The SaaS Graveyard is Paved with "Cool" Ideas: 8 Brutal Mistakes Indie Founders Make

Hey Indie Hackers,

I’ve been digging through the graveyard lately. Not the one with headstones the one with "Startup Name: TBD" folders in Notion, the abandoned GitHub repos, and the landing pages that haven't been renewed in two years aiish.

Here’s the truth that nobody puts in their Twitter (X) brag threads: Most SaaS ideas don’t die because the code broke. They die because the founder fell in love with the wrong problem.

I’ve spent the last few weeks studying the autopsy reports. I’ve looked at the $100K projects that vanished overnight, the "AI wrappers" that crumbled, and the passion projects that burned out because nobody had their wallet out.

If you’re currently nursing a "killer idea" in your Notes app, this is your intervention. Here are the 8 most expensive mistakes indie founders make when choosing their SaaS idea with real names, real numbers, and real scars.

MISTAKE #1: Building a "Vitamin" When You Should Be Selling Painkillers

We all know the metaphor, yet we keep building multivitamins.

A founder named Pierre built PricingBot, a price-monitoring tool for e-commerce owners . It worked. It was clean. It took a year of his life. After 12 months, he had 3 customers and $600 MRR. Why? Because price monitoring is a "nice to have." It’s not bleeding.

Meanwhile, his next idea, ScrapingBee, solved an immediate, urgent problem: developers needing reliable web scraping infrastructure. That did $180K ARR in 18 months .

The litmus test: (Meditate on this) If your product goes down for three days and nobody emails you asking "WTF?", you aren't selling painkillers. You’re selling kale chips .

MISTAKE #2: No Competition? That’s Not a Green Flag. It’s a Funeral

I see this quiet often on IndieHackers and other indie founders communities: "I have no competitors. I’m alone in this space!"

Friend, you aren't alone. You’re lost.

If nobody is solving a problem, it’s usually because the problem doesn’t exist, or nobody wants to pay for it. Juha Kiili, who has listened to 200+ IndieHacker podcasts, sums it up perfectly: "If you can’t find any competition, that’s usually a huge red flag. It likely means there’s no real demand or you’ll have to spend a decade educating people" .

Maarten Belmans learned this the hard way. He built Email Signature Sprout, a tool to help companies create uniform email signatures. He built the whole thing. Then he did research and realized the market was flooded with free, entrenched solutions . The product never launched. (Damn!)

Competition isn’t validation but a complete absence of competition is usually condemnation.

MISTAKE #3: Platform Dependency You’re Not a Partner, You’re a Liability

This is the one that keeps me up at night.

We love building on top of giants: Slack bots, Salesforce integrations, Chrome extensions. It’s instant distribution. But here’s the catch: You don’t own the platform. You’re just visiting.

Drift and Gainsight learned this in late 2025. Both had billion-dollar valuations. Both lost access to Salesforce AppExchange indefinitely due to security breaches involving OAuth tokens. Drift had been offline for over three months. Gainsight was yanked with zero warning .

One day you have 200 enterprise customers. The next day, every OAuth token is revoked. No warning. No negotiation.

Then there’s Zack Katz, who built IDX+ for real estate on top of a base product (DSID Express) that didn’t want him there. The parent company changed their HTML structure regularly, breaking his integration every few months. He made $60K in sales but spent it all on maintenance and heartburn .

The rule: If your entire business model is "please don’t ban me," you don’t have a business. You have a hobby with extra steps. (Please save me the micro SaaS ideologies)

MISTAKE #4: The Consumer SaaS Trap (a.k.a. "Building for Broke People")

We romanticize consumer apps. They’re fun. You can show them to your mom. But consumers are terrible customers.

Pallavi Pant, a solo founder who documented killing 9 ideas on paper, put it bluntly: "Micro SaaS ideas targeting 'aspiring' creators usually fail because the audience often has no budget" .

She killed a vegan AI meal planner. Why? Consumers are price-sensitive, churn like crazy, and will Google for a free spreadsheet before paying you $9 .

