Full-stack dev & marketer starting my journey to build meaningful SaaS

Hi Product Hunt community,

Quick introduction: I am a full-stack developer who also works freelance in Meta marketing.

Along the way, I got into game development as well and built a few small games just to explore how that creative side of tech works.

For the past few years, whenever I hit tedious bottlenecks in my daily work or client marketing operations, I built custom scripts and automation tools to fix them.

Lately, I decided to take things a step further. Instead of just patching my own small headaches, I want to start a journey to build a single, solid SaaS that solves a real, significant problem for others.

My main hurdle right now is finding authentic, painful problems worth solving. It is easy to write software, but much harder to pinpoint what people genuinely struggle with and would actually pay to fix.

On top of that, in this era of AI-assisted programming, everyone can spin up code in minutes. My goal is to use AI to speed up the build process without ending up with generic, low-value AI slop that solves nothing.

To those of you who have launched real products:

1. How did you uncover your first validated problem? (Customer interviews, community listening, or something else?)

2. How do you leverage AI tools while ensuring the product delivers genuine, defensible value?

Excited to be here and learn from your experiences!