I have 38 visitors and 0 paying customers and I finally figured out exactly why
I do not have a product problem. I kept telling myself it was, kept tweaking the landing page, kept planning the next feature, and kept telling myself people would pay once it was just a bit better.
It wasn't the product. it was that I hadn't actually sold anything. like not once. I built a whole thing and then went quiet, because building is the part i'm good at and selling is the part that scares me.
38 visitors isn't a traction problem, it's a me problem. i wasn't showing up anywhere. i was hiding inside the code because the code never rejects you.
so this week i stopped building completely and made myself go be useful in public instead. comments, replies, honest posts like this one. no pitch, just showing up. it's uncomfortable in a way debugging never was.
anyway if you've got a product live but you're weirdly quiet about it, i think this might be you too.
for those who pushed past it, what was the first thing that actually got you paying customers? still figuring this part out.
This is a good realization.
At 38 visitors, I wouldn't treat the landing page as the main source of truth yet. That's too little signal. The better use of the page right now is as a sales conversation tool.
What helped me in this stage:
The first paying customers usually come from direct conversations, but the landing page still matters. Its job is to make the person feel, "yes, this founder understands my problem," before you ever pitch.
I relate to this a lot. A few weeks ago I would've immediately changed the product after seeing people leave. Now I'm trying to separate people don't want it from I haven't talked to enough of the right people yet. It's uncomfortable because conversations don't scale, but they seem to teach more than another week of building.
This feels very familiar.I’m in a similar place right now. I keep wanting more certainty before really facing users.There’s always this temptation to just build the product, launch it, and then use feedback to improve it later.It feels safer than asking real people too early and hearing something unclear or uncomfortable.So I relate to this a lot. It’s not just about traffic. It’s that uncomfortable gap between building something and actually putting it in front of the right people.
yeah "build first, get feedback later" feels safer but later never really comes, there's always one more feature lol. talking to users early isn't a test you pass or fail, it's just data. even weird unclear feedback beats silence after launch. the gap shrinks the second you talk to one real person instead of imagining the whole crowd.
what did you build?
I’m working on a small manual service for indie founders who have already built something, but aren’t sure how to read the early signals around it.The part I’m most interested in is the messy stage before there’s a clean success story.A lot of what we see online is survivorship bias: founders explain what worked after it worked. But when you’re still early, the signals are confusing — a few visitors, some comments, no sales, maybe encouraging feedback, maybe silence.So right now I’m manually looking at real products and trying to help founders get a clearer next step from what has already happened.It’s not a full SaaS yet. More like a manual signal read for people who are stuck between “keep building,” “change positioning,” or “talk to different users.”
Honestly, same with me too. Have you found anything that's actually helped you get in front of the right people, or are you still experimenting too?
Still experimenting, but the thing that has helped most is not a growth hack.It’s manually reading where founders already talk about their products.Indie Hackers posts, comments, launch posts, replies, complaints, awkward feedback, low-traffic updates — all of that tells you more than just looking at polished landing pages.It’s slower than building, and honestly more boring sometimes, but it gets me closer to real people before I hide behind the product.I’m also trying to look at adjacent products and competitors differently. Not just “who is competing with me,” but “who is already close to this pain, and what are their users actually reacting to?”Maybe AI tools can help speed up discovery, but for now I still think the important part is reading the context manually: what people are frustrated by, what they avoid, what they repeat, and what they actually do after getting feedback.That’s been more useful than waiting until the product is finished and then trying to find users.
I like that approach a lot. One thing I'm still trying to figure out is when you stop reading and actually start reaching out. Right now I feel like I could keep reading forever.
Yeah, this is the exact trap.Reading feels productive because it lowers the fear a bit, but after a point it can become another way to delay the awkward part.The line I’m trying to use is:
once reading gives you one specific person, one specific situation, and one question you could ask, it has done its job.For Ashive, maybe the next step is not more reading yet.It might be picking 3 good-fit founders and asking:
“What happened the last time you had a startup idea but couldn’t turn it into customers?”
Not “would you use this?”
Just trying to hear the real sequence:
idea → attempted action → where it got stuck → what they tried next.That kind of reply would probably teach more than another hour of reading.This is also the kind of thing I’m trying to help with through the manual signal read: turning research into one small action. Ashive sounds close to that kind of case, so the form in the post is probably the easiest way to send context if useful.