DEV Community: godbright

Listening to Users and Iterating Before Scaling

godbright — Sun, 20 Jul 2025 13:32:41 +0000

One of the most overlooked yet foundational stages in building a successful software product is the iteration phase that raw, unglamorous stretch where you sit down with your first 10 to 50 users and truly listen.

Before even thinking of scaling, advertising, or acquiring thousands of users, this is where great products are forged. Not in boardrooms or pitch decks, but in deep conversations with early users. It’s in these moments when you’re not trying to sell but trying to learn that you uncover what really matters.

What’s confusing?
What’s working?
What do they wish your product could do?

This is how you find out if your product is solving the right problem, or if you’re just building features in a vacuum. And it’s how your earliest users go from passive testers to active evangelists because they see you listening and building in real time.

Over the past two weeks, that’s exactly what we’ve been doing at Inov-ai. We received a number of our User feedbacks expressing frustrations and others just very good suggestions of how we can streamline things” Then we shipped.

Here are some major updates that came directly from those feedback:

1. Easier Widget Integration with NPM
Our feedback widget has always been easy to install. Copying and pasting a script into your site worked for many. But developers today expect more seamless, modern setups. Over the weekend, we rolled out a new way to install and integrate the widget via NPM.

Now, JavaScript and React developers can install Inov-ai just like any other package in their stack. This method is faster, cleaner, and follows familiar workflows for product and engineering teams building at speed.

See the package here.

No more fiddling with script tags just install, import, and configure.

2. Shareable Feedback Links
One critical insight we uncovered was this: many end-users don’t naturally interact with the embedded widget on the site. Some skip it. Some miss it entirely. This meant that valuable feedback was being lost, not because people didn’t care, but because they didn’t know how to share it.

To solve this, we’re launching Shareable Feedback Links.

Now, you can generate a direct link to a feedback form fully branded and powered by Inov-ai that can be embedded in emails, added to tweets, posted in Slack channels, or shared in community groups.

Instead of waiting for users to find the widget on your site, you can proactively reach out to them anywhere they are and gather insight that would’ve otherwise gone unheard.

These two features npm integration and shareable links are more than technical upgrades. They are direct results of listening to users, observing friction, and iterating with purpose.

If you’re still in the early stages of your product, don’t skip this phase. Build a feedback loop. Talk to your users. Ship based on what you learn. Then scale.

Inov-ai is here to help make that process faster, simpler, and actionable.

Let us know what you think or better yet, try it out for yourself.

Best,
Bright

The future of Marketing Saas products is Organic !!!

godbright — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 23:24:32 +0000

This Weird Social Platform Helped Us Beat 2K Visits With $0

godbright ・ Jul 11

#saas #ai #tutorial #news

The secrets to how REDDIT can be used to drive growth of your Saas product.

godbright — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 23:24:01 +0000

This Weird Social Platform Helped Us Beat 2K Visits With $0

godbright ・ Jul 11

#saas #ai #tutorial #news

If you are an indieHacker with 0 Marketing experience, This is for you.

godbright — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 23:23:10 +0000

This Weird Social Platform Helped Us Beat 2K Visits With $0

godbright ・ Jul 11

#saas #ai #tutorial #news

If you are a indieHacker with 0 Marketing experience, This is for you.

godbright — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 23:22:23 +0000

This Weird Social Platform Helped Us Beat 2K Visits With $0

godbright ・ Jul 11

#saas #ai #tutorial #news

This Weird Social Platform Helped Us Beat 2K Visits With $0

godbright — Fri, 11 Jul 2025 20:20:35 +0000

Marketing was never my thing.

I had to learn marketing the hard way trying to get inov-ai in front of as many people as possible. Over the past few weeks, I've come to understand the power of storytelling, the variety of distribution channels available even to developer–founders, and just how impactful platforms like Reddit can be.

Reddit is a game changer

I knew nothing about Reddit before this. I didn't even know how it worked.

But after watching a few YouTube videos of SaaS founders sharing how they promoted their products, I discovered this strange platform. At first, it felt a bit weird. But eventually, I figured it out and in short, it's a gold mine.

Reddit has communities for almost everything. And if you pick the right ones, your users are already there. For inov-ai, which targets small to medium SaaS businesses trying to scale through better understanding of user feedback, there are relevant spaces like r/SaaS, r/SideProject, and many more filled with founders, PMs, and builders.

So I just started talking about the product.

Reddit increased our reach

Another surprising thing about Reddit: if your content is useful or resonates, it can surface fast. A single post can be seen by over 1,000 people.

That's exactly what happened. In just a few weeks, our website got over 2,000 visits, much of it driven by Reddit.

I also recently discovered that Google is recommending Reddit posts as part of its search results which explains the referral numbers coming from Google. Of course, we did a lot of SEO optimization with inov-ai, but we believe Reddit played a major role in influencing that traffic.

