Clapwall

Hey everyone 👋

I'm Thomas. I've been lurking here for a while and I figured today's the right day to introduce what I'm building, because I'm 8 days out from my first launch and I want to be honest about the strategy before the launch happens, not after.

The product: ClapWall. A testimonial collection and display tool: text + video, with embeddable widgets you drop on your site with a 2-line snippet. Basically a Senja alternative.

Why I'm even attempting this in a market with established players:

Senja is at $83K MRR with 2 founders. Testimonial.to is somewhere around $50-100K MRR. Famewall exists. The category is proven and growing. But here's what I noticed : most of them know they need a testimonial wall on their landing page, they know it would lift conversion, but they can't justify $29-50/month for a tool when they're still pre-product-market-fit themselves. So they end up doing nothing, or stitching together screenshots from Twitter into a Google Doc that never gets updated.

My bet is that there's room for a fourth player at a lower price point, with a free plan, a 3 steps guided wizard and a viral loop built into the free tier from day one ( same playbook Senja used in 2022, but with a more aggressive price ceiling ).

The pricing:

• Free: 15 testimonials, 1 widget, "Powered by ClapWall" badge (this is the viral mechanism)

• Starter: $9/mo

• Pro: $19/mo (35% cheaper than Senja, 62% cheaper than Testimonial.to)

The constraint I gave myself: ship the MVP in 10 days, solo, vibe-coding with Claude Code (~70% of the backend) and Cursor (frontend). Manual review and refactor on every PR. I'm at day 2 right now which is collection forms shipped today, embeddable widgets tomorrow, Stripe and onboarding wizard by day 7, launch day 10.

I'm documenting everything publicly on X (@ClapWall) — daily posts, what shipped, what broke, revenue when it comes (even if it's $0 for weeks). Building in public is part of the strategy.

My goal: $10K MRR in 12 months. Calibrated trajectory based on Senja's actual numbers and a 10:1 free-to-paid ratio fed by the viral loop.

Here's my honest question for you:

If you've built a SaaS in a category with established competitors (like I'm doing), what was the one decision in your first 60 days that made the biggest difference? Was it pricing, distribution, a specific channel, a feature, or something else entirely?

I'm genuinely trying to learn from people who've already walked this path before I make avoidable mistakes.

Waitlist + product page if you're curious: clapwall.com

Thanks a lot for reading this far!

Whishing you well!

Thomas