One week into my launch. Zero sales, but a couple of interesting numbers.
Launched on Product Hunt last week, ran a small Google Ads test
(€5-7/day), posted on Twitter and a few directories.
One week later: zero paying customers. Worth saying plainly.
But a couple of things surprised me. The ad test got 935 impressions
and 38 clicks — about 4% CTR, which I'm told is decent for search ads.
So people are clicking. Nobody's converted yet, but 38 visits isn't
really enough data to know if that's a real problem or just normal
small-sample noise.
The product: AI roasts your website, you get 3 specific issues +
fixes via email, €10, no subscription.
Genuinely curious from anyone who's been through a similarly quiet
first week or two — did something specific change before sales
started, or did it just take volume and time?
Trending on Indie Hackers
Launched Lemonvite on Product Hunt today: $5 per event, no ads, no subscription.
38 clicks at 4% CTR tells you one thing clearly: the search intent is there. People are curious enough to click.
The silence after the click is a different problem entirely — and it's rarely about the product itself.
What I'd look at first: the journey between click and €10 decision.
When someone lands on your page, three things need to happen almost simultaneously:
They understand exactly what they're getting (customer journey clarity)
They trust the outcome is worth €10 (perceived value destination)
The path to purchase feels frictionless (zero ambiguity between landing and checkout)
If any of those three break, the click dies quietly.
'AI roasts your website' is an intriguing hook. But 'you get 3 specific issues + fixes via email' — does the landing page show a sample output? Does it demonstrate what that email actually looks like?
Sometimes the gap isn't traffic or pricing. It's that the customer journey doesn't connect the promise to the proof before asking for the decision.
935 impressions is still early. But before scaling spend, I'd dissect where the journey breaks after the click — that's where the real answer lives
This is the most concrete angle anyone's raised yet, and it made me actually go check the page.
There is a sample on the landing page, but it's styled like a hacker-terminal mockup, not an actual preview of what the delivered email looks like. The real deliverable is a clean, light-themed HTML email — different aesthetic entirely from the framing on the landing page.
That gap between "edgy terminal preview" and "calm email you actually receive" might be exactly the disconnect you're pointing at. Worth testing: showing an actual screenshot of the real email instead of a stylized mockup, so the proof matches the promise before asking for €10.
Appreciate you pointing at the click-to-decision journey specifically rather than the top-line number — that's a more useful place to dig.
Week 1 zero sales is normal — but worth asking whether anyone had a real conversation about the problem you solve, not just viewed a landing page.
What's moved the needle for others at this stage: find threads where your ICP is already asking for help, show up with a useful reply before any pitch. Launch posts and PH traffic often aren't buyers.
What does northcoast_dev do, and where did week-1 traffic come from?
Fair question on both counts. I do freelance web development day-to-day — small business sites, the occasional e-commerce setup. This is a side project built mostly with people in that same world in mind: founders and small teams who'd rather hear something blunt than pay for a polished agency audit.
Week-1 traffic was Product Hunt launch day, a small paid search test (low budget, just to get signal), and a handful of posts on Twitter and here. No organic search traffic yet, it's all been pushed rather than pulled so far.
The thread-finding approach is new to me, haven't tried that specifically. Curious where you'd actually look for those — niche subreddits, somewhere else entirely?
Good context — freelance + side project for the same crowd makes sense.
On where to look: niche subreddits where your buyer already asks for help, not launch posts. For "blunt feedback vs agency audit" types, I'd start with r/smallbusiness, r/Entrepreneur, and r/ecommerce — search for posts like "is my website good enough", "agency quoted me $X", "roast my landing page", "why no conversions". Those are conversation threads, not traffic — closer to what PH day-one rarely gives you.
The daily grind isn't writing the reply, it's finding 2–3 fresh threads that match your exact ICP without sounding spammy. That's what I've been building toward.
What's the product URL or one-liner, and any subs you already lurk in? I can pull a small sample list of threads worth replying to (scored + draft replies) so you can see if it's actually useful for northcoast — free, no strings.
