I am having the same problem trying to kick-start a SaaS being fully self-funded (shameless self-plug:
https://codeinput.com). Pretty much all venues are gate-kept. Even the traditional social media is now behind moderators who have their own incentives or run their own agendas. Being able to grow "organically" is impossible as the corporate have taken the eyeballs timeshare and they are locking it behind their advertising system.
> Those that are still alive are almost undiscoverable due to google being gamed to death by SEO companies.
SEO is impossible if you just started. You just rank nowhere. There is tons of spam out there outranking you. Add to that, in the near to medium future, probably all search results will be ads anyway. I've looked into ads but they are too damn expensive. Might make sense for someone who just raised $x million but without outside funding they are unreachable.
> Reddit, once source of authentic content, is bots talking to bots and people trying to sell and promote. Most of youtube videos are part of someone's sales funnel.
These are the last remaining venues if you don't want to pay for Ads. The problem is that to generate attention, you have to make your photos/videos/titles "outrageous". I pretty much stopped watching videos on youtube now as every other "face" is just too cringe. I reverted back to old school traditional TV channel (they stream on youtube).
> ProductHunt, IndieHacker and Show HN communities are being gamed with cheap to produce SaaS prototypes following MVP concept. Almost all of them are getting very little to no traction.
There are two factors in most of these products/communities. 1, it's sellers selling to sellers. It just doesn't work. 2, there is very little work on the product itself because the creator wants to "test" the market. There is this idea that you need a very clunky MVP to validate your idea before you actually build it.
I personally don't believe in this as I don't recall myself ever using such a product. If the product is too bad/unusable, I just close the window and move on even if I do need the product. Contacting the admin/creator is just too time consuming and the back and forth is not worth it. Also sure as hell I am not going to put a credit card in there.
I think lots of good ideas are being wasted because of this.
> As a result, traditinal startup advice becoming irrelevant as people develop SaaS blindness and don't want to waste their time giving feedback in exchange for nothing.
SaaS are really hard to sell. Extremely I might say. SaaS are subscriptions and there isn't really much things you can sell as a subscription that users will find useful and rely on. For feedback, you are unlikely to get anything useful unless the person is your friend, colleague and even so. You need someone personally invested in your platform to dedicate time and effort.
> Please, prove me wrong, but major AI companies are operating at a loss, creating (OpenAI, Anthropic) and reselling (Cursor, Lovable) tokens at a loss on each stage, with a hope to recoupe it with IPO from pension funds and other holders of someone else's money.
Yes, that's Silicon Valley in a nutshell.
> Are there any products worth attention created on platforms like Lovable, Bolt? Any code worth reading generated by Cursor, Windsurf?
No. SaaS are too complex to be built by AI editors. AI editors can put a simple clone of something that exists a lot with minor modifications. They are worse for anything else and you better use the chat directly as longer contexts degrade the quality of answers.