4 months to go. Chrome extension live. Web search integrated. 4 users. $0 revenue. Still here.

At 27 subscribers and 3 extension users, I’d stop asking “why won’t people pay?” broadly and run 10 manual concierge checks with one narrow audience. If scam-prevention is the promise, prove one painful save, then price around that avoided loss instead of generic usage.

Your line "the distribution is what is broken" stuck with me — so instead of giving advice, I did some work: I built a verified list of 27 people who already care about what TruthScore does (anti-guru YouTubers, media-literacy programs like Poynter MediaWise, creator-economy journalists — 16 with verified direct emails). It's yours for free. I just emailed it to the address listed in your privacy policy — check spam if nothing landed, or reply here and I'll get it to you another way.

4 users and $0 revenue isn’t a reason to build faster. It’s a reason to get uncomfortably specific about who should care.

Before adding anything else, I’d try to get one stranger to say yes to one paid offer. That conversation will probably teach you more than the next month of features.

I opened truthscore.online cold, as a stranger, to answer the exact question you asked: why didn't I pay?

Not the reason I expected. Your free path is genuinely well built - a question for a headline, a paste box, no account, a demo link. Free works because the page is built around free.

Pro is what I couldn't find a reason for. The card sells throughput: unlimited analyses, priority speed, no email gate. But my moment as a visitor is one suspicious video before I follow someone's advice or buy their course - I need depth on one decision, not volume across many. And the one thing you built that delivers that depth - the web cross-reference that catches "claims $50K months, zero footprint online" - isn't mentioned anywhere on the page. Not in the hero, not in Pro's bullets, not in the FAQ. Your hardest build and sharpest differentiator is invisible at the moment of purchase.

Two things the page says against itself: the extension section is headed "Coming Soon" and closes with "50% off Pro forever when we launch," while your top nav and FAQ say the extension is live - and the third stat in the hero is "Free - Always," which tells me not to pay at the exact moment I'm weighing it.

If I tested one change: sell Pro as the background check, not the bulk plan. Lead its bullets with the cross-reference verdict, and let the no-email sample report show that layer catching a real case. The 27 people who gave you an email already told you the score is worth something; what nobody has seen yet is the thing that's worth $9.

The 27 email subscribers who didn't pay are telling you something specific. They experienced the tool, decided it was worth giving their email for, and still didn't pay. That's not a price problem. It's a habit problem.

Free tools create a check-in habit. Habits don't convert to subscriptions unless the person hits a moment where not having paid access causes them real pain. For TruthScore, that moment is probably right before someone follows advice from a creator or buys something a creator recommended. The conversion window is 30 seconds wide, happens outside your product, and you're not in the room when it happens.

The distribution question I'd be asking isn't where to find more users. It's where the scam-victim moment actually happens. Reddit is probably more useful than YouTube for this. r/personalfinance, r/investing, r/malelivingspace all have regular threads about creators people regret trusting. Those communities are already angry and already looking for a tool like yours. That's not a cold audience.

The shadowban is a real hit, but YouTube comments aren't where your buyer is anyway. Your buyer is someone who just watched a video they're suspicious about, not someone browsing creator content for entertainment.

What's the most common pattern in your false positives? That's probably where the trust gap with the 27 non-paying subscribers is hiding.

At 27 emails and 3 extension users, I would stop optimizing product for a week and only run exit interviews: ask each person what exact moment made them try it, what they expected to happen next, and what would make it worth paying before the next scan. The first paid user is probably hidden in the gap between "interesting" and "I need this before I click play."

What stands out to me here isn’t the “0 revenue” part—it’s the fact that you’ve kept shipping, integrating web search, and improving the product despite having only 4 users. That persistence is often harder than the technical work itself.

At this stage, I’d probably treat those 4 users as a goldmine rather than a small number. Understanding exactly why they signed up, what problem they’re trying to solve, which feature they use repeatedly, and what would make them willing to pay could reveal more than trying to acquire hundreds of random users.

