Learnings from launching on Reddit

Hello all!

I built docutalk.co - A tool that makes it really easy to create, train and deploy a chatbot to answer your customer queries within minutes, using ChatGPT. I know there are competitors, but I have had this idea since before ChatGPT (back when we had only davinci models). So 3 weeks back, I decided to build and launch it anyway.

I built my MVP which had following features working:

1. signup and create a bot with some basic information (name, etc.)
2. add some links and "train" the bot (which really is about generating embeddings)
3. a page where you can chat with the bot.
4. a landing page explaining it all

I did not implement a pricing or any type of limits (first and biggest mistake?).

I posted it on Reddit - r/ChatGPT. To my surprise, the post blew up. After the 48 hours window, I had 950000 views, 2000+ upvotes, 800 comments, 150 users on my waitlist (which i implemented after ~10 hours of posting on Reddit).

These stats might look very nice. But the conversion to paying customers is very very low. I am trying to understand why.

I think I did a few mistakes in my Reddit post itself, which I want to share with you and get feedback.

1. The post was bit generic which led people to believe it was a tool to build chatbots for any use-case (e.g., there were game developers asking if they could train the bot and use it in their games) - I think I should have made it clear that it's a B2B subscription product for making chatbots for customer assistance (100 highly targeted audience is likely to have better conversion than 1000 completely random people)
2. During the first few hours, I kept on responding to whoever commented over DM and shared the link (just the https://docutalk.co/auth link -- since i didn't really have a invite-only approach planned out 🤷). I got freaked out by so much response, I started copy-pasting the exact same message to everyone which triggered Reddit spam system & suspended my account for 3 days -- I guess I should have personalized the messages?
3. Since I had not implemented pricing related things at all and now there was no way for me to send message to anyone OR respond to comments due to suspension, I decided to implement a waitlist form and update the post with link to it. But by the time I did this, the post had started trending down slowly and most people had already commented "Interested" and forgot about the post. I couldn't even notify them that there is now a waitlist 😔.

I feel like the decision to launch before implementing some kind of pricing logic was my biggest mistake here. Because with that, I could have simply opened it up to everyone without worrying about making a invite-only etc.

Have you launched your product on Reddit? What are some tips? What do you think I should do next -- I have no experience with marketing/sales, cold email, etc. so any pointers would be great!

I know some of my competitors who do not even offer a free trial of any kind and yet are able to get trust and large number of paying customers (To be clear, I don't have anything against them or their success. They are inspiring honestly). I know what I have built is not bad compared to them. I feel like I am doing something fundamentally wrong, but not sure what 😔.

Anyways, do take a look at https://docutalk.co . Any feedback would be greatly appreciated! 🙂