Nothing is easy but there has never been more resources, support and tooling for indie SaaS makers. If you want to get started the indiehackers community is fantastic and my inbox is always open for answers/encouragement Shane at Cronitor.io
It’s actually a chore to get a meaningful critique from a customer they just don’t care enough and will just cancel.
If you try to launch something, and it doesn't go well for anyone - well, you learned something. I do a martial art (Brazilian Juijitsu) where one of the cliches is "you win or you learn". It may be a cliche, but it applies to a lot of things. But to extend the metaphor, you have to get on the mat.
Also, you’d be surprised how most people sound harsh but actually don’t really mean to. They’ll most likely completely change their tone after you’ve contacted them and tell them you’d like their opinion on future improvements. Also, if by any chance those people finaly use your product, you have a high chance that they become strong proponents and advertisers for your product.
Getting anyone to care enough to give you any feedback at all is a sign you are onto something.
I've been running a SaaS for a couple of years now and learned to take all feedback from customers very, very seriously, but also largely ignore feedback from non-customers. As an example, most people who whine about your B2B SaaS being "too expensive", are non-customers. I did some experiments with discounts, these people inevitably leave anyway.
Most real customers will give you feedback that is constructive, which immediately makes it positive. E.g. rather than whine or complain they will point out a missing feature or show how the software fails.
So, while anxiety is very real (solo founder anxiety is a major issue), it should not come from negative feedback.
There's a good chance that, if you're like me, your anxiety about putting it out there leads you to tell yourself that if you just do this one other feature that it'll be ready. So you wait, and you do it. But it isn't quiiiite there yet. So you repeat that cycle. After a while, you've built up your expectations — both of how good it'd have to be to receive attention, and of what kind of attention you'd need to receive to justify the investment of time — that it's almost an impossible bar to meet. So … you don't ship.
I'd encourage you to ship things earlier in the process. As Matt Mullenweg said, "if you’re not embarrassed when you ship your first version you waited too long." (https://ma.tt/2010/11/one-point-oh/)
I'd also be more than happy to give you friendly-but-honest feedback, if it'll help. Email in profile.