I had zero signal for three weeks and assumed nobody wanted it. My launch post had 5 views.
I built a thing, posted it on X, Reddit, Product Hunt and here, got almost nothing back, and concluded the idea was dead.
Then I actually looked at the numbers instead of the vibe.
My X launch post had 5 views. Not 5 likes - 5 views. The account has 0 followers, no profile picture, and was about a month old. There was never an audience there to reject anything. I had measured my own distribution and called it demand.
Two other things I found once I went looking:
-
Nothing I'd posted was indexed anywhere. Searching my own project's name returned no results at all.
-
My own funnel was killing the few people who did land. If someone searched for something I hadn't written up yet, they hit a bare email form - no example of the work, no reason to trust me, just "give me your email". I was asking strangers to pay in inbox access before showing them a single thing I'd made. I fixed that this week: a miss now shows one complete real verdict first, evidence and all, and asks second.
The uncomfortable part is that none of those three things tell me whether the idea is any good. I still don't know. I just know I hadn't actually tested it yet - I'd tested whether an account with no followers can reach people, and the answer to that was always going to be no.
Since fixing the funnel and replying to people in real threads instead of broadcasting at nobody, I've had two actual conversations and a few founders engage. Still tiny. But it's the first signal that isn't zero.
One more thing worth knowing, from today: I posted to a big subreddit and the post was silently removed by Reddit's spam filter - the account has 1 karma and an unverified email, so it never reached a human. It looks completely normal when you are logged in as yourself. If you're getting nothing on Reddit, log out and check your post is actually visible before you decide the market said no.
So if you're about to quit something because "nobody responded" - check your view count first, and check your posts are actually being shown. You might be reading a distribution problem as a demand problem.
The project, for context: https://bharatlearner18-del.github.io/reality-filter/
