54 posts, 26 products, zero sales — what validation actually looks like vs what i did
heres my gumroad catalog: SEO tools, chrome extension, PDF templates, budget planners, cold email scripts, agency contact lists, data products, AI prompt packs.
26 products. $0 revenue. zero customer conversations before building any of them.
every single one was built based on "this seems useful" instead of "someone asked for this."
what i should have done
found one person with a specific problem. asked what theyd pay to solve it. collected payment BEFORE building. then built exactly what they paid for.
instead i did: build something cool, list it on gumroad, post on IH, hope someone buys. repeat 26 times.
what im doing now
focusing on ONE product: the 798-agency contact list at $19. its the only product where i can articulate exactly who the buyer is (salespeople doing agency outreach) and exactly what problem it solves (skip 15 hours of manual scraping).
everything else is noise. 25 products getting zero attention each is worse than 1 product getting all the attention.
the validation i should have done
- post in r/sales: would you pay $19 for a verified list of 798 marketing agencies with emails?
- DM 10 SDR managers on linkedin with the same question
- offer the free sample and see if anyone asks for the full list
if nobody says yes, the product is wrong. no amount of IH posts fixes a product nobody wants.
free sample (50 agencies): https://vemtrac.gumroad.com/l/blole
the one product im focusing on: https://vemtrac-outreach.pages.dev/leads
Been there. I built 3 different analytics dashboards nobody asked for before I learned the same lesson — but honestly even "someone asked for this" can mislead you. People will say they want something all day long and then ghost when you send a payment link.
The thing that finally worked for me was treating the conversation itself as a checkout flow. Someone describes a problem, you say "I can build that this week for $X — want to pay now and I'll have it to you by Friday?" If they say no, you just saved yourself a week.