Getrive

Quick context: I shut down my last product (Fairdue, a subscription-splitting app) after a week of near-zero traction across Reddit, TikTok, and YouTube — total reach across every channel was basically zero, so it wasn't really a "no," it was a "nobody saw it." Rather than keep throwing content at the wall, I pivoted into Getrive (getrive.app): a tool that watches Reddit, Hacker News, and other places founders' exact customers hang out, scores posts for relevance, and surfaces the ones worth a genuine reply — before a competitor gets there first.

It's now about 10 days old. No revenue yet, and I want to explain why that's intentional, plus share the numbers I do have.

The paid vs. organic experiment

I ran a small paid test to see if ads could accelerate things:

• First Reddit ad, no geo-targeting: ~39k impressions, 175 clicks, 2 signups. Turned out most of the reach was cheap-CPM traffic from markets I wasn't actually targeting.

• Same ad, restricted to real target markets: reach dropped to ~1,280, but I got 3 real signups on day one — a much better ratio.

• A separate Instagram ad on an existing video: 16 visitors, 0% conversion. Session recordings showed almost no real engagement — just passive scrolling.

• Meanwhile, organic Reddit replies (using Getrive's own core mechanism — genuinely helpful replies to people already asking for this) converted at 18–33% in the same windows.

Verdict: I killed paid spend entirely. For an early product like this, organic outreach where you're actually solving someone's stated problem beats ads by a wide margin.

Fixing the landing page instead of guessing

Digging into session recordings and funnels surfaced a real problem: on mobile, the actual product was buried below the fold. Scroll-depth data showed zero sessions reaching 75–100% of the page in a full week, and mobile CTA conversion was sitting around 2.4%.

After a mobile-first redesign (product preview visible without scrolling, tighter headline, bigger CTA):

• Scroll depth recovered — sessions started reaching the 75–100% range same-day

• Mobile CTA conversion settled around 7.3% once separated from noisy ad traffic

Also found (and fixed) a sneaky analytics bug: my onboarding funnel was showing a 0% completion rate, which flatly contradicted what I was seeing in session recordings. Root cause — the funnel required an email_verified event that Google OAuth signups never fire (they verify server-side instead). Removing that bogus prerequisite took the funnel from 0% to 83% overnight. Good reminder that a scary metric is sometimes just a broken metric.

The numbers so far

Nothing huge yet, but real:

• 48 registered users so far

• Of the tracked signups, 62.5% complete onboarding — up massively from the 0% the broken funnel was showing before I found the tracking bug

• Mobile landing page conversion: ~7.3%, up from ~2.4% pre-redesign

• Organic Reddit replies are converting at 18–33%, versus low-single-digits (or 0%) on every paid channel I tested

What's next

• Finish verifying whether a source-activation drop-off I'm seeing in onboarding is real or another tracking bug

• Add Dev.to as a monitored source (IndieHackers itself is already live and pulling in real signal)

• Keep leaning into organic, since it's the only channel that's actually worked so far

Happy to answer questions — especially if you've run paid vs. organic tests on your own product and seen a similar gap.