6 months in, 0 paying customers, competing with Mintlify and GitBook. Help me decide if I should keep going.

he real problem isn't the product — it's communication.

When you're competing with established players, users need fast feedback. If they ask a question and get a response in 24+ hours, they'll try Mintlify or GitBook instead.

Build a system where you respond to every inquiry in minutes, not hours. That's what converts free users to paying customers.

Honestly, I don’t think zero paying customers at 6 months automatically means the product is bad — especially in dev tools.

One thing I’ve learned building my own platform is that distribution and trust take way longer than most engineers expect. You can build something genuinely useful and still struggle because nobody knows you exist yet.

What stood out to me is this line:

“I’ve never marketed anything.”

That’s probably the bigger challenge right now than the product itself.

I also don’t think “cheaper Mintlify” is the strongest positioning. Simpler/no Git/YAML is more interesting because there are a lot of people who want docs without feeling like they need DevOps knowledge just to publish a page.

If it were me, I wouldn’t shut it down yet. I’d spend the next phase talking directly to users instead of mainly building SEO and features. Even 10 real conversations with developers/startups could reveal more than months of coding in isolation.

The fact that you shipped, use it daily, and are self-aware enough to ask these questions already puts you ahead of most people who never launch at all.

Honestly, I don’t think 6 months with zero paying customers is automatically a “kill it” signal in your case.

The bigger issue is probably that you built in a category where trust and workflow inertia are extremely strong. Documentation tools become part of a company’s infrastructure very quickly, so people move slowly even when the product is objectively better or cheaper.

What stood out to me is that you still don’t have enough real conversations with your target users. Right now you’re trying to interpret silence, but silence is ambiguous:

• bad product

• wrong positioning

• weak distribution

• or simply not enough exposure yet

Those are completely different problems.

I’d probably spend the next 1-2 months doing things that don’t scale before deciding to shut it down:

• direct outreach

• onboarding calls

• watching people use the product live

• understanding why free users don’t convert

Because if people use it and genuinely like the experience, that’s usually a stronger signal than early revenue alone.

fellow solo maker in a similar phase here. shipped an iOS app a few weeks ago, small user base, app store just rejected 1.4. taking your three questions seriously.

on feedback with no users. the most useful signal i got wasnt from signups. it was from posting on hacker news and getting torn apart in the comments. roast threads on reddit/IH work the same way. people who comment "this is bad because X" are giving you free product research. you dont need users for that.

on the wedge. the llms.txt auto-generation is your real angle. mintlify will add it eventually but their docs werent built around it from day one. when AI agents are buying api access, docs that are llm-native by default win. dont bury this under "AI writing" features.

on keep-going vs kill. you've shipped 6 months of polish and written a clear-headed post explaining your three buckets of uncertainty. thats not a kill signal. thats a "havent started marketing yet" signal. give distribution mode 6 more months, then re-evaluate.

good luck.

I'll start by prefacing this with the fact that I know very little about your business compared to you. That being said, I think before you make the decision of whether or not to keep going, you need to ask yourself a few questions.

- Of the 6 months spent building so far, how much of that have you spent marketing and talking to potential customers? If the answer is less than 30%, then you need to get on that real quick and forget everything else. 30-40% may mean you need to experiment a whole lot more to find better strategies that work. Anything above that and maybe you need to rethink your approach or offerings

- Who exactly is your target market? I feel like "people who want affordable alternatives to ..." is not specific enough. Eg. from their websites, I know mintlify are targeting enterprise teams and with gitbook it seems to be product builders. If you are having trouble identifying this, then you may want to re-evaluate

- Of the free signups, how many of them have you had direct, honest conversations with? If the answer is not all, why? Only they can really give you an accurate insight on the viability of what you are trying to build

I will say this, I'm impressed and motivated by how far you have gotten in your journey.

I'm 2 months ahead of you on a parallel arc. Different product, same structural problem. Competing in a category with well-funded incumbents, "AI wrapper" critiques, 0 to a handful of paying users in the first month after launch. Some of what you're asking I can actually answer from this week, not from theory.

On the feedback-with-no-users question: I went to r/SideProject with my product and posted a "rate this, be brutal" style post. Got 2K views, 19 comments, and one Top 1% commenter ran my product through itself and gave me a written tar-pit critique. That single comment was worth more than 50 signups would have been. The framing that worked: don't ask the sub to try your thing, ask them to roast it. People who would never sign up will happily critique. You convert critique into rubric calibration. r/SideProject specifically is the right sub for this. r/Entrepreneur is not.

On the "find your niche" question, here's the honest version. You don't find a niche. You find a wedge of distribution that the incumbents structurally can't cover. Mintlify can't show up in r/SideProject as a person, they're a company. They can't write a vulnerable post about a 6-month grind. You can. The wedge isn't a feature, it's a channel where the incumbent's size is the disadvantage. For me that's been Reddit and IH. For docs tools specifically, it might be writing in places where dev tool founders are already losing time to bad docs (Hacker News comments on docs-related posts, replies to people complaining about Mintlify pricing on X, comments on Build in Public threads about technical writing). Wherever the actual buyers of docs tools are being honest about their pain in public, be the person showing up there as a human, not a brand.

On the decision question, I won't tell you to keep going or stop, but I'll tell you what I'm using as my own signal because it might be useful: the thing I track isn't signups or revenue at this stage, it's whether the conversations I'm having about the product are getting sharper. Six months ago could you have written this post? Probably not. The fact that you can articulate the three buckets of uncertainty this cleanly is itself a signal. Killing it because revenue is flat at month 6 is rational; killing it while your understanding of the market is still compounding is not. Watch the second derivative, not the first.

One last thing on the BYOK angle from your March update: that's the strongest piece of strategic thinking in your whole feed. Don't bury it. That's the thing that makes you not-Mintlify in a way that's actually defensible, and it should be at the top of your landing page, not a feature buried under "AI writing."

Good luck. You're not as far behind as it feels.

Hey Gautam! Don't kill it just yet. As an engineer who spent years shipping code before diving deep into B2B automation and lead generation, I can tell you 100% your product isn't the problem, your distribution model is.

You are trying to use passive inbound marketing (SEO, building in public) against companies with $25M in funding who dominate the ad space and search results. That's a losing battle for a solo founder.

Here is the brutal, actionable advice you need right now:

1. Your Wedge is Wrong: "Simpler and cheaper" won't make a CTO switch from GitBook. But your "Auto-generated llms.txt out of the box" feature? That is a goldmine in 2026. Every AI-first SaaS and API startup desperately needs their docs to be easily scrapable by Cursor, ChatGPT, and Claude. Double down on that AI-ready angle.

2. Stop Waiting for SEO, Go Outbound: Since you have zero budget, you need to launch a hyper-targeted B2B Cold Outreach campaign. > Instead of guessing, you should crawl Product Hunt, Y-Combinator directories, or LinkedIn for newly launched early-stage tech startups. Filter for those that have messy README files or no structured developer docs, scrape their founders' emails, and shoot them a personalized, automated 3-step cold email sequence. Offer them to migrate their messy text into Dokly for free to make their product "AI-discoverable" in 5 minutes.

You've built a solid engine, you just need to hook it up to an outbound pipeline to get those first 10 paying customers.

Drop me a DM here or on X, I'd love to jump on a quick chat and help you brainstorm/structure an automated scraping & outbound sequence to get Dokly in front of the right founders. You've got this!