Dokly

he real problem isn't the product — it's communication.

When you're competing with established players, users need fast feedback. If they ask a question and get a response in 24+ hours, they'll try Mintlify or GitBook instead.

Build a system where you respond to every inquiry in minutes, not hours. That's what converts free users to paying customers.

Honestly, I don’t think zero paying customers at 6 months automatically means the product is bad — especially in dev tools.

One thing I’ve learned building my own platform is that distribution and trust take way longer than most engineers expect. You can build something genuinely useful and still struggle because nobody knows you exist yet.

What stood out to me is this line:

“I’ve never marketed anything.”

That’s probably the bigger challenge right now than the product itself.

I also don’t think “cheaper Mintlify” is the strongest positioning. Simpler/no Git/YAML is more interesting because there are a lot of people who want docs without feeling like they need DevOps knowledge just to publish a page.

If it were me, I wouldn’t shut it down yet. I’d spend the next phase talking directly to users instead of mainly building SEO and features. Even 10 real conversations with developers/startups could reveal more than months of coding in isolation.

The fact that you shipped, use it daily, and are self-aware enough to ask these questions already puts you ahead of most people who never launch at all.

Honestly, I don’t think 6 months with zero paying customers is automatically a “kill it” signal in your case.

The bigger issue is probably that you built in a category where trust and workflow inertia are extremely strong. Documentation tools become part of a company’s infrastructure very quickly, so people move slowly even when the product is objectively better or cheaper.

What stood out to me is that you still don’t have enough real conversations with your target users. Right now you’re trying to interpret silence, but silence is ambiguous:

• bad product

• wrong positioning

• weak distribution

• or simply not enough exposure yet

Those are completely different problems.

I’d probably spend the next 1-2 months doing things that don’t scale before deciding to shut it down:

• direct outreach

• onboarding calls

• watching people use the product live

• understanding why free users don’t convert

Because if people use it and genuinely like the experience, that’s usually a stronger signal than early revenue alone.

fellow solo maker in a similar phase here. shipped an iOS app a few weeks ago, small user base, app store just rejected 1.4. taking your three questions seriously.

on feedback with no users. the most useful signal i got wasnt from signups. it was from posting on hacker news and getting torn apart in the comments. roast threads on reddit/IH work the same way. people who comment "this is bad because X" are giving you free product research. you dont need users for that.

on the wedge. the llms.txt auto-generation is your real angle. mintlify will add it eventually but their docs werent built around it from day one. when AI agents are buying api access, docs that are llm-native by default win. dont bury this under "AI writing" features.

on keep-going vs kill. you've shipped 6 months of polish and written a clear-headed post explaining your three buckets of uncertainty. thats not a kill signal. thats a "havent started marketing yet" signal. give distribution mode 6 more months, then re-evaluate.

good luck.

I'll start by prefacing this with the fact that I know very little about your business compared to you. That being said, I think before you make the decision of whether or not to keep going, you need to ask yourself a few questions.

- Of the 6 months spent building so far, how much of that have you spent marketing and talking to potential customers? If the answer is less than 30%, then you need to get on that real quick and forget everything else. 30-40% may mean you need to experiment a whole lot more to find better strategies that work. Anything above that and maybe you need to rethink your approach or offerings

- Who exactly is your target market? I feel like "people who want affordable alternatives to ..." is not specific enough. Eg. from their websites, I know mintlify are targeting enterprise teams and with gitbook it seems to be product builders. If you are having trouble identifying this, then you may want to re-evaluate

- Of the free signups, how many of them have you had direct, honest conversations with? If the answer is not all, why? Only they can really give you an accurate insight on the viability of what you are trying to build

I will say this, I'm impressed and motivated by how far you have gotten in your journey.

I'm 2 months ahead of you on a parallel arc. Different product, same structural problem. Competing in a category with well-funded incumbents, "AI wrapper" critiques, 0 to a handful of paying users in the first month after launch. Some of what you're asking I can actually answer from this week, not from theory.

On the feedback-with-no-users question: I went to r/SideProject with my product and posted a "rate this, be brutal" style post. Got 2K views, 19 comments, and one Top 1% commenter ran my product through itself and gave me a written tar-pit critique. That single comment was worth more than 50 signups would have been. The framing that worked: don't ask the sub to try your thing, ask them to roast it. People who would never sign up will happily critique. You convert critique into rubric calibration. r/SideProject specifically is the right sub for this. r/Entrepreneur is not.

On the "find your niche" question, here's the honest version. You don't find a niche. You find a wedge of distribution that the incumbents structurally can't cover. Mintlify can't show up in r/SideProject as a person, they're a company. They can't write a vulnerable post about a 6-month grind. You can. The wedge isn't a feature, it's a channel where the incumbent's size is the disadvantage. For me that's been Reddit and IH. For docs tools specifically, it might be writing in places where dev tool founders are already losing time to bad docs (Hacker News comments on docs-related posts, replies to people complaining about Mintlify pricing on X, comments on Build in Public threads about technical writing). Wherever the actual buyers of docs tools are being honest about their pain in public, be the person showing up there as a human, not a brand.

