Solo-built Pistly for months. Launching on PH this week and I still don't know if the market wants it.
A while back I needed to build a prospect list for my own sales work: businesses in a specific sector and area, with real contact info. Doing it by hand — Google Maps, copy-pasting names, hunting for emails one by one — took most of a day for a list that was outdated within weeks.
So I built Pistly: pick a sector + area, it scrapes Google Maps for matching businesses, pulls their contact details (email, phone, website, socials), and lets you send a personalized email to the whole list in one click. Quick demo video (2 min, real product, no mockups): https://youtu.be/g4_fJXa3w3U
What started as a tool for my own prospecting turned into a full product over a few months, solo — Next.js/Supabase/Stripe/Resend/Apify stack. Along the way it grew past pure B2B sales: turns out the same "find companies + reach out directly" flow works just as well for job/internship hunting and freelance outreach, so that's now baked in too.
Shipped free tier + Pro/Business plans, automatic follow-ups if there's no reply, CSV/PDF export, MX-record email verification, a lightweight CRM pipeline. Honestly the hardest part wasn't the scraping — it was everything downstream: keeping the emails from feeling spammy/generic, not letting anyone accidentally send an unpersonalized blast, follow-up logic that doesn't nag.
Launching on Product Hunt this week: producthunt.com/products/pistly?launch=pistly. No paid marketing, no network to lean on beyond what I've built posting in relevant communities — genuinely curious whether this resonates outside the handful of people I've talked to so far.
pistly.com if anyone wants to poke at it. Happy to answer anything about the build or the go-to-market side, which is the part I'm least confident about.
Great story! Organizing AI conversations across multiple LLMs with full-text search and local indexing is such a valuable solution. Congrats on reaching 5-figure MRR!
The risk I see is that you have 3 different buyer stories now: sales prospecting, job hunting, and freelance outreach. For the PH launch, I would pick one painful ICP and make the first promise extremely narrow, then use the other two as discovery branches. Otherwise positive comments may look like validation while each segment waits for a different product.
This is exactly the tension I've been sitting with, thanks for naming it clearly. You're right that "positive comments ≠ validation" if each commenter is picturing a different product. For the PH launch I'm going to lead narrow with sales prospecting as the primary ICP (that's where the willingness to pay is clearest) and let job-hunting/freelance surface as "huh, I didn't expect that" discovery comments rather than the headline. Appreciate the push to actually commit instead of hedging in the tagline.
The line about preventing people from accidentally sending an unpersonalized blast stood out.
That feels less like adding a feature and more like deciding what kind of product you want Pistly to be.
Yeah, that one was a real fork in the road. It would've been faster to let people edit anything and just show a warning, but a warning you can dismiss stops meaning anything after the first time. I'd rather someone hit a wall and ask "why can't I remove {{name}}" than let one bulk unpersonalized send slip through and burn trust with an entire list. Small line of code, but it's basically the product's stance on what "personalized outreach" is allowed to mean.
That’s an interesting example of how a small product decision can encode a much bigger principle.
I’d like to continue the conversation outside the thread. What’s the best email to reach you on?