Built something with no users? Let's fix that!
Is this your story? Technical founder ships a great product, but you launch and have nobody using it.
I've worked at C-level with a handful of startups and solo founders over the last 3 years, getting their products in front of their ideal target audience, and I'm looking for my next opportunity to help get your product making money.
If that's you, reply with what you've built and who your target users are. The second answer tells me more than any pitch.
Decloak originally started out as a cheaper, more modern alternative to legacy security app incumbents like AppCheck. We're now using it at my other company for that purpose!
But then it kept evolving and now there are over 50+ security related features.
It's clear to me that as AI-generated code is only getting more and more, security can not be something people gloss over or assume their agent has taken care of. Time and time again apps go live with all sorts of issues.
Decloak has a free 15 second scan that requires no account and can be shared etc. Then you can register, get a security scoreboard across your domains, and paid accounts with features all the way up to compliance teams (compliance mapping), Enterprise (active testing etc) and agencies (white labelled reports etc).
We're now adding AI-powered penetration testing to compete with some other big security platforms, but much cheaper!
I'm a developer by trade and I am in no way a sales person. I know the core aspects of SEO, GEO and CRO and have already applied those, as well as maintaining a blog of industry news and product updates and social channels with regular posts.
We'll be launching on AppSumo as an experiment in September (agreement already signed), and generally I'm looking for help selling the product. This is not my day job but has the potential to be huge with the right help!
That actually sounds pretty interesting. The AppSumo launch gives you a useful experiment to work around too.
The bit I'm wondering about is what you mean by "help selling the product". Is it mainly that you need someone to figure out where/how to get it in front of the right people, or are you looking for someone to actually do the sales/outreach as well?
And what are you seeing at the moment with the free scans? Are people finding it organically and then converting, or is getting people to actually try it currently the main challenge?
I'd be happy to have a chat and hear a bit more about it.
I searched a pain point for landlords, maintenance coordination, between calls, quotes, scheduling and coordination between tenants and contractors, everything is a mess or consumes too much time.
I've built a platform to fix that, Manutio, but I can't seem to find not even a single landlord to even look at the website.
I found some other Saas builders but no landlords.
I've tried going to social media and posting there, like reddit, I've tried announcing free work with busy landlords so I can help organize an maybe later adapt my app to their needs, but nothing
This is a really useful example of what I'm talking about, because the issue isn't that you've tried the wrong channels, Reddit, social, free-work offers are all reasonable instincts. It's that you're marketing to landlords the way you'd market to developers, and landlords don't behave like that as an audience. They're not congregating in public forums comparing tools, they're mostly offline or in closed, trust-based networks, which is exactly why "post and hope" isn't working, and also why it's fixable once you know where to actually look.
That gap between where you're posting and where landlords actually are is basically the whole problem. Happy to talk through what that looks like for Manutio specifically if you want to DM me, that's the kind of thing I help founders work through.
The pattern I keep noticing in these threads: it's almost never the product, it's that distribution is a different skill and solo founders are missing exactly one half of the equation. Curious what your hit rate is on actually fixing it, what's the most common first move that works?
Good question, and I'll give you a real example rather than a headline stat. On one project, organic search ended up outperforming a 15,000-person email list and 22 high-intent Facebook groups combined, which tells you something most founders don't want to hear: a big list or a big group doesn't mean big intent, and a smaller, well-targeted channel with the right intent beats a large, loosely-targeted one almost every time.
So the most common first move that actually works is stop counting audience size and start auditing intent. Where are people already searching for a solution to this exact problem, right now, versus where are they just present because they joined a group once? SEO tends to win because someone typing a problem into Google has already diagnosed their own pain, you're not creating demand, you're catching it. Email lists and Facebook groups often look impressive on paper but are full of people who joined for a lead magnet, not because they're mid-problem.
Hit rate honestly varies a lot by niche, so I won't pretend there's one number, but the pattern above is consistent across the founders I've worked with.