I built new networks on Reddit

Through different posts, I connected with people interested in what we’re building including a potential partners who could help fill our marketing gaps, and others looking to explore integrations.

After that, we saw the need to integrate Calendly directly into our platform. A few days later, we received our very first demo request through the link — which led to a promising conversation and a follow-up meeting, increasing our chances of connecting with even more potential users and partners.

New Landing Page Inspired by Reddit

At one point, I was frustrated that people weren’t spending much time on our site and even worse, they weren’t signing up or subscribing to our services, despite the decent traffic we were receiving.

So, I took that frustration to Reddit and shared a post. The replies were overwhelming, filled with thoughtful and actionable feedback.

Since then, inov-ai has received a complete facelift a revamped landing page with clearer CTAs, social proof from startups we’re working with, and a stronger value narrative.

Here is an example of a thread of good thoughts that we actually applied from linked in. Shout out to who ever the person was!

Final thoughts

If you're trying to drive traffic to your product, especially in the early stages, try Reddit.

It has specific, engaged communities where people will gladly test, share feedback, and even recommend your product, if it delivers real value.

Best,

Bright

Building AI-Powered Tools as a Solo Founder: Lessons from the Trenches (inov-ai)

godbright — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 13:08:19 +0000

When I started building inov-ai, I wasn’t aiming for a product i was just in the journey of learning a flashy framework used to simplify the development of apps powered by LLMs. But before i know it i was in the journey of solving a real problem the pain of collecting and making sense of user feedback. Like many solo founders, I began with an idea, a tight budget, and more stubbornness than resources (Lucky being a student you get a bunch of free resources with the github student account) . Here’s a look at the gritty path of building an AI-powered SaaS product without a team, capital, or much of a safety net.

Lesson 1: The payments infrastructure Isn’t Built for Founders third world Countries
My first real hurdle wasn’t code or design it was payments. In most African countries stripe is not supported, well you would ask why did this guy start with stripe whilst there a lot of solutions out there which are supported in Africa, Well the answer was after research and considering the kind of customers that i was targeting, i was concerned that people might not be aware of the payments providers and they might hesitate to pay through them and second it was clear that all the other providers would not pay in the currency my customers would paying in, so then Stripe was an obvious choice, And thus where my journey to uncover other alternatives such as Stripe , Lemon squeezy and Polar started. But Alas, That meant I couldn’t just plug and play payments like most tutorials show. I researched endlessly, used a third-party service to incorporate abroad, verified my identity across borders, and finally, weeks later, got my first payment infrastructure live. It was messy, expensive, and time consuming.

But when the first payment notification came in (BTW it came in 3 days after incorporating stripe and weirdly enough it was not even from someone i had shared the platform with, it was just a random person in the world), it was worth it.

Lesson 2: Marketing is not an easy fit
When I posted Inov-ai on Product Hunt a popular launching tool for Saas products, I imagined at least a few hundred curious eyes. What I got was... silence. No upvotes, no traction. It was humbling.

That failure led me to explore better channels. I learned that niche communities (like certain Reddit subreddits and indie founder communities on X) were way more effective. I got real feedback, improved my landing page copy, and even landed my first customer through organic Reddit posting.

Lesson 3: User Feedback is Gold (and a Mess)
Ironically, even while building a feedback tool, I struggled with user feedback. It came in from mostly back and forth whatsApp messages, Reddit, support forms on our site, DMs all scattered. That’s when I realized inov-ai needed a smarter interface. So I built Airi, an AI bot that lets you chat with your feedback. You can ask, "What are users struggling with on onboarding?" and get a direct summary from real user data.

Lesson 4: Low Resources Means High Ingenuity
When your server has limited RAM and CPU, (Due to limited resources we are still rocking the T2 micro from AWS upgrading soon) and it sure sometimes crashes randomly under traffic, you don’t throw money at the problem you build a Telegram bot to ping you when it goes down. That's something that i picked in my rounds through Reddit posts, And so i build a bot that now also alerts me to new user signups, when the server starts or when it shuts down unexpectedly. It’s not elegant, but it works, and it proves you don’t need fancy dashboards to stay in control.

Where We Are Now

inov-ai is live and improving fast.

It helps SaaS product teams turn raw customer feedback into actionable insights by:

Automatically organizing and tagging input from surveys and forms.
Detecting patterns, sentiment, and key themes
Letting you chat with your feedback through Airi to explore what matters

We recently landed an amazing startup business called ghala, And because we are still in the season of iterating fast and improving the product, we have been receiving a lot of constructive feedback.

We also opened up a free trial because we want more early-stage teams to explore the product, And above all we are learning a lot from the marketing experience.

Just click this link to check it out: [inov-ai(https://inov-ai.tech) and if you’re building in the trenches too, I’d love to hear your story.