2 weeks later: still no paying users. Here's what I've learned.

Same position here, zero paying users. The 42K TikTok views with 137 landing page visitors is the number that stands out most. That ratio suggests the content is working but the bridge between watching and visiting is broken somewhere. People who watch a TikTok and immediately visit a landing page have already decided they want more, 137 visits from 42K views means most of them decided they didn’t need to. The accountant outreach angle is interesting because it bypasses that bridge entirely. One accountant who genuinely has the problem and recognizes it in your product is worth more than another 42K views from people who found it entertaining. The calculator not converting yet isn’t surprising, it tells you what people won’t do but not what they will. The question worth sitting with is what does someone do in the 10 seconds before they leave? That’s where the answer probably lives.

This is a solid, honest update — and you’re closer than it looks.

42K views with 0 conversions usually means interest is there but not strong enough pain to act. The 10-second drop-off is the key signal — people aren’t instantly seeing “this is for me".

I’d focus less on more traffic and more on direct conversations with a very specific ICP. Even 5–10 real conversations can unlock your first paying user.

The 10-second bounce on 137 visits jumped out at me. I'm building a small iOS memo app solo (a Captio replacement) and saw the same pattern early on — TikTok-driven traffic was very high-intent for the topic but very low-tolerance for any "figure out what this is" moment. What flipped it for me wasn't a new lead magnet, it was making the very first sentence above the fold answer "what does this do for me right now." The calculator is a great asset, but a second CTA can split attention. Did you see if visitors who land from TikTok specifically click the calculator, or do they bounce before reaching it?

The 'Zero to One' phase is always the hardest. Most of the 'overnight successes' you see on here actually had weeks or months of silence at the start. Thanks for sharing the raw reality—it's much more helpful than the filtered success stories.

You probably do not have a traffic problem anymore.
You have a trust problem.
If people leave in under 10 seconds, they are not evaluating the product.
They are making a snap judgment that it either feels risky, unclear, or not worth fixing right now.
That usually means the leak is not traffic quality.
It is positioning.
Especially in your category, “clean” is not enough.
The page has to make the pain feel expensive in the first 3 seconds or people bounce before curiosity kicks in.
Right now the first paying user is probably less about more traffic and more about making the cost of doing nothing feel obvious.

42K views → 137 visitors/month is the real bottleneck before the conversion problem. that's like 0.3% click-through. what's the CTA in your videos? feels like the funnel breaks between TikTok and the site way before it breaks on the page itself

We're in a similar spot with iLoquio — an all-in-one platform for creators to sell online courses and live sessions. The traffic-to-conversion gap is something we're actively working through too.

One thing I've noticed: short-form video audiences watch because it's interesting, not because they're actively searching for a solution right now. The people who convert tend to find you when they already have the pain and are actively searching. Targeting niche communities where your exact audience gathers ("how do I monetize my knowledge?", "which course platform should I use?") converts far better than broad content views.

On the 10-second bounce — leading with the specific pain rather than describing features makes a real difference. The hero has to make them feel the problem before showing the solution.

Keep going, NG. Building in public is the right call — even if the path to user #1 is messier than expected.

The funnel math is worth a closer look: 67K video views -> 137 landing page visits/month is your biggest leak, not the landing page itself. People are watching but not motivated enough to click. That's a different problem than hero copy or CTAs.

Two things I'd separate:

1. One week of calculator data on ~30 visits/week is statistically meaningless. Give it 4 weeks before iterating, or you'll kill tests that never had a chance.
2. 0 responses to cold outreach isn't a product signal yet. Offer, list, and copy are three variables before you get to "accountants don't want this."

On Reddit/Facebook: those communities aren't ad averse, they're value averse. If the calculator is genuinely useful, post it free with no email gate, answer questions for two weeks, let people find the product through your replies.

The harder question worth sitting with: are the people watching your TikToks the same people who'd pay? Entertainment-fit and buyer-fit aren't always the same 600 people.

good luck! this road is not easy

In my hones t opinion you, have the wrong people visiting your app. Those people don't need the product you are building, you should look for people who need the solution you are selling

Mirror situation from the inverse angle: I'm pre-launch on Day 8 of a 21-day demand gate using $25 refundable deposits before I write any code. Same 0-conversions number, different vantage.

