2 weeks of helping people in Reddit threads. 2 people said yes to beta testing. Both ghosted. Here's what I'm learning.

You probably proved the pain, but the handoff is too abrupt. Someone will happily talk on Reddit about bad CTR or bot traffic, but connecting an ad account feels like a completely different trust threshold.

I’d bridge that with separate pages for the exact failure modes you keep hearing: campaigns dying overnight, good CTR with zero conversions, bot traffic, and creative fatigue. Each page can show the diagnosis logic and offer a lightweight sample audit before you ask for any account connection.

For context, I'm building Clustra which does this automatically and happy to generate a free example for your product if useful: clustra[dot]nanocorp[dot]app

Reading this with a knot in my stomach because I am about three weeks away from being in exactly your position. Building an AI assistant for a different niche (content sites instead of Meta Ads), and my plan was also community engagement to get the first pilots.

The detail that hit hardest was the gap between "yes I will check it out" and actually onboarding. I had been mentally treating those as the same thing. They are clearly not.

One question, since you are deeper in this than I am. Did the people who said yes feel different in any noticeable way during the conversation, versus the ones who never said yes at all? Trying to figure out if "yes ghosters" are a signal that the ask was wrong, or if they are just polite people who never had real intent in the first place. Two different problems with two different fixes.

Either way, thanks for posting this. The "gap between yes and usage" framing is going to stick with me.

We just opened our own beta program this week (StoreMD, Shopify store health scanner) and designed it specifically around the ghosting problem you're describing.

What we changed: instead of asking people to sign up and figure it out, we scan their store first and send them the report. They see real findings on their own data before they commit to anything. The conversion happens after the value, not before.

The other thing that helped: capping it at 10 spots with a hard deadline. "Free lifetime Pro" sounds generous but it doesn't create urgency. "10 spots, first come first served, opens Monday" forces a decision.

Your Reddit thread strategy is solid for building trust. The missing piece might just be the ask. A live walkthrough call is a good move. Way easier to say yes to 15 minutes of screen sharing than to handing over their ad account credentials to a stranger.

This actually looks less like a traffic problem and more like a positioning + trust gap.
Right now it sounds like:
→ “AI layer for Meta Ads”
But the moment you described is much sharper:
→ “my campaigns are dying and I don’t know why”
That’s what people react to.
Also — asking for account access before they see it work is probably killing momentum.
If the first experience was:
→ “paste campaign / see diagnosis instantly”
instead of:
→ connect account first
you’d likely convert way more of those “yes” into actual users.
Curious — what’s the fastest way someone can see value without giving access upfront?