On the decision question, I won't tell you to keep going or stop, but I'll tell you what I'm using as my own signal because it might be useful: the thing I track isn't signups or revenue at this stage, it's whether the conversations I'm having about the product are getting sharper. Six months ago could you have written this post? Probably not. The fact that you can articulate the three buckets of uncertainty this cleanly is itself a signal. Killing it because revenue is flat at month 6 is rational; killing it while your understanding of the market is still compounding is not. Watch the second derivative, not the first.

One last thing on the BYOK angle from your March update: that's the strongest piece of strategic thinking in your whole feed. Don't bury it. That's the thing that makes you not-Mintlify in a way that's actually defensible, and it should be at the top of your landing page, not a feature buried under "AI writing."

Good luck. You're not as far behind as it feels.

Hey Gautam! Don't kill it just yet. As an engineer who spent years shipping code before diving deep into B2B automation and lead generation, I can tell you 100% your product isn't the problem, your distribution model is.

You are trying to use passive inbound marketing (SEO, building in public) against companies with $25M in funding who dominate the ad space and search results. That's a losing battle for a solo founder.

Here is the brutal, actionable advice you need right now:

1. Your Wedge is Wrong: "Simpler and cheaper" won't make a CTO switch from GitBook. But your "Auto-generated llms.txt out of the box" feature? That is a goldmine in 2026. Every AI-first SaaS and API startup desperately needs their docs to be easily scrapable by Cursor, ChatGPT, and Claude. Double down on that AI-ready angle.

2. Stop Waiting for SEO, Go Outbound: Since you have zero budget, you need to launch a hyper-targeted B2B Cold Outreach campaign. > Instead of guessing, you should crawl Product Hunt, Y-Combinator directories, or LinkedIn for newly launched early-stage tech startups. Filter for those that have messy README files or no structured developer docs, scrape their founders' emails, and shoot them a personalized, automated 3-step cold email sequence. Offer them to migrate their messy text into Dokly for free to make their product "AI-discoverable" in 5 minutes.

You've built a solid engine, you just need to hook it up to an outbound pipeline to get those first 10 paying customers.

Drop me a DM here or on X, I'd love to jump on a quick chat and help you brainstorm/structure an automated scraping & outbound sequence to get Dokly in front of the right founders. You've got this!

Congrats on the launch, looks solid. How are you currently thinking about acquiring early users and gathering feedback?

Looks great, I just signed up! I think you have built out a lot of the great features needed, but for me personally I think you have to focus on design a little bit. In my opinion, I want my docs to look super top-notch design wise to give customers that "luxury" feel with software

This is the most authentic and universal startup experience there is. That deafening silence after the first public launch is a rite of passage. Congratulations—you've now leveled up from "builder" to "iterative problem-solver."

You're 100% right to suspect messaging and targeting. Traffic without conversion is a classic sign that you're speaking the wrong language to the wrong crowd. Your product likely solves a real problem, but the people who clicked didn't instantly see their pain reflected in your copy or believe you were the solution.

Your "What's next" list is gold. Especially "Actually talk to people instead of just broadcasting." Do that immediately. Find 5 developers who should need docs and interview them about their current process. Don't mention your tool at first. Just listen.

A few tactical thoughts based on your post:

1. "Free tier too limited?" Possibly. Could it feel more like a trial than a free plan? Consider a temporary "Unlock all features for 30 days" launch offer to remove friction and get critical early users in the door.

2. Landing Page Autopsy: Does your headline state the user's biggest frustration with documentation, or does it just describe your product? People buy aspirin, not vitamins.

3. Targeting: r/SideProject is full of builders launching their thing, not necessarily looking for new tools. Where do developers go to complain about writing docs? Find those threads, listen, then engage helpfully.

The only failure now would be to stop. You've built in public, now learn in public. Share what you discover from talking to people. That shift from "Here's my thing" to "Here's what I'm learning about your problems" is where the real connection starts.

You're in the trenches. This is where founders are made. Keep going.

Love this model

As someone in the painting industry, especially serving clients searching for Painters in San Antonio, keeping costs lean matters. BYOK makes total sense—why pay inflated AI markups when you can use it at real API cost?

Transparent pricing builds trust, just like in painting. Respect for choosing the honest route.

I am getting close to this point. And it does terrify me a bit. But hopefully things go well.

Been there. First launches rarely convert.
What channel brought the most qualified traffic, not just volume? That’s often the clue. I am curious which platform you advertised on.

Oof I really feel this. That “people clicked but nobody signed up” silence is uniquely brutal, especially when you’ve been carrying the whole thing solo for months. You’re handling it with a lot of clarity and honesty, though, which already puts you ahead of where most people are after Day 1.

One thing that jumped out at me is your instinct that it’s probably not the product, but the messaging. That’s very often the case. You might find the StoryBrand framework helpful here. It forces you to make the user the hero, clearly name the problem they feel, and show how your product helps them win quickly, without asking them to work too hard just to understand the value. A lot of dev tools fail not because they’re weak, but because the landing page answers what it isinstead of why the visitor should care right now.