The thing your post surfaced for me: "no paying users" reads as a verdict, but it's actually still a loop. The signal isn't whether you have users at week N — it's whether week N+1's tactic is informed by week N's silence. Most founders I see (myself included, twice over) freeze on the verdict and stop iterating the loop.

What changed for me this round was committing to a fixed window with a fixed mechanism (deposit gate, hard target, refund-and-walk if missed). The silence becomes a clock instead of a wound. Curious — has the 0-users data started shaping a specific next-experiment in your loop, or is it still mostly diagnostic?

The honesty is refreshing. Most people don't post when
the numbers are zero.

The 10-second bounce rate tells you the landing page
isn't matching what people expect when they click through
from TikTok. They saw something interesting in the video
but the page doesn't continue that same story. Might be
worth making the landing page feel like the next scene
of the video instead of a separate product page.

The accountant outreach instinct is probably right. One
real distribution partner who already has the audience
you want is worth more than any amount of content views.
The hard part is getting them to care enough to reply.

I'm in a similar spot with my own project. Two days into
distribution, zero paying anything, just trying to get
people to look at the work. The building part was easier
than this part by a long way.

Keep posting these updates. The data is useful for
everyone going through the same thing.

Those view numbers are a dream, but a 10-second bounce usually means your landing page feels like "homework" compared to your fun videos. If the "job calculator" asks for too much effort upfront, it might be scaring off your TikTok crowd before they trust you. Turning that chore into a 3-second "aha!" moment is usually the fastest way to stop the leak!

If you could remove one field from that calculator to make it feel instant, what would it be?

High traffic + zero conversions + 10-second bounce rate usually points to one thing: a massive disconnect between the content hook (TikTok) and the landing page promise. They arrive expecting X and see Y. We just went through this exact anxiety launching Phoebe (predictive migraine engine). We ignored TikTok entirely and focused strictly on high-intent, bottom-of-funnel communities. Got 30 paid subs in 7 days because the intent matched the page perfectly. B2B accountant outreach (cold outbound) is a completely different beast than TikTok B2C. You have to pick one and optimize the funnel for it. Send me your LP in DMs, happy to give you a brutal, honest tear-down from a fellow founder.

This is a really honest breakdown, respect for sharing it.

One thing I’ve been noticing (building something in the same “career” space) is that views ≠ intent.

You can get a lot of attention from content, but most of those people aren’t actively looking to solve the problem right now. So when they land, they bounce quickly because there’s no urgency.

The bigger shift for me has been focusing on people who are already in pain:

• actively applying to jobs
• frustrated with rejections
• trying to improve something specific

Those users behave completely differently from general traffic.

Also, on the 10-second bounce, I’ve been seeing similar behaviour, and I don’t think it’s always a “bad landing page” problem. Sometimes it’s just:
→ “This isn’t exactly what I need right now”

Curious - are you tracking what those visitors are trying to do when they land, or just that they leave quickly?

This hits hard. I went through something similar where I kept thinking more views would eventually turn into users, but it never really worked that way.

What changed for me was realizing distribution is a separate problem entirely. Now I try to validate the channel first, like where the actual buyers already are and how they discover things, before going deeper on the product.

In your case the 10 second bounce feels like a mismatch between what people expect from the TikTok and what they see on the page. I had the same issue where the content attracted interest but not intent.

Are you seeing any comments or questions on your videos that hint at what people actually want to do next?

There’s a pattern forming in this thread that’s easy to miss.

Most of the discussion has moved from traffic → conversion → positioning. That’s a real shift. But there’s one assumption still sitting underneath all of it:

That the audience is correct.

Right now the signal looks like this:
42K TikTok views → 137 visitors → 0 paying users.

The natural reaction is to fix the page, the message, the positioning. And some of that is valid.

But that ratio also suggests something else:
You’re generating attention from people who were never close to a decision in the first place.

Not low intent.
Different intent.

