Built a micro SaaS to kill the one freelancing task I hated, been dogfooding it on my own clients for months

Solo freelancer here, about 4 years in. The work I love. Writing proposals I did not. I'd burn an hour or two on one, send it, and half the time the client wouldn't even open it. Felt like throwing unpaid hours into a hole.

So I built a small tool for myself to stop doing it by hand. It generates the proposal with my own branding, and handles the bits around it too, clients, invoices, a bit of analytics. Nothing enterprise, just the stuff a solo person actually needs. Classic micro SaaS, built by one person to solve one annoying problem.

Few honest takeaways from using it on real client work:

The time saved on writing mattered less than I expected. The real unlock was pricing. I'd lowballed myself for years out of fear, and once the tool started suggesting fair rates for my region I actually charged more and my close rate went up. Still weird to me.

Scope creep is real even solo. It started as "just proposals" and I kept bolting on invoices, projects, analytics. Half of me thinks the focus is the strength, half thinks I diluted it. Genuinely unsure.

Dogfooding beats any roadmap. Every feature that's actually good came from me hitting a wall in my own freelance work, not from guessing what users want.

It's live at novadraft.io if anyone wants to poke at it, but honestly I'm more curious about the journey side.

Question for other micro SaaS folks here: when you built something for your own workflow first, did you ever struggle to know if it was actually a product or just a tool that only fits you? That's the line I keep second-guessing.