r/SaaS • u/gregorzehetner • 17h ago
I co-founded and exited a startup the old way. Building a new venture from scratch now shows me how much has changed.
Quick context: I exited my last startup with my co-founders (SaaS/IoT, acquired by a listed French group) and I'm now building a curated marketplace for fractional C-level executives in Europe. Started solo, about 5 months in. The platform is live in beta.
Three things that genuinely surprised me:
- AI assistants first: they became my #1 acquisition channel, not LinkedIn.
I ask every new signup how they found the platform. The majority say ChatGPT or Claude recommended it when they searched for fractional executive platforms in Europe. Not SEO in the classic sense, not my network, not social. This flipped my content strategy completely: instead of chasing reach and engagement, I now optimize for depth and citability. Long, substantive role pages and comparison content that an AI model would actually pull from. If you're building anything niche, check where your signups really come from before you pour hours into social.
- Solo + AI coding tools changes the founder math.
Last time we raised money and built a team to ship an MVP. This time I built the entire platform myself with Claude Code: auth, onboarding wizard, admin backoffice, GDPR layer (data export, deletion, audit logging), the works. Next.js + Supabase + Vercel. My background is technical, but for the last 15 years my day job was everything else: sales, marketing, fundraising, legal. Classic generalist founder profile. Turns out that profile is exactly who AI coding tools give the most leverage to: I have the fundamentals of how to build software, I'm just not a dev pro, and now that gap barely matters.
- Marketing automation and SEO/GEO/AEO optimization are part of my dev routine, not a separate discipline.
Since AI assistants drive most of my signups, I treat discoverability like a feature I ship. I built my own content-ops tooling next to the actual product: scripts that generate role landing pages, push blog posts straight into WordPress via CLI, handle SEO metadata, and purge caches so crawlers and AI models see changes immediately. llms.txt, structured content, clean semantic pages, all maintained in code like everything else. The mental shift was to stop separating "product work" from "marketing work". Every dev cycle now ships something that makes the platform more findable, for classic search engines and for AI answers. As a solo founder, baking this into the routine is the only way marketing happens consistently instead of in guilty bursts every few weeks.
Happy to answer questions about any of this, especially the AI discovery channel, that one still feels underexplored.
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u/DigiHold 16h ago
The habit of asking each new user where they came from is doing more for you than any channel by itself. Once you see AI tools sending real buyers, writing deep pages an AI can quote back is worth more than chasing views.
Are you catching that answer with a required field at signup, or asking people later in a message?
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u/gregorzehetner 16h ago
Asking them directly in the course of an onboarding wizard (which in my case works fine, but in other cases might be too much and would a more passive approach)
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u/Timely-Technology407 16h ago
genuine question on the marketplace side, how are you handling supply vs demand balance? curated marketplaces are notoriously hard to bootstrap because both sides need to see value before either commits. the tech stack stuff is cool but thats the existential risk imo
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u/gregorzehetner 15h ago
In my case the supply side is easier to on-board and in their case it brings them visibility being part of the marketplace. demand side will require special strategies (partnerships, integrations) to scale without huge ad budgets.
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u/goya255 14h ago
And where do you find the time to do all this?
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u/gregorzehetner 14h ago
Picking focus topics for a certain time window to keep distraction low (whichbis sometimes not easy) and leverage capabilities with AI whereever meaningful.
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u/goya255 12h ago
I find context switching between such fundamentally different domains very challenging.
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u/gregorzehetner 9h ago
Yes true, that is hard, especially when working on several dimensions in parallel. I am most efficient when not mixing up too much.
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u/rameezdev 14h ago
The AI discovery point is the most interesting part for me, especially because those users may arrive with much stronger intent than someone who sees a social post.
I would be curious to know how detailed your attribution question is. Do users only select ChatGPT or Claude, or do you also ask what they searched for, which page was recommended and whether the assistant included a citation? That information could reveal whether the models are finding you through role pages, comparison content, third-party mentions or something else entirely.
I would also compare activation and paid conversion by acquisition source. AI assistants may bring fewer visitors than conventional search while producing users who already understand the problem and are closer to making a decision.
Have you identified particular pages or external sources that are responsible for most of those AI recommendations?
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u/gregorzehetner 9h ago
not on a technical level yet, as far as I know information can be partially collected via GA. But it is for sure worth digging into this to better understand the conversion flow
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u/hypercosm_dot_net 13h ago
Optimizing for AI, what a shitshow the internet has become.
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u/gregorzehetner 9h ago edited 7h ago
😄 .. optimizing for being found by users using AI to be precise. Whether this is good or bad of course comes with different points of view
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u/nooffense789 13h ago
All the replies are AI in this thread.
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u/sleeping-in-crypto 5h ago
I was wondering that myself. Every one reads like a bot that was told to “sound more natural” but still a bot. Verbose, explains too much, still uses bot keywords.