Entertainment audiences and buyer audiences behave completely differently. One consumes, the other evaluates. If the input is skewed toward consumption, no amount of landing page iteration will fully close that gap.

That’s why it can feel like things are “working” and not working at the same time. The system is producing activity, but the activity isn’t directional.

So the question shifts again.

Not just:
“Is this traffic converting?”

But:
“Is this the kind of attention that can convert at all?”

Because if the input is off, everything downstream becomes harder than it needs to be.

And if the input is right, a lot of this starts to fix itself faster than expected.

Three weeks in for me and one paid customer behind on the same path, so I will share two pricing lessons that flipped my thinking. Maybe useful, maybe not.

First, subscription versus one-time matters more than the price itself. I started with a £39 monthly subscription and got zero. Pivoted to £7 per report (one-time) and the conversation changed completely. Subscriptions assume an ongoing relationship the user has not yet decided they want. One-time matches the natural cadence of the underlying job, in my case people sign maybe 4 contracts a year. The friction of a subscription was killing me, not the price.

Second, the "free fairness check before paying" framing converts better than a paywall up front, but only because it is a real free, not a teaser-free. If your free tier shows people a real, useful, complete-feeling output that answers their question, then they pay for the upgraded version because they trust the engine. If the free tier withholds the answer, they bounce. Sabri Suby calls this Godfather Offer logic and I think he is right.

What is your current free-to-paid conversion ratio? Mine is undefined because I have not had enough volume yet to be statistically honest about it.

42K TikTok views, 137 monthly site visitors, 0 paying users. The funnel isn't broken at the landing page it's broken at the assumption that view convert. Entertainment audiences and buyer audiences are almost nevr the same people.

42K TikTok views with 137 monthly LP visits is a fascinating ratio. It tells you the content is reaching the wrong end of the funnel: people watch, nod, and leave. The conversion problem isn't on your landing page yet — it's earlier, on the bridge from video to URL.

Two things I'd test before iterating on the LP:

1. Audit the moment in your videos where you say the URL. Most TikTok founders say it once, at the end, after the value is already delivered. Reverse it: hook → a claim that's only resolvable on the LP → URL repeated mid-video and pinned in the comments. The viewer needs a reason to leave the video, and that reason has to land before they swipe.

2. The job calculator with 0 signups is a signal, not a failure. It means people who land want a different next step than the one you're offering. Read the last 30 viewer comments on TikTok end-to-end (not aggregated) — what are they almost-asking? The lead magnet that converts is the answer to the question you keep seeing in the comments, not the one that seems useful from your side.

(Separately, accountant outreach via email/LinkedIn is a different game — it lives or dies on whether you're emailing one specific accountant who literally has the problem you solve, not a list. Volume hurts there.)

Will you keep posting weekly updates? This kind of honest 0-MRR public log is rare and useful for the rest of us.

Two weeks usually means one of three things: wrong people, wrong moment, or the value isn't landing fast enough in the message.

What i've noticed building Closr is that outreach based on static filters (title, company size) barely works. But if you reach out to someone right after they engaged with content about the exact problem you solve, the whole conversation changes. they're already thinking about it.

What channel are you using right now to reach people? happy to look at the actual sequence if you want a second pair of eyes.

42K TikTok views → 137 site visitors is the gap I'd fix first. what does the video CTA look like? that ratio tells me people enjoy the content but don't feel pulled to act.

the contractor who just got burned is doing the right framing - accountants might be the referral path but they're not the person in pain right now. the people who'll convert fastest are the ones who just underquoted a job and felt it. finding where those people vent (not where they discuss tools) is probably the faster path to user one than any outreach sequence

The 42K TikTok views with 0 conversions usually means the content audience and the buyer audience aren't the same person. TikTok rewards entertainment; your buyers want trust + a workflow they can plug in tomorrow morning.

Two questions that helped me: who is on your landing page in the 10-second window, and what were they doing 30 seconds before? If they came from a fun TikTok, they're in browse-mode, not buy-mode. The hero copy has to bridge that gap explicitly: "you saw the video, here's the version you can actually use Monday."

