Built an ad spy tool, it's live, revenue is exactly $0
I spent the last few weeks building AdSpyFree, a free tool for browsing competitor ads without paying $100+ a month for the big spy tools. It works, it's deployed, I've shown it to maybe five people. Revenue so far is zero dollars and I'm not even mad about it, I just genuinely don't know what the next move is.
I keep reading launch posts here where someone goes from zero to their first hundred users and it always sounds obvious in hindsight. Post in communities, do cold outreach, SEO, whatever. But when I sit down to actually do it, everything feels either spammy or like shouting into a void.
So I'm asking the people who've been through this. What actually got you your first real users, not signups from friends but strangers who came back? And if you look at what I made and think the idea itself is the problem, say so. I'd rather hear that now than after three more months of polishing.
Anyway, if you want to poke at it and tell me what's broken or pointless, it's here: https://adspy-tool.vercel.app?utm_source=indiehackers&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=adspyfree_202607
$0 with a live ad spy tool is usually a discovery problem, not a build problem — people who need ad intel rarely search your category name; they vent in threads about “Meta ads not converting / what are competitors running.”
Are you hunting Reddit / niche forums for that language yet, or mostly launch channels?
I built a scored thread digest for that hunt (discovery only). Happy to map a 10-min sample for an ad spy ICP — or if you skip calls, send one-liner + 3–5 subs + pain phrases and I’ll run a small feed.
Mostly launch channels, so yes, guilty. Nobody searches for an ad spy tool by name, they search for why their Meta ads stopped converting, and I haven't been anywhere near that language.
Happy to skip the call and do it the async way. One-liner: it mines live Meta and TikTok ads and flags the ones that are probably making money, with the sources and the scoring shown. I'll send subs and pain phrases rather than have you guess them.
The hardest part may not be distribution yet. I'd first validate what makes someone switch from their current way of researching ads. If the replacement behavior isn't clear, adding more traffic usually just creates more people who don't convert.
Replacement behaviour is the right question and I don't have an answer to it. Most people researching ads are scrolling the ad libraries by hand or paying for one of the big tools, and I've never asked what would make either of them stop.
More traffic on top of an unclear switch just makes a bigger group of people who bounce, agreed.