I fell into the same trap of "build, and they will come" multiple times. Reading The Mom Test changed my perspective on things. I cannot recommend that book enough. Good luck. It's possible. I started my SaaS 8 yrs ago and it more than pays for my lifestyle.

I read the book. It’s more entertainment than useful. I just don’t know how to find the people who have problems. I don’t have specific domain knowledge nor I built a following / circle of people to whom I can sell

> I just don’t know how to find the people who have problems

They are all over the internet. Including in this thread, if you read carefully. e.g., OP is clearly stating a problem.

> It's just simply much harder as a small/smaller business to make money and compete with the big boys.

You're conflating two different things. Thanks to software, it's easier today than it's ever been to make money as a small business / solopreneur. It's also harder to compete with the big boys, possibly for the same reason and due to economies of scale.

That's why I don't bother entering the same markets the big boys are in. There are plenty of niche markets which they don't bother touching where a small business can thrive.

Thanks for the tips and catching the typo (fixed).

Is 40k tranasactional emails a month enough to keep a dedicated IP warm? That's my main concern for not using a dedicated IP for transactional emails.

Easily, that’s 55 messages an hour.

What's your spam report rate on Google Postmaster Tools?

Their reputation is probably so poor that GPT won't even show them.

Curious how you're thinking about getting around anti-bot protection. I scrape a lot and I've noticed many highly trafficked sites investing in anti-bot measures recently, with the rise of AI browsers and such. Still, cool idea, congrats on the launch.

I'm planning to add proxy rotation across different regions to help with geo-restricted content and rate limiting. Anti-bot is an arms race though — some sites just can't be monitored without solving a captcha, which isn't something I'm trying to do. Focused on making the common cases work well rather than promising to bypass everything.

Many people have mentioned gym. I second that wholeheartedly. Running, especially has improved my mental health considerably. Also, writing. Maybe start by writing about all the times you wished you were alone and how that will now be possible :)

I can relate to this. Coding satisifies my urge to build and ship and have an impact on the world. But it doesn't make me think hard. Two things which I've recently gravitated to outside of coding which make me think: blogging and playing chess.

Maybe I subconsciously picked these up because my Thinker side was starved for attention. Nice post.

Reminded me of one of Paul Graham's maxims: "do things that don't scale"