Accountant outreach is going to be your real lane. One warm partnership beats 50K cold views every time. But cold email + LinkedIn from a brand-new account converts at <1% in my experience. The trick is finding the 3-5 accountants who already complain publicly about the problem you solve (LinkedIn comments on accountant influencers, niche subreddits, even Glassdoor). Reply to their actual post first, then DM days later.

Job calculator is a smart instinct but a calculator with 0 signups means the input fields are too many or the output is too vague. Single-input calculators convert way higher than multi-step.

The "land and leave in under 10 seconds" line is the real signal here — short-form can be sending exactly the right viewers and the LP can still kill conversion silently. I'm shipping a Captio-style memo app for iOS in a couple of weeks — one-tap-to-email, no menus — and on my own landing page the same pattern showed up: people arrived primed for a felt problem, but my hero was still answering "what is this app." Swapping that for a single-line "lost a thought because Apple Notes is a labyrinth?" cut the under-10s bounce noticeably. On accountant outreach, the thing that actually unlocked replies in my own narrow-niche outbound wasn't a better pitch — it was leading the subject with one specific thing I'd noticed about that firm. Curious — when viewers land from TikTok, do they expect a tool or a service?

10-second bounce is almost always the H1, not traffic. if the headline names the product, people don't see themselves and bounce. what's yours right now? worth trying the exact sentence your buyer says out loud (their pain, in their words) and seeing if dwell shifts.

on the calculator: utility magnets tend to underperform 'words/templates' magnets pre-PMF. people don't trust the numbers yet but they'll grab a script they can paste tomorrow.

12 days in on my own thing (a planner) and the pattern matches. 5 yeses on cold dms, 0 actual usage. just had a commenter on r/saas reframe it for me, the dms i was sending were basically asking for a favor, not finding people in actual pain. yeses from your network get filtered by relationship more than by whether they actually have the problem.

on the accountant outreach question, worth thinking about whether accountants are the actual pain-shaped audience or whether they're a layer between you and the contractors who just lost $5k underquoting. accountants would give you polite yeses out of professional courtesy, but the contractor who just got burned is the one who'd open your link in 30 seconds.

on the landing page bounce, someone gave me this earlier today and it really clicked: the first 5-8 words on any surface need to be a pain point, not a feature. "stop underquoting" is closer than "job calculator" because one is for the contractor who just got burned, the other is for everyone.

This probably is not a traffic problem anymore, it is a positioning problem. People understand what the product is, but they do not immediately feel why it matters to them right now.

The 10-second bounce is the biggest signal. Especially with TikTok traffic, people arrive curious, not with buying intent. So the hero section has to make the pain feel immediate. “Job calculator for contractors” explains the tool, but something like “Stop underquoting jobs and realizing too late you lost money” explains the consequence.

Also agree with the accountant angle. One trusted accountant with 30–50 contractor clients is probably worth more than thousands of cold views. But instead of pitching the product immediately, the smarter move is probably using those conversations to understand what contractors are already struggling with and reflecting that language back into the landing page.

Building WhatCarCanIAfford gave me a similar experience — financial calculators for specific audiences seem like they should convert, but the 10-second bounce is brutal. What shifted for me was realizing users were leaving because they did not feel the problem yet. I was showing them a calculator before they felt the pain of not having one. Flipping the hero copy to lead with the consequence ("how much car can you actually afford, not the bank's number") before the tool itself dropped my bounce rate noticeably. Also agreed on the accountant angle — in my space it was financial advisors and car dealers. One dealer partner asking their customers to run the numbers is worth more than any cold outreach. The math of going through existing trusted relationships just works better at this stage.

The accountant outreach instinct is right. They can become referral channels, not just direct customers. Worth testing: instead of pitching, ask for 20 mins to understand their clients pain points. That research call often converts to word-of-mouth more reliably than cold demos.

On the 10-second bounce: that usually means the value prop is not immediately quantifiable. Saves you time does not land; shows you X in under 30 seconds does. I have been building WhatCarCanIAfford.com (a finance tool for car buyers) and the biggest difference came from rewriting our hero around a single concrete outcome rather than describing what the product does.