Appreciate the offer, genuinely curious to see what that looks like in practice. Product: knallhart.dev — AI roasts your website and emails 3 specific fixes for €10, aimed at founders and small teams who'd rather get blunt feedback than pay for a full agency audit. Subs I'm active in: r/webdev and r/SideProject. Haven't lurked in r/smallbusiness or r/ecommerce yet, but based on what you said above, that's probably exactly where I should start.
Nice job actually sharing numbers instead of guessing — most people don’t even get to 935 impressions in week one.
A 4% CTR is not bad at all, especially for early-stage ads, so the top-of-funnel interest is clearly there. The real signal here is the gap between clicks (interest) and zero conversions (intent mismatch or landing friction).
A few likely reasons this happens in week 1:
Message-product mismatch: “AI roasts your website” is fun, but €10 still needs strong perceived value. Users may be curious but not “problem-aware enough” to pay yet.
Landing page trust gap: First-time visitors often hesitate if there’s no strong proof (examples, before/after roasts, testimonials).
Too little traffic for signal: 38 clicks is still very early — conversion noise is huge at this stage.
Unclear urgency: People may think “I’ll try this later” unless there’s a compelling hook or limited-time angle.
What usually changes things (based on similar early SaaS launches):
Showing real sample roasts upfront (not hidden behind payment)
Adding one strong transformation example (bad site → issues found →
fixed outcome)
Testing a free first roast / freemium hook before charging €10
Narrowing audience (e.g., “landing pages for SaaS founders” instead of all websites)
Improving trust signals (who built it, why it’s reliable)
Early weeks like this are usually not about traffic — they’re about clarity of value in 5 seconds.
Good list. The first point — showing real sample roasts upfront — is actually already live as of today, added real screenshots of actual delivered emails directly on the page, partly because a few people in this thread independently flagged that exact gap. The freemium idea is the one I keep circling back to without having tried it: a free, smaller finding to prove the AI is actually looking at the real page, then charge for the full three. Worried it changes the whole economics, but it's the most concrete unexplored lever here. Narrowing to one specific audience (SaaS founders, say) is tempting too, though I genuinely don't know who's actually buying yet — narrowing feels like guessing before there's data to guess from.
That 4% CTR on search ads is actually a strong signal. It usually means the messaging is landing, even if the conversion layer isn’t there yet.
In early-stage launches I’ve seen, the gap between “people click” and “people pay” often comes down to either (1) onboarding clarity or (2) whether the value is felt in the first 60–90 seconds after arrival.
Curious if you’ve looked at what users do immediately after landing—like scroll depth, time on page, or where they drop off?
Just started looking at exactly that, timing-wise. Set up event tracking a couple days ago — scroll depth to the form, button clicks, that kind of thing — partly prompted by a similar point a few comments up about the landing page not matching what's actually delivered. Don't have enough volume yet to say anything meaningful, but the instrumentation is finally in place instead of guessing. Will share what it shows once there's something real to report.
This sounds similar to a site I made (detectsiteai). I got a few sales but the actual site analysis/review feature was free. I made a few sales though from selling ad spots on the site for a monthly fee. Maybe you could do something similar? before deciding though you certainly want to get more visitors... I'd say at least a few hundred... maybe close to 1k just to get a better idea of conversion. If I was you I would be 100% focused on marketing the product. Either increase your ad spend/duration, but if you can focus on organic growth then even better. Post on X, Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, etc. and try to get as much free traffic as possible
That's a clever pivot, didn't expect that angle. Free tool + ad revenue solves the chicken-and-egg problem differently than a paid product does — you don't need buyer intent, just eyeballs. Tempting, but would mean rebuilding the whole value exchange, not a small tweak. Filing it away as a real option if the €10 model doesn't find its legs. On traffic volume — fair point, a few hundred visitors is probably the minimum before any of these numbers mean anything. Going to keep pushing on that before changing the model itself.
Honestly, a €10 no-subscription tool is such a refreshing offer nowadays.
Your CTR is great, which means the interest is there. It’s just an attention and volume game right now. Don't lose momentum after just one week, the internet just needs a bit more time to discover you.
Hang in there.
