8 free magic features Cloudflare that you have been missing:

Tap to see real use examples 👇👇👇
(saves me $200/m) 1. email forwarding

This one is my fav 🧡
Cloudflare forwards all incoming emails from any of my domain inbox to a single gmail.

E.g. you can email me at alex(@)isora.me or dsa123(@)isora.me and i will receive those.

I created 14 directories in the past year.

Let me show you all of them. And the result I achieved in 6 months (profit $$, traffic, content) ⤵ My biggest success is stripealternatives.com
I made this directory to solve my own problem (finding a Stripe alternative).
I sold a paid listing for $99. Then the client acquired the whole site (just like Bezos bought Washington Post 😁).

The full story: x.com/alexanderisora…

Tomorrow the most of your work will be done with AI agents.

I have tried 11 no-code AI agent builders to make you prepared for the future 🦸

The most complete list by today (with live demos): Google's Vertex AI agent builder.

Cons:
Does not allow any other LLMs besides Gemini
Lame, overcomplicated corporate UX
it makes me angry and sleepy
Very limited (you must code your own integrations with 3rd party services)

Pros: Has built-in access to data from Google search

Rating: 0/5, just ignore it

Link: cloud.google.com/products/agent…

i sold a directory for $10k 😎

here is the story of making, growing and selling it:

[ tap to read ⤵ ] before it started.

i got inspired by my friend who made a directory while watching the live presentation of openai's custom GPTs: x.com/johnrushx/stat…

he was able to detect a need early and quickly fill it in 🏃‍♂️

then he sold the directory: x.com/johnrushx/stat…

I gathered 54 growth ideas of how to find the first 100 paid clients for your startup.

These are from my indie maker career: 7 years of actually making a SaaS from $0 to $16,000 MMR and observing others.

MEGA JUMBO THREAD! LFG! 🧵🧵🐘🐘

[ bookmark it ] This is one stupidly simple, but unobvious. It brought me the first 5 paid users in 2018: find people in your contact list who could be your customer.
Ex-colleagues, partners, freelance clients, bosses. Sell them your product.

The most loyal people are the easiest to sell to.

Owning a directory = owning a free infinite marketing channel. I build at least 1 new directory per month.
It is my investment in the future 😎

In this inspiring thread, I briefly explain what is a directory and why you need to build at least one for yourself 👇 So what is a directory?
A directory is a website with a list of useful links.

An owner of a directory has experience in the niche, so the items’ set is better than you will find on Google.

Let’s take a look at one of mine’s as an example: stripealternatives.com
I gathered all alternatives to Stripe in one place.

Why my directory is better than any of the top pages from Google? Because in the SERP, you will only see articles written by SEO experts. They have no idea about billing systems. They never managed a SaaS.
Their set of links is 15 random items from Crunchbase or Product Hunt. Their article has near 0 value for the reader, because the only purpose of the article is to bring traffic to the company’s blog.

What about mine? I tried a bunch of Stripe alternatives myself. Not just signed up, but earned thousands of real cash through them. I also read 100s of tweets about experiences of others. I’m an expert now. I can even recognize good ones without trying them.

The set of items I published is WAY better than any of the SEO optimized articles you will ever find on Google. That is the value of a directory.

I know what stops you building your SaaS: a proper idea 😁

Here are 20 proven micro-SaaS ideas that you can build solo and earn $10k per month:

(tap to see ↓) 1/20 Web page builder

Make a website builder! Overcrowded niche? Oh yes. But not a problem if you niche it down! 🤓

Make a tool aimed for a small audience. Make this audience LOVE your tool. Yes, you will make your market x100 times smaller. But this handful of people will choose your SaaS rather than Wix or Webflow.

I did this in 2018 with @unicornplatform. I made a landing page builder tailored only for startup founders. I was able to outcompete the giants and grow it to $16k/m only because it was niched down.

So, I earned $15,354 on AppSumo.
Here are 3 reasons why I won't ever do that again 🙈 
(tap to see 👇) 1/3 Crazy commission.

I wasn’t able to find out the exact amount of the commission because they made it shady. But people say it is 70%.

Don't get me wrong! I’m OK with giving a cut for having new clients. My affiliate programs have always been ~50% more generous than the average market.

But hey. They just took all my money lol 🙂

i went a little crazy and created 6 (six) sideprojects over this weekend 😅😅

Here they are: (tap see them and learn why and how I built it) 1/6

It is a single-page web app that uploads your file and gives you a direct URL. That’s all! 🙂

I often need this tool when I work: to embed an image to @producthunt or @indiehackers (both require a direct link) or to embed a video on a web page.

I will use this app to solve the problem of hosting videos online for the clients of @paracast_io as well. So I hope to earn money from it indirectly, by helping the users of .

Problems:

It is a super risky project. I know that the file hosting business is hard for 2 reasons:

1) costs
2) malice

I solved problem 1) (costs) by hosting the files on Cloudflare R2 which offers generous $0 traffic costs. But I know that Cloudflare can turn into a bitch anytime and force me to pay (). This is why I moved the project to a separate Cloudflare to protect my other projects.

I charge users nothing because I do not want to have full responsibility for the files' uptime. I will keep the service alive and pay for the storage costs, but if it begins to cost me thousands I will just shut it down.

The 2) problem is more tricky. Some odd ones may want to upload DMCA-protected files or pictures of naked persons or viruses. It may nuke the project overnight as well. I supplied a captcha, a nude pictures/video detector (try it!) and a virus detector to protect the project. Let’s see how it will go.

Code: the whole project was coded by Sonnet 3.5. Tech stack: next js, react, vercel, cvs file as a database.uploadfile.click
Paracast.io
reddit.com/r/selfhosted/c…

Sharing my entire growth plan for my new SaaS.

I will be using the plan to grow @paracast_io from $240 to $100k.

Feel free to browse the list of my 32 marketing ideas, steal them or inspire and come up with new ones.

Click to open: 👇😉 Do things that do not scale

1) Reach agencies and freelancers. Offer a deal: find clients for the templated video. Pay me a fixed price, and charge the clients what you want.

2) make videos for others with a watermark and send it to them (stolen from @tomorbach)

Here are 6 SaaS ideas I toyed with until I decided to stick to Paracast.

😇 Feel free to steal: 1/6 Copybrain. AI co-writer. It stores your past experiences and helps with content creation.

The project has potential because content creation is hard. And it is a big market.

I will give it another try after llms will become a little better.

Making a B2C product? You will earn $0 😇

Tap to open the epic thread 👇 According to my research, 69.8% of makers prefer starting a B2C product instead of B2B: 

I had 100s of conversations with makers. I can clearly understand the main reason behind this decision: it is easy to come up with an idea. You just solve your own problem.

https://x.com/alexanderisorax/status/1772249784251777384

You want to make a SaaS, but you have no ideas?

You thought of stealing an idea. But you see lots of people making clones. Even clones of clones! The competition is crazy. And the whole game seems just… pointless?

Let me give you a hope today 🙂👇 (tap) The simple idea:

Take any currently rising SaaS trend.
Sell it in a non-english speaking country.

I parsed 968 launches from Reddit/r/SideProject and analyzed them with Claude 3 Opus.

Here are the insights I found 🙂👇 (open the thread) The data:

I searched for all posts from /r/SideProjects which contained these strings:

"I built"
"I made an alternative to"
"I created a clone of".

Most posts are <=1 year old.

I published the JSON here: isora.me/list-of-altern…