Day 35 of trying to get my first paying customer. Still at zero. Here is what the data is actually telling me.

I set a goal of paying customers in 40 days for Bersyn, a tool that shows you which products AI models recommend when buyers ask. I am on day 35. Paying customers: 0. I want to write the honest version, not the highlight reel.

What has not worked: cold email. I sent a batch of careful, personalized founder emails, each built on a real scan of that founder's own product. One reply so far. Not zero value, but not a channel that is going to find me a customer in the time I have.

What did something: content. I published a few teardowns showing exactly what AI says in a category. Within hours of one of them, a stranger left a sharp, expert comment on an older post of mine and we had the first real back and forth I have had in two weeks. It came off a public post where someone could reply, not off an email sitting in an inbox.

So the lesson I am taking into the back half: I do not have a conversion problem yet, I have a distribution problem. Nobody is bouncing off my pricing page. Almost nobody is arriving. Optimizing the funnel before there is traffic in it is just a comfortable way to avoid the scary part, which is putting the work in front of strangers and asking them to react.

The artifact from today, since this is build in public: I measured which hosting platforms the four major AI models recommend for a SaaS app. Railway got named in 0% of ChatGPT answers and 0% of Perplexity. Fly.io was missing on three of four models. Claude was the only one that knew the modern tools. The models mostly still send you to AWS and Heroku. That is the kind of thing my product exists to surface, and it is also just genuinely interesting, which is the whole point of a teardown.

If you have taken a B2B tool from zero to its first customers recently, I would take any honest answer to one question: what was the channel that actually produced the first paying person, not the one that produced the most vanity engagement.