I Found the Best SaaS Advice of 2025 Buried in a Reddit Comment Section
Last Wednesday night, I was doomscrolling. You know the drill.
Then I saw it. A post on Reddit with a title that was pure founder-bait: "My #1 Advice for Anyone Starting a SaaS in 2025."
It had all the greatest hits: Charge from day one. Retention is king. Talk to your users. I nodded along, feeling smart and validated.
Then I made the fatal mistake. I opened the comments.
And what I found was a train wreck. A beautiful, glorious train wreck where all the neat, tidy advice from the original post got smashed to pieces by reality.
The post itself was useless. But the arguments, the angry replies, and the author's own cringey behavior in the comments? That was a masterclass.
The Dirty Secret About Viral SaaS Advice
Here’s what the gurus who post these lists don’t tell you: pre-packaged advice is a comforting lie.
It’s designed to be shared, not used. It makes you feel like you have a map, but you’re still lost in the woods.
The real playbook isn’t in the bullet points. It’s in the messy, contradictory, and brutally honest feedback from people actually trying to build things. I spent more time analyzing the fights in that comment section than I have in most business books.
That’s not procrastination. That’s where the real lessons are.
What Actually Works (Based on People Fighting on the Internet, Not a Tidy List)
I decided to distill the chaos into a real strategy. No more nodding along to advice that sounds good but goes nowhere.
Here’s what I learned.
1. The Money Question Isn’t "If," It's "How"
The thread kicked off with the classic tough-guy advice: “Forget free trials, charge from day one.”
Everyone loves this. It sounds so decisive. It filters out the tire-kickers and gets you feedback from people with skin in the game. One commenter agreed: “So true. Charging early filters out the non serious folks.”
But then someone else pushed back: “I don't fully agree... You can discover big things with the free ones.”
Who’s right? They both are. And they’re both wrong.
The real lesson: Stop asking if you should charge. Start asking for commitment.
Cash is just one form of commitment. The real goal is to find out if a user is serious. The "charge from day one" mantra is a sledgehammer for a problem that needs a scalpel.
Here are smarter ways to test for commitment:
The $1 Trial: This was the original author’s real recommendation, buried in a reply. A buck is nothing, but pulling out a credit card is a huge psychological hurdle. It separates the curious from the committed. It’s the best of both worlds.
The “Uncomfortable” Price: My favorite comment came from a founder who said to charge a price that makes you uncomfortable. Why? It’s a commitment device for yourself. If you’re charging $199/month, you can't ship a buggy piece of crap. You are forced to deliver real value.
The Time Commitment: Can't charge yet? Ask for an hour of their time for a detailed onboarding call. If they won't give you an hour to help them solve a problem, they were never going to give you their money.
The test? If you can't figure out how to prove a user is serious without taking their money, your product's value probably isn't clear enough.
2. The "80% Marketing" Rule Is a Trap
Next up: “Post-launch is 80% marketing, 20% product.” and “Market shamelessly.”
For most founders, "shameless marketing" is pure terror. As one guy confessed, "goddamn it sooo freaking hard haha!"
He's right. It is. But then we got a live demonstration of what "shameless" looks like. The original poster replied to nearly every comment with the same canned sales pitch for his dev shop.
It was spammy. It was annoying. And it was a perfect example of the marketing paradox. On one hand, he was doing it—putting himself out there. On the other, he was turning potential fans into enemies.
The real lesson: Your business is a leaky bucket. Your job is to know where the leak is.
The "80% marketing" rule isn't a permanent state; it’s a snapshot. Your focus needs to swing like a pendulum.
Stage 1: The Empty Bucket (0-100 users). Your job is 80% marketing. You need to pour people in. This is the "shameless" phase. Do things that don't scale. Annoy some people. The Reddit author's spammy comments? That's an empty-bucket tactic.
Stage 2: The Leaky Bucket (100-1,000 users). People are coming in, but they're churning out just as fast. Stop marketing. Your focus is now 80% product. Talk to churned users. Fix onboarding. Plug the damn holes. Pouring more marketing into a leaky bucket is just burning cash.
Stage 3: The Expanding Bucket (1,000+ users). The bucket holds water. Now you swing back to scalable marketing—content, ads, brand.
The question isn't whether to do marketing or product. The question is: Where is the biggest hole in my bucket right now?
3. "Best Practices" Can Kill Your Business
Of course, the list had some "duh" advice like “Offer Google login.” and “Make your landing page fast.”
No one sets out to build a slow, ugly website. But the real gold was a comment that blew up a piece of universally accepted wisdom.
Someone dropped this bombshell: “#1 is false! We had to remove Google login from our paid ads funnel because it was causing dropoffs.”
Boom.
A "best practice" was actively losing them money. In their specific context—cold traffic from paid ads—the extra click and permission screen was just enough friction to kill a sale.
The lesson? If a "best practice" isn't based on a conversation you had with your own users, you're just guessing. One founder put it perfectly: "Half the founders I know spend more time tweaking their pricing page than actually talking to users."
That's the disease. We hide behind analytics and A/B tests because we're terrified of having an awkward human conversation.
My Hard-Learned Lesson (And What It Actually Cost Me)
I once spent two weeks implementing three different social login options for a project. I was so proud. It was a "best practice."
Result: Zero impact on conversions.
Then I spent one afternoon on Zoom with three users who had just churned.
Result: I discovered our onboarding was confusing and the "aha!" moment was buried. Fixing that took a day and increased activation by 30%.
Total cost of my "best practice" obsession: two weeks of wasted dev time.
The 3-Day Test That Will Save Your SaaS
Here's your homework. Forget the tidy lists. Get messy.
Pick ONE "best practice" you follow (e.g., "send a weekly newsletter"). Spend 30 minutes arguing for the exact opposite. What if you only emailed users when it was critical? This forces you to justify your strategy, not just copy it.
Schedule TWO "problem" calls. Get on Zoom with two target users. Ask them this: "Tell me about the most frustrating part of your workday." Shut up and listen. Don't pitch. Don't ask for feature requests. Just listen.
Do ONE "shameless" thing. Post about your product somewhere that feels a little scary. Send a cold DM to a dream customer. You don't have to be a spam-bot, but you have to push past your comfort zone.
The Truth About Finding Advice That Actually Works
The best SaaS playbook isn't written by gurus on a blog. It's written in the chaotic, contradictory, and honest feedback of the market.
Your job isn't to find the perfect map. It's to learn how to navigate the territory.
The real question isn't "What's the best advice?"
It's "What did my users' actions—not their words—teach me today?"
Start there. Your business will thank you.