Launched a grant writing kit three weeks ago, still at zero revenue
I spent the last couple months building GrantKit, a set of templates and worked examples for writing grant proposals. The idea came from watching a friend who runs a small nonprofit lose forty hours to a proposal that got rejected for formatting reasons. That felt fixable.
So I built it, put up a landing page, and shipped. It's live. Revenue so far is zero dollars. Not low, zero.
I've posted in a few communities, tweeted into the void, and emailed maybe a dozen nonprofit folks I found through mutuals. A few polite replies, no sales. I honestly can't tell if the problem is the product, the copy, the price, or that I'm just invisible.
So I'd rather hear it straight from people who've been through this. What actually got you your first paying users? Was it one channel that worked, or just grinding every channel until something stuck? And if you look at what I made and think the whole premise is off, say so. That's more useful to me right now than encouragement.
Site's here if you want to poke at it: https://grant-proposal-kit-site.vercel.app/?utm_source=indiehackers&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=grantkit_202607
The forty-hour formatting rejection is the strongest signal here, but it points to a service before a template. Find three nonprofits with a deadline in the next 30 days and sell a fixed-price pre-submission formatting audit; give them GrantKit as the handoff artifact. If nobody pays while a live application is at risk, the issue is probably the offer, not visibility.
A service before a template, with the template as the handoff, is a better shape than what I built. It also puts a deadline in the room, which a downloadable pack never does.
"If nobody pays while a live application is at risk, the issue is the offer, not visibility" is a clean test and I can run it in a fortnight. Three nonprofits with a deadline inside 30 days is a specific enough target that I can't fudge the result.
Taking this one.
The interesting challenge isn't getting the first sale—it's identifying whether GrantKit is being rejected because buyers don't trust the format, don't recognize the value before they need it, or don't believe templates can materially improve funding outcomes. I'd keep validating which of those decisions is actually preventing customers from buying before optimizing acquisition channels.
Those three reasons would each send me somewhere different, and I'd been treating them as one blur called "no sales".
I don't know which it is. My guess is the middle one, that nobody recognises the value until the rejection has already happened, but that's a guess and it's testable by talking to people mid-application rather than after.
Validating that before touching channels.