Try Them On Me
See how Vinted clothes look on you — before you buy
I’m currently documenting a challenge:
building digital products until I reach €3,000/month.
Not with one big startup,
but with multiple small products.
I call it The Rent Project.
Why €3,000?
Because where I live, rent is around €1,000.
And realistically, you need about 3x that
to be considered a reliable tenant.
So €3,000/month = stability.
That’s the target.
Episode 2 just dropped
In this new episode, I focused on something I thought would work:
ads.
I tested small campaigns on Meta and TikTok,
expecting to accelerate growth.
Instead, I got a pretty clear lesson:
traffic doesn’t mean users.
What happened
traffic increased
engagement didn’t
free trials weren’t used
and the only paying users came from organic traffic
So I basically paid for clicks, not intent.
What I’m doing next
This pushed me to rethink a few things:
simplifying the funnel
improving how the product is accessed
focusing more on organic distribution
and paying much more attention to retention
Why I’m sharing this
I’m not sharing success stories.
I’m sharing the actual process:
what I try
what works
what clearly doesn’t
Because honestly, that’s the part I find the most useful
when I read other builders’ journeys.
If you're interested
Here’s the episode:
👉 https://youtu.be/x5RCOml_igA
Curious if others here are also building toward a specific income goal,
rather than chasing a single “big idea”.
I’m building TryThemOn, a small SaaS around fashion images.
The initial idea was simple (and very logical… or so I thought):
“Help people imagine how clothes would fit on them.”
Virtual try-on. Models. Projection. The usual.
The product worked. The tech worked.
The traction didn’t.
So I did the uncomfortable thing: I stopped tweaking the landing page and went where users actually talk.
Reddit.
The Reddit thread that slapped me in the face
I posted and interacted in a few threads around buying clothes online, especially on Vinted and second‑hand platforms.
At some point, I asked a very naive question:
“Am I the only one who gets bored of clothes photographed lying on a bed or a table?”
I expected people to agree.
They didn’t.
Instead, I got answers like:
“Flat-lay lets me understand the garment without the noise of a model’s body.”
“I can instantly tell if a pair of jeans will work: rise, waist, leg shape, hem width.”
“Models introduce a variable that is visually dominant — and very different from my body.”
And then this hit me:
They don’t want to imagine themselves in the clothes. They want to understand the garment itself.
The uncomfortable realization
I wasn’t solving their problem.
I was solving mine.
As a guy, my mental model was:
Put clothes on a body
Project yourself
Decide
But many women think differently:
Remove the body
Read the garment
Decide
Same goal. Opposite path.
I had built noise… where they wanted signal.
The real positioning (thanks Reddit)
The real angle of the product isn’t:
“Imagine how it fits on you.”
It’s:
“Understand the garment without the noise.”
That sentence wasn’t written by a marketer.
It was written by users. In comments. For free.
The product pivot
Instead of fighting this insight, I leaned into it.
TryThemOn is now evolving toward two complementary modes:
1️⃣ Virtual Try‑On
For people who want projection.
2️⃣ Without Mannequin
Take a photo of a garment worn on a model and extract the clothing into a clean flat‑lay style view.
No body. No pose. No bias.
Just the cut.
Same image. Two mental models.
What I learned
Users don’t describe problems the way founders imagine them
“More realistic” is not always “more useful”
Sometimes the value is not adding information, but removing variables
And most importantly:
If your product isn’t clicking, stop polishing. Start listening — somewhere uncomfortable.
What’s next
I’m rebuilding the messaging, the onboarding, and part of the product around this insight.
All because I asked a bad question on Reddit.
Worth it.
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1
Congrats on the launch! What channels are you testing to bring in your first customers?
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1
Thanks! I’m testing TikTok and Facebook ads to get early traffic. Slow but steady, given the budget.
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Nice, paid ads are great for controlled testing.
If you’re open to adding a complementary channel, Reddit can sometimes bring higher-intent users at a lower cost when positioned inside the right conversations.
Happy to share how I’d approach it for your product if useful.
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Facebook and TikTok campaigns are dead. Don’t bother. Seriously.
At first I was hyped: Facebook was sending tons of traffic. Then I actually looked at the stats: every single paid visitor basically hit the landing page… and bounced. Digging deeper? Almost all came from random towns in Africa or India. Yep, click farms pretending to care about my site. Spoiler: they don’t. They didn’t even try the free trial. Thanks, I guess?
Paid ads performed worse than my grandma’s newsletter. Lesson learned: never again. Money, time, patience: gone. All for the thrill of watching bots “visit” my page.
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1
Ouch, yeah, that’s the dark side of low-budget paid traffic. You end up paying for impressions instead of intent.
The big difference with Reddit is you’re not interrupting anyone; you’re stepping into conversations that are already happening around the exact problem you solve, no bots, no click farms, just people openly discussing their frustrations.
Especially for early-stage products, I’ve seen founders get better results by contributing to relevant threads instead of running ads. The traffic is smaller, but the intent is significantly higher.
Would you be open to testing a conversation-led approach instead of paid distribution?
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Totally agree on intent vs impressions. That’s exactly why I stopped paid ads.
Reddit-style, conversation-led traffic does work… but it’s slow, fragile, and heavily karma-gated. As a founder, you spend more time “earning the right to speak” than validating your product.
I’m not against it, I already do it. But it doesn’t scale, and it doesn’t forgive mistakes. One wrong post and you’re shadow-banned into oblivion.
So yes, conversation-led acquisition is powerful. No, it’s not the silver bullet people pretend it is. Especially when you’re early and need signal fast.
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You’re 100% right.
Reddit is slow if you approach it like a founder trying to squeeze validation out of it between product work. And yes, it punishes mistakes.
That’s usually where most people get it wrong. They treat it like a posting channel instead of a positioning + account-building system.
When it’s structured properly (aged accounts, controlled engagement, pain-first threads, no direct pitching), it becomes much less fragile and a lot more predictable.
Out of curiosity, are you doing this from your main founder account or testing with separate accounts?
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My girlfriend buys a lot of clothes on Vinted.
Most listings show clothes on hangers or laid on a bed.You never know how it’ll actually look once worn.
And somehow you’re supposed to make a buying decision from that.
After being frustrated one too many times, I built a small app to fix this.
TryThemOn lets you upload a photo of yourself and preview how a piece of clothing could look before buying it.
No dressing room. No guessing. Just a visual idea.
It’s not perfect — but it’s already better than buying blind.
I’m curious:
Would you use this before buying on Vinted?
What would make it actually useful for you?
👉 https://trythemon.me
Brutal feedback welcome.
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