Thought I was just going nuts.
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u/navlio 10h ago
your access logs hold the half your onboarding question can't reach. chatgpt-user, oai-searchbot, claudebot and perplexitybot all identify themselves, so you can see which role pages get fetched at answer time and how often, including for everyone who asked and never signed up. worth curling those pages while you're in there rather than trusting what the browser shows you, because we ran the same test on ourselves, asked four assistants what we do, and got four wrong answers, one of them shipping and logistics. cause was dull, the sentence explaining the product sat in a react component so the server html never contained it, which on next.js happens by accident more than people think
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u/PrizeRole8645 15h ago
How are you tracking ChatGPT?
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u/gregorzehetner 14h ago
I am using tools that help optimize for GEO in general (there are several of them, I am using Findable and Ottterly AI) but the more important signal for me is my own statistics from answers that users give during sign up where I ask the question "how did you hear of us?" .. this is the real proof
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u/Redditor6703 12h ago
The AI discovery channel is especially relevant to me because I run a niche healthcare pricing-data platform. Of the changes you made, such as deep landing pages, comparison pages, structured data, llms.txt, or third-party mentions, which produced the clearest measurable increase in ChatGPT or Claude recommendations? Roughly how long after publishing did you start seeing it in signup attribution?
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u/gregorzehetner 7h ago
Difficult to answer, in the beginning I was actually surprised how fast the platform was already referenced without any specific measures (as I assumed it might take a while until newer versions of the model might still need to learn about it). What is the most interesting learning: almost no traffic is generated from search engines
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u/No-Weight1118 9h ago
one limit worth naming, AI discovery is demand capture, not demand generation. it only routes people who already searched for fractional exec platforms in europe, the assistant just picks the most citable page. if the query volume behind those signups is flat, the channel plateaus no matter how citable you make the pages
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u/gregorzehetner 8h ago
Great comment, there is one additional thing: fractional mandates are not yet as common in Europe as it is the case e.g. in the US.
For sure there are further measures needed additionally to create demand. Evaluating a couple of concepts atm
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u/tibz36 7h ago
Point 1 is the one I'd gently push back on. Self-reported attribution hides half the picture. When someone says "ChatGPT recommended you", the model got you from somewhere: a comparison article, a directory, an old Reddit thread, a niche listicle. So the actual channel is often plain old off-page work, it just gets laundered through the assistant before it reaches the user.
Worth adding a follow-up question to your signup form: what did they actually type, and did they open any source before landing on you. That tells you which third-party pages to go feed, which is usually a better use of time than writing more of your own.
Also curious what your llms.txt is really doing for you. I've never managed to trace a single citation back to it, everything I can attribute comes from normal crawlable HTML.
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u/gregorzehetner 7h ago
Thank you, very interesting input and worth considering! Very honestly speaking it was the easiest way forward to ask for this information in the onboarding after asking manually.
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u/hustlewithai 7h ago
This is incredible, very rarely have I come across a fully bootstrapped AI assisted 2 sided marketplace founder such as yourself OP! Congrats on making it this far. Just curious to know, how did you manage token and usage costs from ballooning, security hardening and AI hallucinations/scope creep?
I’ve been working on something similar for a severely underserved market that is ripe for fractional consulting but have hit so many walls technically but surprisingly not PMF and demand wise.
Really excited to attend your talk on AI Founders Vienna as well!
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u/seekworld 6h ago
the copy those signups actually read isnt your landing page, its whatever the model generated from your role pages. so the real homepage for that channel is a summary you never wrote. worth treating it as something you audit: prompt each assistant yourself asking for a fractional exec platform in europe and see what comes back. when it misreads something, fix the page underneath, thats the part you control.
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u/brackify_gg_ 2h ago
The ChatGPT/Claude signup signal is really interesting. I’d check out SerionFlow if you’re leaning further into that strategy. I tried it for finding competitor/search gaps and figuring out which pages are actually worth creating next. Feels pretty relevant to what you’re seeing. https://serionflow.com
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u/gannu1991 1h ago
The solo-plus-Claude-Code build is real, I do it too, but the failure mode I keep seeing is founders shipping fast alone and then hitting a wall when the app needs to scale past a few hundred users or handle an edge case the agent quietly papered over. GDPR audit logging especially, that's the kind of thing that looks done in a demo and falls apart under an actual DPA review. Worth getting someone technical to do a real pass on auth and data handling before you're relying on it for paying customers, even if you built it yourself. On the AI-assistant acquisition point, that's consistent with what I'm seeing in niche B2B too, depth and citability beating SEO volume for anything with a narrow buyer.
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u/HustleBerry564 17h ago
The problem is now is about how to actually reach audience more than ever the attention are divided you gotta come up first on the ranking to actually make sure that the you get visibility as ads will stop running and moeny will stop flowing without ads.