The content working but site not converting is a solvable problem. It means your audience finds the topic interesting but does not see themselves as buyers yet. That gap is usually messaging, not product.

This is helpful and honest. I think early traction can be confusing because interest doesn’t always mean buying intent.

I’m learning that people may like the idea, but the offer still has to be clear enough that they immediately understand the outcome and why they should try it now.

Outstanding and good work keep sharing

I'm in the exact same boat. 77K lines of code, months of building, $0 MRR. Sent 80+ cold DMs to potential customers, zero replies. The product works, the demo is live, nobody cares.

Two things that shifted for me recently. First, I stopped describing features and started describing consequences. "AI support agent with 46 chain integrations" got blank stares. "Your moderators won't need to open Block Explorers anymore" gets nods. Same product, completely different reaction. You might be hitting the same wall with your landing page, people leave in 10 seconds because they see what it is but not why it matters to them specifically.

Second, your accountant outreach instinct is right. I made the same pivot. Instead of targeting end customers directly (protocols in my case, contractors in yours), I started targeting the middlemen who serve them (community management agencies for me, accountants for you). One agency managing 50 clients is one conversation that opens 50 doors. Way better math than 50 cold DMs that all get ignored.

The 10-second bounce might mean your hero text is describing the product instead of the problem. Try leading with the pain ("still guessing what your next job will cost you?") instead of the solution ("job calculator for contractors"). Just a thought based on what worked when I made that same switch.

Still at $0 too. But the conversations got better the moment I stopped pitching and started being useful in communities first. Keep going.

22 days into a $199 LTD with 0 sales here — genuinely peer-feeling this one.

Three things I'm trying today after wasting the first 22 days:

1. Ditched generic lead magnets, doubled down on intent. A calculator with 0 signups isn't a calculator problem — it's a no-urgency-at-the-trigger problem. Embed it inside your existing accountant-outreach email where the user already has intent, not as a top-of-page curiosity hook.

2. Found people in real-time pain instead of waiting for waitlists. Twitter search for "[competitor name] expensive" past 7 days, reply with founder voice. DM open rate way higher than any other channel I've tried this month.

3. No discount. Lifetime price holds. Discounts signal doubt to the buyer, not value.

Full post-mortem here if useful: https://dev.to/adarsh_kant_ebb2fde1d0c6b/i-built-voice-enabled-forms-in-50-languages-22-days-at-199-lifetime-0-sales-post-mortem-5f95

Rooting for you.

137 visitors a month is too little to diagnose conversion. That's 4 or 5 people a day. The page might be fine. The real problem is still traffic quality and volume.

137 landing page visitors/month is something great for the start. Not getting a paid user from the 137 visitors is a signal that something is wrong.

1. Maybe there's a miscommunication from the page they are coming from and found the landing page to be different
2. Your landing page is not optimised for conversion
3. You're getting the wrong audiences
4. There's no clarity in the communication of value

These are some of the things that can cause you not to get users, your views on those platforms are huge compare to those visiting your page.
You can share the landing page and I would check what you need to work on. Sometimes if you don't give people reason to pay you, they won't pay.

Massive respect for the transparency, NG. With 40k+ views and a 10-second bounce rate, you don't have a traffic problem—you have a 'Time-to-Value' problem.

Contractors are busy; 'Clean and Clear' design doesn't sell as well as 'Urgent and Profitable.' Try flipping your hero copy from what the tool is to exactly how much money/time they are losing by not using it. Also, consider removing the signup wall from the calculator—let them see the value first, then ask for the email to 'save' the result.

That first paying user is right around the corner once the 'pain' feels more expensive than the subscription

Don't be disheartened. Check on why the views did not convert unto sign ups. If you know the reason post using similar pattern but now with call to action to make sure user takes an action. Focus on userbase first and then on MRR

Respect for the honest update. A lot of founders assume traffic validates demand, but attention and intent are very different signals. If people bounce in 10 seconds, the issue is usually not “clean design” it’s that the value, urgency, or trust case isn’t obvious fast enough.

One good partnership may absolutely outperform thousands of passive views.