Appreciate that, genuinely. Easy to lose perspective on "one week" when it feels longer in the moment. Sticking with it.
40 days on SEO with zero paying strangers is demoralizing, but SEO usually does not pay out for 4 to 6 months, so that part may be slow rather than broken. The faster signal is direct outreach. Have you tried messaging 20 specific agencies that fit, instead of waiting on inbound? Curious what your outbound looks like so far, since we sell to a similar crowd.
Think this might've crossed wires with another thread — I'm only about 2 weeks in, no SEO play yet. But the outbound point stands either way, haven't tried messaging agencies directly yet.
I think in terms of cold start, you can try the following approaches. The first one is to leverage your personal network. Tell your friends around you what your product is and see if they are willing to give it a try. Another good way is to directly send a private message to your competitors. You can send a message to the followers of your competitors on social media. Another thing is to participate in the discussions in various communities and see if there are any genuine expressions of problems. If so, you can provide your solutions at an appropriate time.
Appreciate the list. Personal network is actually the weak point for me specifically, not much to tap into in this space, which is part of why distribution has been the hardest part of this whole thing. The competitor-follower approach is the one I haven't tried and I'm least sure how to do well without it feeling like cold spam. How do you usually approach that without coming across as intrusive?
One week and 38 clicks isn't data, it's noise, and the risk is you start rewriting the page off a sample that can't tell you anything yet. At a normal 1 to 3% conversion, 38 visitors should produce roughly zero sales, so zero isn't a verdict, it's exactly what the math predicts. The trap I see founders fall into is optimizing conversion before they have enough traffic to even see one. Before touching price or copy, get to a few hundred of the right visitors and only then read the funnel. The other thing worth separating: an "AI roasts your website" hook pulls curiosity clicks, and curiosity clicks almost never convert to a paid audit. Entertainment traffic and buyer traffic look identical in your click count and behave nothing alike. Figure out which one you're getting first.
Fair, and noted — not trying to read conclusions out of 38 clicks specifically. What I'm actually acting on isn't the conversion math, it's a separate signal: multiple people on this thread independently pointed at the same concrete thing — the landing page shows a stylized terminal mockup, not what the delivered email actually looks like. That's direct, repeated feedback on the artifact itself, not an inference from outcome data, so I think it's fair to fix regardless of sample size. The roast-vs-fix audience split you and a couple others raised is the bigger open question though — that one probably does need real volume before I can say anything confident about it.
Zero sales but interesting traffic" is the ultimate cliffhanger for any indie developer. Thanks for sharing these early numbers!
I’m currently helping my family promote our niche app, and we’re having the exact same internal debate right now: Should we spend money on paid ads, or stick to the slow grind of cold outreach and community building?
For a highly specific product, ads feel risky because the audience is so targeted, but doing everything manually takes forever. Since you already have some traffic, are you leaning towards organic growth, or are ads on your roadmap? Rooting for you!
Appreciate the support, genuinely. Honest answer: leaning towards a mix rather than picking one. The small ad test (low budget, just to get signal) was actually useful precisely because it's cheap and fast — 4% CTR told me the headline lands with someone, in days rather than weeks. For a niche product I don't think ads alone will ever be the main channel, the audience is too specific and CACs would get ugly at scale. But as a fast, cheap way to test messaging before grinding the slow organic route, it's been worth it so far. Good luck with your family's app, the ads-vs-grind debate doesn't really have a universal answer, it depends a lot on how identifiable your audience is to a platform's targeting.
One week with zero sales is completely normal, especially at that traffic volume. 38 visits is not enough data to draw any conclusions about conversion.
One thing worth looking at on your landing page: the headline ‘AI roasts your website’ is fun but it might be filtering out buyers who want to fix their site, not just hear what’s wrong with it. The people most likely to pay €10 are probably founders
That's a sharp distinction, and it connects to something a few people above pointed at too — there might be two different audiences responding to "roast": people who want to laugh at the result, and people who actually want their site fixed. Right now the headline optimizes for the first group's attention, not necessarily the second group's intent. Worth testing whether leading with the outcome (3 specific fixes) instead of the entertainment angle pulls a different kind of visitor. Going to look at this alongside the email-preview point raised earlier — I think they're actually the same underlying issue from two different angles.
