4 months in. 3 Chrome extensions live. First mobile app done. Still £0. Here's my honest June update.

Your website only described what it is, it's not showing me anything. Why no screenshots, gifs/video's of it all in action? It really raises the bar for me. I have to connect all the dots myself and take the install plunge to find out what it really does. Show, don't tell.

Respect for shipping this much and posting the zero honestly. Most people hide that number. I am going to be blunt because it will help more than a compliment: 1 weekly active user across 290 installs is not an activation-copy problem, it is a focus problem. You have three products and a fourth in the oven, solo. That is not three shots on goal, it is one person's attention split four ways, which is exactly why none of them have caught. The market is quietly telling you nothing has hit resonance yet. What I would do: pick the one with the best signal (Prompt Helix at 179) and freeze the other two for 60 days. No new features, no fourth product. Then go interview the people who installed Prompt Helix and never came back. Ten of those calls will teach you more than another launch. You are clearly good at building. The reason you are at zero is that building is the comfortable part, and the uncomfortable part (one product, real users, hard conversations) is where the revenue actually lives. If you could keep only one of these, which would you bet on?

290 installs and 1 weekly active user is actually really useful data — it tells you the problem is activation, not discovery. People found you, they just didn't reach the moment where your product clicked for them.
The free demo call idea for Prompt Helix is smart. Sometimes people need someone to show them the value before they can feel it themselves. What does the first 60 seconds look like when someone opens the extension for the first time?

The gap between 290 installs and 1 WAU is an activation problem, not a product problem — and you already know that, which puts you ahead of most people at this stage.

The demo flow for Prompt Helix is exactly the right move. The install-to-value window is probably under 3 minutes for browser extensions: if someone doesn't feel the thing work in that window, the extension icon joins the forgotten toolbar graveyard permanently. One proxied call on the page they're already reading is a good answer to that.

The harder version of this problem is FocusForge. Productivity tools have a cold-start problem where the value is delayed — blocking only feels useful when you're about to lose focus, not when you're calm and setting it up. The "significant first block" instinct is right, but I'd think about it as: what does the moment feel like when they've just stopped themselves doing something they were about to regret? That's the emotional hook. Lean into that.

290 installs in 4 months solo as a CS student is the foundation. The activation rate is fixable. Most people who hit $0 for this long are stuck on the product, not on the experience of the product. You're already asking the right question.

Four products in four months is real output, not just aspirational. The value-moment gap you spotted with Prompt Helix is the same thing I kept hitting early with DictaFlow. Users would install, poke around settings, and close it without ever actually dictating anything. The fix was forcing the first dictation to happen in under ten seconds: hold a key, speak, release, text appears. No setup, no config tour, just the core mechanic immediately. Once someone sees their words appear at the cursor, they get it. Without that forced value moment, the product is just another icon they installed. Is Helix Decide doing anything to shorten the gap between install and first real decision output?

290 installs and 1 WAU is actually useful signal — it means your distribution is working but the first session isn't. You've already diagnosed it correctly with the demo flow for Prompt Helix, which is the right instinct.

For FocusForge specifically: "making the first block feel significant" is exactly the right direction. The way to do that is to make the outcome tangible immediately. Something like showing "You were about to spend ~20 min on [site] — blocked." The number makes it feel real. Right now most blockers just say "this site is blocked" and users feel annoyed, not grateful. The moment they see time saved, the value proposition clicks.

One thing worth watching for Helix Decide: the aha moment for a decision tool depends on the user having an actual pending decision when they open it for the first time. If they open it out of curiosity with nothing to decide, they'll close it and forget it exists. The onboarding flow probably needs to ask "what's one thing you're deciding right now?" before anything else — even if they type "whether to buy X" it creates the context that makes the whole app make sense.

Appreciate the honest update. Most people only share wins. The consistency of shipping 3 extensions despite £0 revenue shows real commitment — that's the hardest part.

I'd be careful treating this as an activation problem too quickly.

The interesting question may not be whether users are reaching the value moment.

It may be whether the people installing the products expect the same value you're actually delivering.

Those sound similar, but they can lead to very different conclusions about the buyer, the product, and which signals deserve attention.

I wouldn't make that call casually from the current data.