You’re still early enough that one strong insight from a single user could completely change the direction of the product. Four users may not be traction yet, but they’re definitely enough to start learning.

Respect for staying with it. The next 4 months could be much more interesting than the first 4.

Three real users is not nothing. The sharper signal in your post is 27 people willing to hand over an email, zero paying, and an API bill that grows with every free scan. That points to a trust-and-value test before a distribution test. I’d make the first scan free, but put the web cross-reference behind a small one-off payment or credit, then watch whether anyone pays to see the reasoning behind one specific score. Not a generic premium tier — a concrete evidence report: which claim was checked, what footprint was missing, and what changed the score. That gives a user something they can judge instead of asking them to trust a number. It also gives you a cleaner conversation with the 27 subscribers: “what would make this report worth paying for?” A working product with zero revenue is painful, but it’s still a clearer experiment when the next user can cost you less than they teach you.

I don't think this is a big enough need honestly.

One thing none of the answers above touch: the trust problem might not be about price or timing, it might be that a single score is a hard thing to trust when it's a verdict about someone else. I hit something similar with money data, not scam data, building Alisio. Early on I showed one confident number and people made decisions off it that didn't hold up, so now if a figure can't show what it's actually built from, the app refuses to print it rather than showing a plausible-looking guess. A TruthScore that comes with the two or three signals it weighted most, the missing footprint, the claim mismatch, whatever specifically tipped it, would probably convert better than a number alone, because people won't pay to trust a black box, they'll pay to see the reasoning and agree with it themselves.

Disclosure: I build three products, one an iOS app with model calls in production, so the API bill part is familiar.

Everyone here is pointing at the 27, and they're right. But there's a separate thing in your post nobody's picked up: right now every new user makes your position worse. Each scan costs you Gemini money, nothing converts, and you've said plainly that it's money you don't have. So distribution isn't just the missing piece - it's the piece that hurts most if it arrives before the paywall works.

Which means I'd flip the order. Get one person paying, at any price, on the traffic you already have. That's a much smaller job than finding a distribution lever, and it's the only thing that turns a new user from a cost into a gain.

Concretely, I'd keep the first scan free - that's your demo, and you need it. The web-search cross-reference is where I'd put the wall. It's the thing that took you longest, it's the part nothing else does, and it's your most expensive call. At the moment your most defensible feature is also the one you're giving away to people who have told you 27 times that free is a price they're happy with.

Eight months and still shipping, with the extension out the door, is not nothing.

Still here after 4 months with 4 users — that's more than most people who talk about building.

The hardest part isn't the code, it's knowing if anyone actually wants it before you've burned months. What was your original validation signal that told you this was worth building?

Keep going.

The biggest signal here may not be distribution yet—it’s the 27 people who used the product, gave you their email, and still didn’t pay. That creates a much more interesting conversion question than “how do I get more users?” They’ve already crossed the curiosity barrier, but apparently not the value/trust/urgency barrier. I’d be careful about treating the product as proven and distribution as the only broken piece; the free-to-paid gap may be telling you something about how the product’s value is framed or experienced. The key question is: what would have needed to happen during that first scan for paying to feel like the obvious next step?

The 27 emails are probably the highest-leverage signal here. I would not ask them generally why they did not pay. I would ask one very narrow thing: "What would have needed to happen in your first scan for this to be worth paying for today?" That forces the answer toward outcome, trust, and urgency instead of politeness.

The “distribution is broken” conclusion is the part I’d question most. 27 people gave you their email after using it, but none paid — that sounds like a useful signal about perceived value, trust, or willingness to pay before assuming you just need more users. I’d dig into that gap first.

The distribution being broken while the product works is the most honest description of early stage I've read. Same situation here — still looking for that first paying customer. The hardest part is that a working product proves nothing about whether you can reach the people who need it.