy my software"? If you've got a framing for that first message that's actually worked, I'm all ears.
And thanks for taking the time to write this out — it's the most useful thing anyone's said to me this week.