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Shipped a grant proposal kit, still $0 revenue. Blunt feedback wanted

I built GrantKit. It's templates and worked examples for grant proposals, aimed at small nonprofits and solo consultants staring at a blank document two weeks before a deadline. It's live, it works, and revenue is basically zero.

I think I came at it from the wrong end. I'd written a few proposals for a friend's nonprofit and kept rebuilding the same needs statement, the same budget narrative, the same logic model every time. That felt like a product, so I made it one. What I never did was talk to a single person who might pay before I built it.

Now the site sits there getting maybe a dozen visits a week, and most of those are me checking it still loads. I genuinely can't tell if the problem is that grant writers don't buy templates, or that nobody knows it exists, or that the landing page fails to say anything useful in the first five seconds.

So two questions for people further along. Where did your first ten paying customers actually come from, not the version you'd put in a case study? And if you landed on a page like mine, what would make you close the tab?

Anyway, here it is if you want to poke at it and tell me it's bad: https://grant-proposal-kit-site.vercel.app/?utm_source=indiehackers&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=grantkit_202608

on August 7, 2026
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    I think the biggest clue is in your own post: "I never talked to a single person who might pay before I built it." I'd spend the next few weeks talking to nonprofits and grant consultants before changing the product. If those conversations don't uncover a strong willingness to pay, no amount of traffic or landing page optimization will fix that. The first customers usually come from conversations, not websites.

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