4 organic users, 400K impressions, 0 paying customers. Building in public update.
I want to start by saying I had zero business building this. No CS degree, no startup experience, no network. Just a problem I kept running into personally and a curiosity to see if I could actually ship something real.
Trakly is a mobile first budgeting PWA that gives you a Financial Health Score (0-100) that improves as your habits do. The idea came from seeing people try YNAB or a random ledger and quit within a week because the maintenance load was too high. I wanted something that built the habit first and showed you data second.
Here's everything that happened so far:
The Build
I used Cursor, React, TypeScript, Vite, Tailwind, Supabase and Stripe. No prior experience with most of these. Learned as I went. The hardest parts weren't the features, they were the invisible stuff like fixing a race condition on the free trial so users couldn't grab it twice, getting Stripe webhooks to actually fire correctly, and figuring out why my env vars were silently failing on Vercel.
I deliberately skipped the App Store entirely. No 30% cut, no $99/year developer fee, no approval delays. PWA only. Users install via Add to Home Screen and it works on any device.
What I shipped:
- Financial Health Score (0-100)
- Budget categories with progress bars
- Daily streaks to build the tracking habit
- Savings goals
- Paycheck Planner
- Demo mode so people can try it without signing up
- CSV import and export
- Dark and light mode
- Subscription Graveyard, No Spend Challenges, Bill Detection
Pricing is $7/month or $59/year with a 7 day free trial. YNAB charges about $15 so I'm sitting at 53% cheaper with a cleaner experience.
Distribution
This is where things got interesting. I launched with basically zero audience.
Reddit: posted in r/SideProject, r/SaaSDevelopers, r/SaaS and r/micro_saas. Best post got 2.3K views and hit top 13 in the sub. I also learned the hard way that r/personalfinance will permanently ban you if you mention your own product even subtly. Lesson learned.
Twitter/X: started an account as NotAFinanceGuru and went verified on day one. Strategy was simple, find threads with 500K+ impressions and leave genuinely good replies. Hit 100+ followers in under a week and crossed 200K impressions in the first few days. Namecheap's official account (124K followers) even replied to one of my posts which was wild.
Indie Hackers: published a post about the security layers I shipped before touching prod. Got manually approved by a mod which felt like a win.
Where things actually stand
Honest numbers:
- 4 organic users, all strangers who found it on their own
- 0 paying customers so far
- Demo mode is live and converting visitors to signups
- All infrastructure is solid, security hardened, Stripe working
The hardest part right now isn't the product. It's the silence after shipping. You build something you're proud of and then wait. The feedback loop disappears and your brain starts reading silence as failure even when nothing is wrong.
But I keep reminding myself the market is validated. YNAB has millions of users. People pay for budgeting tools. I just need to find my first 10.
What I'm focused on next
- Getting that first paying customer
- Adding a demo video to the landing page
- Setting up PostHog for proper funnel tracking
- Emailing my existing users personally to get real feedback
If you've made it this far, I'd genuinely love your thoughts on the landing page or the app itself. Demo works without an account at trakly.pro and roasts are welcome.
Building in public is the only way I know how to do this.
Love seeing the honest numbers — 400K impressions converting to 4 organic users is exactly the kind of asymmetry most builders don't post about. The instinct that "the silence after shipping" is the hardest part is the right diagnosis. Top-of-funnel signal without conversion signal is, somehow, worse than no signal at all.
The hardest part for me has been resisting the urge to "fix" the product when the data is actually telling me the positioning is off. YNAB is validated for "I want to budget seriously"; Trakly's wedge sounds like "I tried YNAB and quit in a week." Those are two completely different searches and two different landing pages. The 400K impressions probably came from people interested in the broad category, not your specific wedge — which is why they don't convert.
One question I'd be curious about: of the 4 organic users, how did each of them describe Trakly back to you (in their own words, not yours)? If even two of them say the same phrase, that phrase is probably your real headline. The first paying customer usually shows up after that gap closes, not before.
The positioning point hit hard. I've been defaulting to the price wedge (53% cheaper than YNAB) when the real wedge is probably habit-first for people who've already failed at budgeting once. Two completely different searches, two different people.
On your question, I actually haven't asked them yet, which is embarrassing to admit. It's been on my to-do list for two weeks now. You've just pushed it to the top. If two of them say the same phrase unprompted that's basically free copywriting.
What was the moment for you where the positioning gap closed?
