Building in public: week 1 of trying to get my first paying customer
I launched AI News Agent last week — an AI-powered news aggregator that monitors 300+ sources in 22 languages and delivers filtered, translated news to a Telegram bot. Built it in 2 weeks for my own Telegram channel, now trying to turn it into a business.
Here's what actually happened.
What I shipped this week
Launched on Product Hunt (scheduled for tomorrow)
Published on Indie Hackers (you're reading it)
Posted on VC.ru (Russian tech platform) — 51 views, 0 comments
Submitted to Habr (Russian dev platform) — in moderation
Posted on TenChat (Russian LinkedIn) — published, crickets so far
Cold outreach: the honest numbers
Sent personalized messages to 9-10 Telegram channel owners in relevant niches (logistics, customs, pharma). Each message was tailored — I read their channels, mentioned specific sources they use, explained exactly how the bot helps.
Results:
1 person replied with "interesting"
3 people blocked me
Rest: silence
The blocks came from channels where the contact was an advertising manager, not the actual author. Those accounts get dozens of commercial messages daily — they block first, read never.
Lesson: only reach out through the author's personal contact. No ad managers, no telega.in links. This also means smaller channels (2-7k subscribers) where the author is directly reachable.
Also: Telegram blocks accounts for spam reports. After 3 blocks I stopped cold outreach entirely to protect the account.
What's actually working (so far)
The Indie Hackers thread from my first post. Two people left thoughtful comments — one asked about the product vs service distinction, another challenged my distribution assumptions. Both conversations were more useful than any cold message I sent.
One person asked for my email. Haven't heard from them yet but it's only been a day.
What I got wrong
I thought the hard part was building the product. The filtering pipeline, the buffer system, the 5-provider AI fallback chain — that took 2 weeks and I'm proud of it.
Turns out nobody cares about your buffer system until they trust that you can actually curate their niche better than they can themselves.
The real constraint isn't infrastructure. It's whether someone trusts your judgment enough to stop doing their morning tab-switching ritual and hand it off to a bot.
That trust takes more than a landing page and a demo bot.
What I'm doing next
Tomorrow: Product Hunt launch (10am Moscow = 1am ET... not ideal timing but it's set)
This week: find channel owners with direct personal contacts, not ad managers
Trying to get one person to actually try the demo bot and give feedback
If Habr article gets approved — that's 50k+ Russian developers as potential audience
The honest question I'm sitting with
One commenter here said: "the real constraint is whether users trust the selection layer enough to replace their own scanning habit. That switch usually takes more credibility than infra."
He's right. I don't know how to build that credibility without clients, and I don't know how to get clients without credibility. Classic cold start.
If anyone has broken this loop before — genuinely curious how.
Demo bot (energy news, shows the mechanics): t.me/ainewsdemobot Landing: lively-rabanadas-3c1f0a.netlify.app
That information is very helpful and informative
thx for ur feedback
The "blocks came from the wrong contact" detail is the most underrated part of your post. That's not an outreach failure, that's a context failure — you had the right channel, the wrong person, and the wrong-person signal wasn't visible until after the block.
The thing I'd push you to think about: when you're reaching out to a publication, you're really running 3–5 parallel conversations at once (the author, the editor, the ad ops person, sometimes the founder). Each one has different timing, different message, different definition of "ready to buy." Most outreach tools don't model that — they treat each thread as a single conversation with a single person.
The bigger lesson might be: the channels were right, but you needed to know which role inside each channel to talk to, and what each one cares about. Tracking that across 50+ publications without losing track of who's-who is the actual operational problem.
On your supply/demand question: ship whichever side you have a distribution advantage to. For you it sounds like Telegram channels = distribution, so demand (players/tournament hosts) first makes sense — they'll seed the activity that makes supply (devs) interested. But the deciding factor is who shows up fastest when you ping them.
The "context failure" framing is exactly right — and honestly more useful than how I was thinking about it.
The role mapping problem is real. I was treating each channel as one conversation when it's actually a small org with different people who care about different things. The ad ops person sees another vendor. The author sees someone who might actually save them an hour a day.
What I'm taking from this: before reaching out, figure out who specifically runs the content operation — not who handles ads. For solo channels (2-5k subs) that's usually obvious. For anything bigger it requires actual research.
On the supply/demand point — the Telegram channel angle is interesting but I'm not sure it maps to my situation directly. My "demand" is channel owners who need the feed, my "supply" is my capacity to configure and run bots. The deciding factor you mention (who shows up fastest) — so far it's been builders on IH, not channel owners. That's probably telling me something.
The role-mapping reframe landing well is the highest compliment — you built it into something operational ("before reaching out, figure out who runs the content operation") which is exactly how I know a concept is useful vs. interesting.
On your supply/demand pushback — you're right that the "who shows up fastest" heuristic breaks when your fastest channel and your best customer aren't the same audience. IH builders aren't your buyers; channel owners are. That's a real strategic gap and worth its own thinking, not just "follow the data where it goes." Sometimes the data tells you where attention is, but attention isn't always where revenue is.
If you want to keep trading notes, I'd be up for it — but no pressure on timing. This thread has already been useful for me (the role-mapping reframe is going into a piece I'm writing on context loss across domains).
"Attention isn't always where revenue is" — that's the most useful reframe I've gotten from this thread.
You're right that I'm conflating two different signals. IH engagement tells me the problem is real and articulable. It doesn't tell me channel owners will pay to solve it. Those are separate validations and I've been treating them as one.
The strategic gap you're naming: I need to find a way into channel owner conversations that doesn't rely on cold outreach (which got me blocked) and doesn't wait for them to discover me organically (which is slow). Still working on what that bridge looks like.
Glad the role-mapping piece was useful — would be curious to read it when it's out. What domain are you applying it to?
hey bro i think it’s real good idea
yea u right