I feel like the product doesn't fully solve a problem, that may be why people aren't willing to purchase it.
That's the blunt version of what a few people above have been circling. Curious what gap you're seeing specifically. My current read: it's not that the problem doesn't exist — most websites do have real, fixable issues — it's that the pain is mild enough that paying €10 to find out feels optional rather than necessary. Curiosity gets the click, but "optional" rarely gets the card out. If that's right, the fix isn't really about the product, it's about finding who actually feels this as a real problem rather than just an interesting one.
I also have got some organic people on my website it only have 40 days now and I have total 500+ user only but i dont have any social account and i also dont have backlinks
That's solid for 40 days with zero social and no backlinks — purely organic search then? Curious what's driving it, since that's basically the opposite problem from what I'm dealing with right now.
the thing @aryan_sinh poked at is the real one here and I'd put it even more bluntly — you have a hypothesis (price) and no funnel data, and the danger isn't that you're wrong, it's that the tracking you add next will quietly get built to confirm the thing you already believe.
but honestly, before any of that: having zero conversations is the louder signal than zero sales. 38 clicks and not one reply, question, or "wait does it do X" — that's not a small sample telling you nothing, that's telling you the headline pulls a click but the page doesn't make anyone feel something enough to react. people who almost buy usually leave a trace. silence after the click often means the visit was shallow — curiosity click, not "oh this is for me."
so the question I'd actually chase isn't price. it's: who is the person clicking, and did they want a real audit or did they want to be entertained for a second by "AI roasts your website"? because those convert completely differently, and a roast hook can pull a lot of the second kind. the Sreeja point about the terminal-mockup not matching the real email is part of this too — the whole top of funnel might be selling a vibe, and the €10 ask wants a buyer.
what did the 38 actually do on the page — anyone scroll to pricing at all, or bounce up top? that splits "wrong people" from "right people, wrong page" and those are different fixes.
That's a really good way of putting it.
Especially the point about tracking being built around the explanation that's already sitting in your head.
I hadn't thought about it in quite that way, but I think that's closer to the risk I was trying to get at.
This thread keeps getting sharper, thank you. The curiosity-click vs buyer-intent distinction hits something I hadn’t separated out. “AI roasts your website” is built to be intriguing on its own, independent of whether someone actually wants to be roasted. Those are genuinely different audiences converting at different rates, and I’ve been treating the 38 clicks as one undifferentiated pool. Don’t have the scroll or page-behavior data yet — was running on Vercel’s basic analytics, which only tells me single-page vs multi-page sessions, nothing about in-page behavior. Setting up proper event tracking today, specifically so I can answer your last question with actual numbers instead of guessing. Noted on the confirmation-bias risk too — going in trying to find out whether anyone reached the pricing section at all, not trying to prove the price theory.
you're on the right path with what the numbers are saying. so, the higher the impressions the more visitors you will get on your site.
the main focus now shouldn't be how to reach more people, that seem easy. you should focus on what will make people convert better. your landing page should be converting so much as your product/checkout page.
one of the things to do to make you know what to change is to track users behaviour on your site. watch a session recording and the heatmap.
a week into launch with these numbers shows a great potential, don't be discoraged
Thanks for the encouragement, genuinely needed that today. Good point about heatmaps and session recordings — looking into it now. Want to actually see where the click-to-checkout journey breaks instead of guessing, especially after the comment above about the landing page preview not matching the real email.
glad it helped, honestly, I think that’s the right approach. A lot of people immediately start changing copy or redesigning things without knowing where the actual drop-off is happening.
the heatmaps/session recordings should give you some clues: are people not understanding the offer, getting stuck on a section, clicking things that aren’t leading anywhere, or how long do they spend in a session/section.
