I have built three products. The first two failed for the same reason, and the third one is still working on it.
I'm writing this for anyone who is somewhere in the middle of that and tired of reading launch posts with big numbers in them. Mine has no big numbers.
Before any of this: a blog
This isn't my first attempt at making something online. Back in class 11 and 12, around 2016 and 2017, a classmate and I ran a tech content blog called Axogeek. We wrote about tech and hoped to earn from ads. That never turned into anything, but it was the first time I put something on the internet and waited for people to show up.
Product one: a link shortener
It started as a URL shortener. Nothing clever. I built it mainly to learn backend and deployment, and a shortener is small enough to finish. It was my first real product: I bought a domain and published an actual site, not just a project on my laptop.
It got more use than I expected. Most of the traffic came from South Korea, which I never planned for. Over its life it logged roughly 100k clicks. People created around 60 links, and I made some of those myself, so call it 40 to 45 real ones. About 20 people used it as a product.
Those numbers sound okay until you look at what they are. Clicks on a short link are not customers. Nobody was paying, and I had no idea who the 20 users were or what they needed.
Product two: a creator tools directory
So I turned it into a directory of creator tools. About five tools: a storefront, a YouTube hashtag generator, an Instagram hashtag generator, and a few similar ones.
This one went nowhere, and the reason is simple. Tools like that already exist, plenty of them, and most are free. I wasn't solving a problem anyone had. I was building things because building is the part I'm good at.
The actual problem was mine
Somewhere in there I noticed the one problem I really had: I had no idea how to find people who would use what I build.
So I stopped building tools for other people's problems and built one for mine. That became Xoru. You give it your product, and it scans places like Reddit, X, LinkedIn, Hacker News and Product Hunt for threads where someone is asking for what you sell. Then it helps you write a reply in your own voice. You approve every reply and post it yourself. It never posts for you.
I started with the simplest version: scan the threads, find the good ones, reply by hand.
What worked: commenting a lot
I used Xoru itself to find conversations and join in, mostly on Reddit and a few on LinkedIn. I commented on a lot of threads, a lot of days in a row. A few people reached out. Some said nice things. That brought in my first roughly 50 users. They were all free users. None paid.
Then Reddit shadow-banned me.
There was no warning. My posts got removed first, then my comments. I couldn't comment more than once every five minutes. Anything I did post was invisible. New sign-ups dropped to almost nothing, because the channel that fed everything was gone.
I'm still not sure why it happened. I was posting a lot, and I suspect that was enough. If you rely on one platform for everything, one moderation decision is all it takes to end your growth. I learned that the hard way.
The part I don't love saying: nobody has paid
I added paid plans a month back. Nobody has converted. Two people did a free trial and didn't continue. Right now I have no active users.
I have a few guesses, and I want to be clear they are guesses:
- My early users were mostly indie hackers and solo founders. Many of them are, reasonably, careful about paying for tools. Some wanted something cheaper.
- A few people from agencies told me other tools were better than mine at the time. They might have been right.
- I may have been selling to the wrong people, which is why I'm now aiming at startups and small and mid-sized teams who have an actual budget for this.
My co-founder and I have also been trying cold email. So far it hasn't worked for me either.
What I'm doing now
I've stopped assuming the product will sell itself once people see it. This week the plan is boring and small:
- Find a handful of people who recently asked for exactly what Xoru does, and answer them like a person, not a pitch.
- Show them something real first, then ask for a paid month. No free weeks.
- Stop depending on one platform. LinkedIn and X now matter as much as Reddit did.
- Write down what I learn, including this post.
If this works I'll tell you. If it doesn't, I'll tell you that too.
If you've been here
I'd like to hear from anyone who has gone from zero to a first paying customer. What did the first one look like? Where did you find them? And if you've been shadow-banned somewhere you depended on, how did you recover?
Xoru is at xoru.app. I built it, so take that for what it's worth. If you're in the same spot, I'm happy to look at your threads with you.