Day 2 of building in public: zero engagement, full transparency, and why I'm not worried yet
Still day 2. Nobody knows Conviction exists yet and that's fine. I've been trading for 5 years and I've watched enough people launch things to know that the founders who obsess over day 2 metrics are usually the ones who quit at day 30.
So here's where I actually am.
The product is built. It's a React app that scores every position you hold or watch across 5 criteria — product quality, mainstream potential, return vs target, social reach, and tokenomics — and ranks everything on one leaderboard. The idea came from a problem I've had for years: the hardest question in trading isn't whether something is good. It's whether it's better than what you already hold. Nobody built a tool for that so I did.
This week I filed the company, registered the domain, set up the X accounts, and posted a Upwork brief for a developer to connect the app to Supabase and Stripe. That's the whole list. Zero signups, zero followers worth mentioning, zero paying customers. I'm in Australia which means every US peak posting window is somewhere between midnight and 3am so I'm scheduling everything through Typefully and targeting the European morning window instead.
The one thing I'm focused on right now isn't metrics. It's getting the first 10 genuine replies to anything I post. Not follows, not signups, just 10 people who read something and had a reaction worth typing out. That's the only signal that matters at day 2 and I don't have it yet.
The thing I'm most uncertain about is pricing. $19 a month feels right for solo traders but I have no evidence for it. The plan is to give the first 50 beta users 90 days free and watch what happens when the paywall appears. Has anyone here tracked what conversion actually looks like the first time free users hit a hard limit? I've seen people quote anywhere from 2% to 15% and I'd love to know what the real number looks like for a solo productivity tool with genuine daily usage.
Back next week with real numbers either way.