Pierre and Kevin from PricingBot noticed this too. Their original Chrome extension had 3,000 users but almost zero willingness to pay. The money wasn't in consumers; it was in the e-commerce business owners using their tool to spy on competitors .

B2B isn’t "selling out." It’s "getting paid."

MISTAKE #5: The "Idea Honeymoon" Falling in Love Before the First Date

Katie Keith and her husband spent hundreds of hours researching ecotourism. They meticulously planned Green Rooms, an online eco-tourism product. They loved it. They obsessed over it.

They never launched it .

It’s still sitting there, a ghost product, perfectly researched and completely unrealized. No bookings. No feedback. No money.

This is the "Idea Honeymoon." You’re in love with the concept, not the reality. And like any honeymoon, reality hits hard when you realize you don’t actually know the person (customer) you married.

The cure: Sell it before you build it. Even if it’s ugly. Even if it’s manual.

MISTAKE #6: Ignoring the "Wizard of Oz" Cheat Code

Speaking of manual: Why are we coding things we haven’t even validated?

Fireflies.ai is now a $1B company. But when they started, there was no AI. There were two founders, Krish and Sam, manually joining meetings, taking notes by hand, and typing them up for customers .

They charged $100/month for this "AI" service. It barely covered costs. But they learned exactly what needed to be automated. They built the perfect spec not from guesses, but from 100+ real meetings they personally transcribed.

Most founders refuse to do this. It’s embarrassing. It doesn’t scale.

Good. That’s why it works.

If you aren’t willing to do the unscalable, sweaty, manual version of your SaaS, you don’t actually understand the problem .

MISTAKE #7: Underestimating the "Hidden Vendor Tax"

Ronik Patel spent $100,000 and one year building Liquor Engine an e-commerce platform for liquor stores. He had 100+ sellers lined up. The tech was solid. The market was ready.

Then an email arrived. Their third-party delivery vendor (who they had to use for alcohol logistics) had gone public. Fees doubled from $5 to $10 per delivery. Overnight, the business model became unsustainable .

The project died before it launched.

Your SaaS might not have liquor delivery fees, but it always has hidden dependencies. API pricing changes. Platform policies. Compliance shifts. If your margins rely on a third party not changing their prices, you’re playing roulette.

MISTAKE #8: The "Indie Bait and Switch" Chasing Shiny Niches That Don’t Buy

We all have that list. The "fun" ideas.

Tinder for Co-founders? Killed. (Recurring revenue? Zero. Once they find each other, they leave.)

Personal CRM? Killed. (Nobody actually does the data entry after Day 3.)

Crypto portfolio tracker? Killed. (If the market crashes, your MRR crashes.)

These ideas survive because they’re interesting to build. They’re conversation starters. But they’re not businesses.

What survived Pallavi’s "Quick-Kill Framework"? Automated compliance checker for European dental clinics .

Boring? Yes.

Sexy? No.

Will they pay €99/month to avoid a €5,000 fine? Absolutely.

Dental clinics have money. They have regulations. They have pain. That’s a business.

The Final Question: Could You Sell This Before Writing a Line of Code?

Every failure I researched had one thing in common: The founder assumed that building was the hard part.

It’s not.

The hard part is finding someone—anyone—who will physically hand you money for a promise.

PricingBot built first, asked questions later. ($600 MRR)

Email Signature Sprout built first, researched later. (Dead on arrival)

Liquor Engine built first, negotiated vendor pricing later. ($100K sunk)

Fireflies ai sold first, then built. ($1B valuation)

The Graveyard Is Full of Beautiful Code

So here’s my unsolicited advice for your next SaaS idea:

Pick an audience with money. Dental clinics > vegan meal planners.

Pick a problem with immediate consequences. Fines > inefficiencies.

Pick a platform that won’t ban you. If they can ban you, assume they will.

Sell it manually first. If you can’t get a pre-payment via PayPal, you can’t get MRR via Stripe.

The ideas that survive aren’t the coolest. They’re the ones that refuse to die—because someone, somewhere, is in enough pain to pay for relief.

Go find that pain.

What’s the "boring" idea you’ve been ignoring that probably prints money? Drop it in the comments I dare you. 🔪