Buildfield, the line that stuck with me — "one good partnership probably beats 50K views." You already know the answer, you're just gathering proof.

A few honest reactions:

The 10-second bounce — 137 visitors from TikTok is cold traffic. They're not arriving with intent, they're arriving curious. A calculator is still a commitment. Try a 30-second embedded demo video at the top showing the exact pain → fix. Let them watch before they have to do anything.

Accountant outreach — cold email/LinkedIn to accountants is brutal because you're a stranger asking them to vouch for software to their clients. Flip it: offer to build them a free white-labeled job-cost report for one of their contractor clients. You do the work, they look good, the contractor sees the product in action. That's how you get user #1.

Reddit/FB contractor groups — show up as a contractor's friend, not a vendor. Answer 20 questions before you ever link anything.

I'm Shirley from ZooClaw — also deep in user-discovery mode, so I get this stage. Happy to trade notes anytime.

This is a solid update honest and clear, which already puts you ahead of most people building in public.

The traction on content is actually a really good sign. Getting consistent views means you’ve nailed attention. The drop-off after landing, though, usually points less to traffic quality and more to a mismatch between expectation → first impression.

Curious when someone clicks from your TikTok/YouTube to the site, does the headline immediately reflect the exact problem or scenario from the video they just watched? Sometimes even a small disconnect there can cause that “leave in 10 seconds” behavior.

Also, the calculator idea is smart, but if it’s getting 0 signups, it might not be about the tool itself could just be how it’s positioned or introduced on the page.

I’d be interested to see how the landing flow looks right now. From what you’ve shared, it feels like you’re close just a matter of tightening that first impression and guiding people a bit better once they land.

How are you currently structuring the hero section and CTA?

interesting

The conversion gap from "video views" to "paying users" is rough, usually because the content audience and the buyer audience are not the same person yet. 600 views per TikTok is real distribution, but TikTok is a "save it for later, never come back" platform for anything B2B flavored.

One thing that worked for us when we were stuck at zero paying users: pick the 5 most engaged commenters from a single video and DM them with "what would make you actually try this." Not a sales pitch, three questions. We found out our landing page was answering the wrong question.

Rooting for you. Building in public is the right move.

Hey NG,

Read your post about the 67K views to 137 visits gap. That ratio tells you the TikTok audience and the buyer are different people — the content is working as content, just not as acquisition.

I build web and SaaS products, 20 years in. I have seen this exact setup before — usually the fix is not the landing page, it is figuring out which 600 of those viewers have a real pain with admin/invoicing right now and finding a way to put the product in front of them specifically.

Happy to look at your site and give you 20 minutes of honest thoughts if you want a second pair of eyes. No agenda.

Lacy

One thing that helped me in a similar situation was removing friction instead of adding features.

Instead of:

• lead magnets
• calculators
• multiple CTAs

Try a single simple CTA like:

“Try it in 30 seconds”

People often bounce because they feel like they’re being pushed into a funnel before they understand the product.

Still not sure what you are solving where you make a case where your product is better than Stripe or Square which are more established brands when I visit your website.

Appreciate you sharing the honest version. I’m also in early validation mode right now.

Quick question: during these first 2 weeks, what tools did you use for building, tracking users, outreach, or feedback, and how did you choose them?

One of the first things I noticed was 0 product or even UI macro shots, is it a SaaS, is itttt an app? Also theres no way to explore what you do offer, I see no nav, no footer. It cant be good for SEO purposes.

A sincere post, and for that I commend you. The conversion issue you describe is something I’m grappling with right now as well: there’s traffic, people are landing on the page, but nothing happens.
There is, however, one point on which I’d like to slightly disagree: 137 visitors a month is still too few to draw any conclusions. In my opinion, even a perfect landing page wouldn’t provide meaningful insights with that kind of volume. The 10% bounce rate could simply be due to “cold” traffic with little motivation, which in any case would never have led to a conversion—or so I believe.
As for reaching out to accountants, I think you’re right that a good partnership is worth more than 50,000 views, but the problem is finding one and trusting them.
What is the specific problem they’re facing today that’s costing them time or money? I personally think about this as if I were in their shoes.