The r/personalfinance ban is a rite of passage at this point. Worth knowing they will also remove posts retroactively months later if a mod later decides the account looks promotional, so the 2.3K views you got from r/SideProject is probably the better long-term bet anyway. On the silence after shipping: the frame that helped me was separating "nobody knows this exists yet" from "nobody wants this." They feel identical from the inside and they require completely different responses. Four organic strangers finding you with zero paid distribution is actually signal, not noise... most products never get that far without spending money.
The frame of separating "nobody knows this exists yet" from "nobody wants this" is genuinely one of the most useful things I've read this week. From the inside they feel identical and I've been conflating them constantly. The r/personalfinance ban stung at the time but you're right, r/SideProject traffic is probably healthier anyway. And yeah, 4 strangers finding it with zero paid spend is something I keep underselling to myself.
The retroactive removal detail is the kind of thing I wouldn't have found anywhere! useful to know before I've built up any more post history there.
The r/SideProject bet already paid off once so leaning into that makes sense. Feels like the right community anyway, people there are genuinely curious about what you're building, whereas r/personalfinance is more "does this solve my specific problem right now or get out."
On the frame: the reason it landed so hard is that when you're in the silence after shipping, the two hypotheses feel equally plausible and you can't test both at once. Having a name for the distinction makes it easier to actually run the right experiment. I'm treating the four users as a sign that the distribution problem is real and solvable. The next few weeks will tell us more.
"Does this solve my specific problem right now or get out" is exactly the r/personalfinance energy, brutal but accurate. r/SideProject people are curious in a way that's actually useful for early stage, they'll poke at the idea rather than just bounce.
And yes, having a name for the distinction is half the battle. Once you can say "this is a distribution problem not a product problem" you can actually start running the right experiments instead of reflexively adding features. The next few weeks should be telling, especially now that I'm done with finals haha.
Done with finals and now you can actually run the experiments. Good timing. The curiosity thing in r/SideProject is underrated, honest poke-at-it feedback is harder to get than praise and probably more useful at this stage.
The distribution vs product frame is one of those things that sounds obvious in retrospect but genuinely changes what you do next. Would love to hear how the next few weeks go. Check back in if you end up with data worth sharing.
The part that stands out to me is not the 0 paying customers yet, it’s the gap between “budgeting market is validated because YNAB exists” and “why would someone pick Trakly today?”
Being 53% cheaper than YNAB might help later, but I’m not sure it’s the strongest early wedge. People who already pay for YNAB probably don’t mainly feel “this is too expensive.” They probably feel “I trust this enough to run my money through it.”
Your sharper angle might be the habit-first part: people try YNAB or ledgers and quit because maintenance is too heavy. That’s a concrete failure mode.
If demo mode is already converting visitors to signups, I’d look very closely at what they do inside the demo before signup. Do they interact with the Financial Health Score? Paycheck Planner? Streaks? That probably tells you which promise is landing.
I’d also personally email the 4 users with one very specific question:
“What were you hoping Trakly would make easier than your current budget setup?”
That answer is probably more useful right now than another feature.
this is really useful, thank you genuinely
the YNAB price comparison as the main wedge was probably lazy thinking on my part. you’re right that trust is what keeps YNAB users paying, not price. the habit-first angle is way more honest to what Trakly actually does differently
the demo tracking point is something i haven’t done at all yet and now i feel like i should have from day one. i don’t have PostHog set up yet so i’m basically blind to what people actually do inside the demo before signing up. that’s going on the list this week
and the email to the 4 users with that one specific question is exactly the kind of thing that’s obvious in hindsight. i’ve been putting it off because it felt awkward but “what were you hoping Trakly would make easier than your current setup” is a much better question than anything i would have come up with
going to action all three of these. appreciate you taking the time to actually read it properly
400K impressions and 4 sign-ups — that gap usually isn't top-of-funnel. Where do you think the real cliff is: click, signup, or pay? Curious if one channel was carrying most of the noise.
honestly i don’t know yet and that’s probably the real problem
most of the 400K impressions came from Twitter replies on viral threads, not people actively searching for a budgeting app. so the traffic quality is probably low intent by nature
my gut says the cliff is between click and signup rather than signup and pay. the demo converts visitors to signups okay but i have no PostHog or funnel tracking set up yet so i’m basically guessing
one channel is definitely carrying most of the noise, Twitter replies on high impression threads. Reddit has been rough, got banned from two finance subs for mentioning the app
Ill be setting up proper funnel tracking this week so i can actually answer this question with data instead of vibes
My bet: click→signup looks fine in aggregate but splits ugly by source. Twitter-reply traffic and organic search are basically two different funnels with the same UI. Splitting that view from day 1 saves a week of debugging.