also, that landing page preview vs. actual email mismatch is worth paying attention to because as soon as a lead discover mismatch in message, doubt instantly plant in their mind. with that, only little amount of people will still be interested in buying
once you have your data, you can share it for right optimization strategy
Appreciate that, especially the framing around doubt being planted the moment someone notices a mismatch — that's a sharper way to put it than I had in my head. Will share the funnel data once there's enough of it to actually mean something. Thanks for sticking with the thread.
the "AI roasts your website" framing is fun and probably what got the clicks, but curious if the actual delivered output (3 issues + fixes) feels as fun as the pitch promises, or more like a generic audit with a joke tone slapped on top. a lot of "roast" framed products undersell the substance because the pitch is the entertaining part and the deliverable ends up being pretty dry, that mismatch between expectation and delivery could be costing you word of mouth even before it costs you the initial sale
Genuinely good question, and it's a failure mode I worried about while building this — funny pitch, dry audit underneath.
What I tried to avoid: making the humor come from being specific and accurate, not from a joke layer slapped on top of a generic finding. One real line from an actual output, describing a logo
with bad contrast: "It's less a logo and more a ghost whispering its existence." That's pointing at a real, specific problem, not decoration.
Can't promise every single roast lands equally well — depends a lot on the site and what the AI actually finds — but the goal was always tone earned through specificity, not tone pasted over
substance. Appreciate you naming the risk, it's the right thing to watch for with anything branded "roast."
Early launch numbers can be more useful than sales numbers if they show where people are getting stuck.
I would look less at “zero sales” first and more at:
For a very narrow product, even a few real conversations can be a stronger signal than broad traffic.
If people understand the pain but do not buy, it may be a positioning or trust problem.
If people do not understand the pain, it may be a targeting problem.
If the right people ask detailed questions, that is usually worth following up manually.
This is a useful framework, thanks for laying it out.
Mapping it onto what's actually happening: CTR on the small ad test is sitting around 4%, which I'm told is decent for search ads — so people seeing the headline get the pain point enough to click. Conversion past that is at zero so far, small sample (under 40 clicks), but if that holds with more volume, your framework points pretty clearly at positioning/trust rather than targeting.
Haven't had any real conversations yet though — no replies, no questions, nothing to dig into. That's probably the bigger gap right now compared to the sales number itself.
What stood out to me is that the post seems to assume the next useful lesson comes from more data.
That may be true.
But sometimes the first few users are interesting because of what they fail to tell you, not because there aren't enough of them.
I'd be curious what conclusions you've already ruled out.
Honestly — not much ruled out yet, mostly because I don't have visibility into where those clicks dropped off. Bounced on the headline? Scrolled past the form? Hit the price and left? Don't know yet.
What I can rule out: the checkout itself works, I've tested it with real payments.
What I haven't ruled out: price sensitivity, unclear value prop, or a real mismatch between who's clicking the ad and who actually wants this. Don't have granular funnel data yet to say which — that's the next thing to set up.
That makes sense.
I think the reason I asked is that sometimes a lack of visibility creates a temptation to treat the first explanation that appears as the right one.
Then better tracking arrives and ends up answering a different question than the one people thought they were asking.
Curious what you end up finding.
Good point, and a slightly uncomfortable one to sit with.
Honest risk: I already have a hypothesis (probably price), and
adding tracking could just dress that up as fact instead of
actually testing it. Going to try to look at the funnel without
deciding upfront what I expect to find — easier said than done,
but worth naming out loud.
Will share what actually shows up once there's enough data to
say anything real.
That's actually the part I'd be most interested in.
Not the tracking itself.
The fact that you already have a candidate explanation before the visibility exists to support or reject it.
I've got a few thoughts on that dynamic, but it's probably more than I'd try to unpack properly in a thread.
What's the best email to reach you on?
Totally fair — that's probably a better conversation over email
than in a thread anyway. [email protected] works, genuinely
curious to hear your thoughts on this.
Just tried emailing you and it bounced back.
Mind sending over the correct address?
Weird, just tested it myself and it went through fine both ways. Could you paste the exact bounce error you got? That’ll tell us exactly what’s going on. And just to rule out a typo — it’s [email protected], all lowercase.
Appreciate it.
Just sent you an email.