ForthWrite
AI email writer for Gmail and Outlook that learns your voice
Zero revenue so far. A few dozen trial users. I want to write this now, before I know how it turns out, because those posts are more useful than the retrospectives.
What building looks like as a non-technical founder
I built this entirely with Claude, Cursor, and patience. Progress looked like a series of upward-trending loops: fix one thing, something else breaks, fix that, something else breaks. It's never felt like a straight line, but has always trended in the right direction. I think that's the thing non-technical founders underestimate about AI-assisted building. You can get there, but it's not as easy as "tell Claude what to do".
The hardest part wasn't the AI or the Chrome extension or the Stripe integration. It was debugging things I couldn't fully read. When you can't parse a stack trace fluently, every error is a puzzle with missing pieces. I got faster at it, but it never got easy.
What distribution looks like at week 2
I've been submitting to directories (Uneed, TAAFT, Betalist, SaaSHub, G2, Microlaunch). Getting site visitors. 1 signup from directories so far, but it's been less than 24 hours so I'm not drawing conclusions.
TAAFT sent out a newsletter mention today. Too early to tell.
Instagram and LinkedIn video got engagement and support from people I know. No conversions. Support from your network and revenue from strangers are completely different things, and I think this is the lesson most people learn first.
I haven't found the channel yet, so right now I'm running the experiments to find it.
What I'm watching this week
TAAFT newsletter conversion rate over the next 72 hours is my first real signal. Then I'm posting on Hacker News and Reddit (r/SideProject, r/ChromeExtensions) next Tuesday. HN will tell me if the technical angle resonates with the people who'd actually scrutinize the product.
If none of those move, I'll start being more direct about who I'm reaching out to (sales teams, executive assistants, real estate brokers). People for whom email volume is a real cost, not just an annoyance.
Question for the community
For those who've been through an early launch like this: was there a moment where it clicked that the channel you were betting on wasn't the one? And how long did you give it before you pivoted to something else?
7 Comments
Email writing tools live or die on trust in tone consistency, not feature completeness. Most users will tolerate imperfect drafts, but they drop off fast when it starts drifting even slightly from how they actually write under pressure.
Right now the bigger gap is not generation quality, it is proving the model stays aligned over weeks of real inbox behavior instead of just sounding right in isolated examples.
Agreed, and that aligns with what we're doing at ForthWrite. The more examples the user generates, the closer we get to their voice. Alignment is there from the jump, and gets better with time.
What stood out to me is that most of the post is framed as a search for the right channel.
I'd be curious how confident you are that channel selection is the decision the current signals are actually pointing toward.
Early on, it's surprisingly easy for different explanations to look like the same problem.
Fair challenge, and honestly, I'm not highly confident. Part of why I wrote the post now rather than after the fact.
Got first traction last night, here's some real data since posting: TAAFT newsletter drove 11 signups in roughly 16 hours, with 3 converting to Pro trial (27% paid rate). But 5 of those free signups did zero email import, which is the setup step that makes the product actually work. So even if the channel is right, something in onboarding is losing people before they get value.
You're right that "wrong channel," "wrong message," and "wrong onboarding" can all look the same at this stage. I don't have enough data to rule any one of them out yet, but the activation gap feels like the most honest place to start.
That's actually the part I'd be most interested in.
Reading your reply, I can already see a few different stories that could plausibly be told from the same set of observations, and they don't all point to the same next decision.
I've got a few thoughts on that, but it's probably more than I'd try to unpack properly in a thread.
What's the best email to reach you on?
Would love to hear what you're thinking, thanks.
It's curtis @forthwrite .ai (can't post links, excuse the disjointedness)
Appreciate it. Just sent a note over.