When someone lands on your homepage, can they immediately see what painful problem in their day gets easier in the next 5 minutes if they try Dokly — or do they have to think like a builder to get it?

You’re absolutely right that talking to people next is the move. This post alone shows you’re doing the hard part: staying in the game after the first punch. Rooting for you! Day 1 is rarely the story people tell at the end.

Been there! That first silent launch hurts more than people admit.

One thing worth sanity-checking early: 0 signups with traffic usually isn’t a “marketing” failure yet, it’s a clarity or friction issue.

When someone lands, they’re subconsciously trying to answer three things very fast:
– what is this actually for?
– is it meant for someone like me?
– what do I get before committing?

If any of those feel fuzzy, people don’t reject the product, they just don’t act.

Before changing channels, I’d try watching a few people react to the page cold (even friends). If they can’t explain the value in one sentence after 5 seconds, that’s usually the first lever.

Respect for shipping publicly though, most people never even get this far.

This resonates deeply. I'm a solo dev from Japan with 24 iOS apps, and the silence after launch is something I know too well.

Your point about "broadcasting vs actually talking to people" is the key insight here. I spent months localizing my apps into 35 languages thinking that would drive downloads. It didn't. What I should have done was exactly what you're planning - genuine conversations, not just announcements.

One thing that helped me reframe: Day 1 data tells you nothing except that you shipped. The real signal comes from the conversations you have in the next 2-3 weeks.

Keep building in public. This kind of transparency is exactly what makes IH valuable.

Thanks for sharing this transparently.

It’s striking how often traffic exists, but no decision happens on the other side.

I also encountered the same situation. The product I just released, Qibanhub (https://www.qibanhub.com), has very few users and is scattered. I post too many external posts and worry about being blocked or deleted by the platform. Cold start is always difficult, but you have to be shameless to find users for your own products and your own children. No matter how hard it is, we still have to maintain it well so that it can survive this period and slowly grow naturally.

I know how frustrating that can be but I think you are targeting the wrong subreddit. My opinion about reddit could be really biased since I am resenting them for banning by 12 years old account with lots of karma but I have noticed their audience convert poorly with ads. They are hardliners . There's the bots issues too.

I don't know how you validated the idea but I think you are up to some real deal, it's a nice product. You just have to build your distribution now and perhaps try to find a better positioning, a small group of people that'd live on your product all day.

You can solve positioning issues by making ad variations with so much variation like, virtually different positioning. Doesn't have to be an ad, could be free posts on Quora, indiehackers, medium, YouTube, or just go for meta ads, track the source whose audience stayed longer, did more clicks or signed up. That's the audience you should be talking to.

I have also found that products like yours do much better on viral platforms like tiktok, especially when you find a way to bundle 'AI' term into the marketing/promotional texts.

Goodluck!

I feel your pain. Hang in there.

The 0 signups sting is real - been there more times than I'd like to admit. What yamamoto said about broadcasting vs genuine engagement is spot on.

One thing I'd add: your timing might actually be fine, the targeting probably isn't. Reddit posts in generic startup subs reach people who are *curious about startups* - not people who are actively wrestling with documentation pain right now.

The developers who'd pay for this are mid-project, probably googling things like "how to deploy docs site" or "docusaurus vs gitbook" right now. They're not browsing r/SideProject. Might be worth lurking in language-specific discords and subreddits where people ask documentation questions, then just... answering them. When someone asks "how do I host my API docs?" the answer isn't "use my product" - it's genuinely help them, and they'll click your profile.

Also worth considering: the free tier might be testing the product but not testing the *workflow*. If someone can't actually go through the full "write docs, publish, share with team" loop in the free tier, they haven't really evaluated it. They've just looked at the editor.

Day 1 data is basically noise anyway. Keep shipping.

Day 1 with 0 signups is brutal, but it's also information. A few things I'd dig into:

Traffic source mismatch: Reddit and broad ads often bring curious browsers, not buyers. Developer docs buyers typically discover tools when they're actively building something. Have you tried reaching out to recently launched projects on IH or PH that might need docs?

Free tier friction: The 1 project / 5 pages limit might actually work against you. It's not enough to properly evaluate the product, but it's also not generous enough to feel like a gift. Consider either removing limits for 14 days or making the free tier more useful.

The "who's using it" concern: I'd address the previous comment's point directly. If those logos are aspirational, better to remove them. Trust is everything early on.

One thing that worked for me: Instead of "broadcasting" on Reddit, I started commenting genuinely on posts where people discussed the problem my product solves. Much slower, but converts way better.

The product looks solid. The gap is in the distribution, not the build.

Hey, I checked the site out. Honestly, simplify it by 10x. I say this to be constructive, not mean, but it just looks like annother fancy js heavy LLM bloat site. Show the value on the landing page straight away. There are also some dishonest claims on the site about who is using it, which isn't a great vibe.

Website looks great! Keep it up!

I am curious, how did you come up with this idea and how did you validate it?