Building Upbuild — Crowdfunding infrastructure for solo founders. Stuck on the trust problem. Looking for people who've been here.

Hey Indie Hackers —

I'm building Upbuild. The short version: we're building crowdfunding infrastructure for independent founders who have the idea, the audience, and zero bandwidth to run a campaign alone.

Campaign page. Payment processing. Donor communications. All of it — handled — while the founder keeps building.

We're early. No live portal yet. Founding cohort phase.

Here's exactly where we are and where we're stuck:

We just finished our first sprint. 40 personalised DMs, 6 pieces of content, 2 weeks of work.

The numbers:

40 DMs → 1 form submission

585 Instagram accounts reached → 4 new followers

148 LinkedIn impressions → 12 new followers

Reach is happening. Conversion isn't.

The core problem we've identified:

We're asking people to eventually trust us with something high-stakes — their fundraise, their donor relationships, real money moving through our platform. And right now we have no live product to point to, no case studies, no user proof.

Every trust signal a cold visitor looks for in 5 seconds — follower count, working portal, social proof — we don't have yet.

We replaced the Google Form CTA with a Calendly link framed as a conversation, not a conversion. That helped the messaging. It hasn't solved the underlying problem: how do you build trust for a financial infrastructure product when you have nothing to show yet except the people building it and the honesty with which you're building it?

The specific questions I'm trying to answer:

For those who built early-stage platforms in fintech, payments, or anything involving money movement — how did you establish credibility before you had users? What actually worked?

We've shifted Sprint 2 entirely to content — building in public, showing the conversations, showing the pivot, showing the real numbers. Has anyone found content-first trust-building actually converted to users at this stage or does it mainly build audience without converting?

Is there a version of social proof that works when you genuinely have zero users yet — or is there no shortcut and you just have to get the first 3 people through sheer persistence?

Not looking for validation. Looking for people who've actually been in this specific position and came out the other side.

Everything we're learning is being documented publicly. Happy to share sprint reports as we go if that's useful to anyone building something similar.