I got 3 tiny sales from an accidental Indie Hackers spike, so I rebuilt the product around the actual problem
I built a small tool called AIO Checker. The first version got 3 real payments after an accidental Indie Hackers spike: two at $4.99 and one at $1.99.
Then it went quiet.
The mistake was not checkout or pricing. It was distribution, and also positioning.
The early version was too centered on llms.txt. After rebuilding it, I think the more useful question is:
Can AI/search crawlers actually fetch, parse and understand your public site?
So the new version checks boring but practical things:
- robots.txt and AI crawler rules
- indexability
- readable initial HTML
- sitemap discovery
- structured data
- snippet controls
- optional llms.txt
The free scan works without login. The paid part is a one-time $19 ZIP with fix.md, robots/schema snippets and prompts for Cursor/Claude/ChatGPT.
I am trying to validate whether this should stay as a one-time report or become an agency/multi-site pack.
Try it:
If you run a SaaS or devtool site, post your score. I am especially interested in which stack patterns fail hardest.
Congrats on first dollars! Can I know how did you promote your product on this platform?
Thank you!
Honestly, I did not have a big promotion plan. The post itself was the main distribution.
What worked best here was being very specific about the problem: my own Next.js site looked fine in the browser, but the initial HTML was weak for crawlers/AI search. That made the post more like a technical lesson than a product pitch.
A few things that helped:
- I shared the actual mistake I made
- I used a concrete score/result
- I made the tool free to try without signup
- I asked people to test their own sites and share scores
- I replied to technical feedback instead of just pushing the link
The first dollars came from that discussion, not from ads or SEO. Search traffic is still basically zero for me, so I’m trying to learn how to make community distribution repeatable.
One thing I want to be clear about: this does not promise ChatGPT rankings.
The scan is about source readiness: can crawlers access, parse and summarize the public page, and are crawler policies intentional?