Day 4 of eating my own dog food: my tool found 135 postable threads for other people this morning and 0 for me
Four days ago I posted here that Kasspian had 48 signups and 0 paying customers, and that I was going to spend a fortnight using it on myself and publish whatever came back. 51 comments later, here is the halfway report. It is not flattering.
The number that matters
This morning the daily job ran on all 114 plans in the database. It found 163 live threads. 135 of them were worth posting in.
My own plan got 2, and both were unusable.
That is the third morning in four that my plan has produced nothing I can act on, while the identical code produced a full queue for everyone else. Yesterday other people's plans surfaced threads in r/SocialMediaManagers, r/daddit, r/cursor, r/ClaudeCode and r/smallbusiness. Mine surfaced r/SaaS twice, which is a room that silently removes my comments.
The reason is structural and I did not see it coming. Kasspian sells to founders. Founder rooms are the rooms that ban vendors. So the tool works for a pricing tool selling to indie hackers, for a kids' app selling to parents on r/daddit, for a dev tool selling to people in r/cursor, and it fails for itself, because its own buyers gather in exactly the places that do not tolerate someone selling.
I could not have learned that by reading the code.
What four days of posting actually produced
3 threads posted. 1 reply, from a founder pricing his first B2B contract, 50 minutes after I posted. He said my number was in his ballpark and that he would raise procurement in his next meeting. No next step by the definition I wrote down before I started, which was: started a plan, asked about pricing, or paid.
1 of the 3 posts was removed by moderators inside 16 hours.
So: 3 posts, 1 conversation, 0 customers, 4 days.
Using it broke it, repeatedly
Every bug below was found by being the user, not by testing:
The finder dropped r/PPC as "full of practitioners, not buyers" and then, three lines later, recommended posting in r/PPC. Two halves of the same read disagreeing.
It cited a Hacker News comment as though it were a thread. The URL had no title and no story, because it was a permalink to somebody's reply.
One thread got handed to 15 different plans in a single morning. All 15 were mine, so no harm, but nothing stopped it going to 15 strangers who would then all answer the same person before lunch. I fixed that yesterday with a claim table, and the first version of the fix was worse than the bug: it keyed on a URL with the query string stripped, so every Hacker News thread collapsed to one key with the thread id stripped out, and the first claim would have locked every other founder out of Hacker News permanently. Caught it in a dry run, by accident.
And the one I liked least: the page that shows what the product produces served 279 words to anything that does not run Javascript, while the idea validator served 2,858. Every answer engine describing Kasspian was describing the half I had moved away from, because that was the only half it could read. That is not an SEO problem, that is telling the world the wrong thing about your own product for months.
The bit I am least comfortable publishing
Since the fortnight started I have sent 20 agencies the same offer: pick one client you already bill, I will send you the ten live conversations where that client's buyers are asking for what they sell, which rooms will let you post rather than only comment, and the ten replies written in their voice. Five working days. £300, paid after they read it. No call.
Replies so far: zero.
Every one of those emails carried a real finding from running the tool on that agency first. Several of them landed on the same thing: the rooms an agency reaches for first are full of other agencies. Only one of the twenty had its obvious rooms come back as actual buyers, because that agency sells to founders rather than to marketers.
I still think that is the most interesting thing the tool does, and 20 people have now looked at it for free and said nothing.
What the 18th decides
If a fortnight of using my own product on myself produces no customer, and 20 agencies will not pay £300 for a deliverable they already produce by hand, then the honest reading is not that the marketing is wrong. It is that the job is not worth paying for, at least not in this shape.
I would rather find that out in September than in a year.
The question I would actually like answered
For those of you selling to founders: where do you post? Every founder room I can find either bans vendor posts outright or removes comments from newer accounts quietly. I keep concluding that the only honest answer is to be a person with a track record in the room long before you need anything, which is a two-year strategy, not a distribution channel. Has anyone got a shorter one that is not a trick?
The 20 × £300 test seems more revealing than the founder-room distribution problem. If agencies are shown a real finding specific to their client and still don’t respond, does that suggest the deliverable itself isn’t valuable enough to buy rather than just being hard to distribute?
Fair, and the test as I ran it can't separate those two. 20 cold emails with 0 replies is also just a normal cold email outcome, so on its own it isn't evidence either way.
What does point your way: 14 founders outside my own account have run a full plan, and 3 of them ran a second one. That's usage, not price, and it's the number I keep trying to explain away.
So the cleaner test is to give the deliverable away to one agency and watch what they actually do with it. If they post the replies, it's distribution. If they read it once and nothing happens, then it's the deliverable, and the 300 was never the question.
That repeat usage is a much stronger signal than the cold-email result. I’d be interested in seeing what the agency test reveals. If you’re open to it, what’s the best email to reach you on?
hello@kasspian.com. Happy to talk about any of it.
On the agency test, I'll write it up the way I've done the rest: what went out, who used it, what came back. A no goes in as well.
If you'd rather check than read, kasspian.com is free to run on your own thing, and it'll tell you more about whether the deliverable is worth anything than my write-up will.
Thanks! I’ve just sent it over.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.
Two things I cut to get this published, plus the reason, since the reason might save someone else twenty minutes.
The post was refused with "Sorry, you're not allowed to post this" while it contained two links. Save as draft was refused too, so it is not a publish-time check on the content. Stripping both links and resubmitting worked immediately. Worth knowing if you are writing something up here.
The tool being tested is kasspian.com. It is free to run and the whole point of the fortnight is whether the plan it hands you is worth anything, so I would rather you tested that than took my word for it.
The other link was the Hacker News one: the claim key I mentioned collapsed every thread on the site to news.ycombinator.com/item, because the thread id lives in the query string and I was stripping the query. Two hundred threads, one key, first claim wins the lot.