We re all builders here, which usually means at some point we looked at something clunky, slow, or frustrating and thought, there has to be a better way. Most products don t start with a grand vision; they start with irritation, curiosity, or firsthand pain.
I d love to learn more about how others here have navigated that journey:
How did you uncover the problem you decided to work on? What signals told you this problem was worth solving? How did you validate (if at all) whether people would actually pay for a solution? Has your product stayed true to the original problem, or did it evolve into something different? What surprised you the most along the way?
I've built my product around traditional SaaS pricing (monthly tiers), but I m starting to wonder if that model is getting outdated, especially with more AI-powered and compute-heavy tools entering the market. That shift requires real architectural changes, instrumentation, metering, billing logic, and UI changes, not just pricing tweaks. It s something I m starting to seriously think about for my own product.
In particular, AI usage has real COGs (every prompt costs money), and I m seeing more platforms experimenting with usage-based models, or hybrids like SaaS base + usage + overage.
For those of you building AI or compute-intensive tools:
