u/B3N0U

Classic developer mistake and I made it anyway even though I knew better.

we spent three months building before showing the product to anyone. the logic was "let's make sure it's solid first." so we built. and built. and built.

70+ endpoints. search, scraping, outreach, inbox management, analytics, CRM, webhooks, conversation history, profile enrichment, company data, post publishing, comment replies, reaction tracking. you name it, we probably built it.

Launch day came. people started using it.

turns out 80% of usage comes from maybe 10 endpoints. the other 60 endpoints exist. people just don't use them. some have never been called in production. not once.

the endpoints I thought were clever and differentiating? barely touched.

The boring ones I almost didn't bother building because they seemed too simple? used every single day.

the thing that stings: I knew about this pattern before I started. I had read about it. I had nodded along to the "build less, talk to users earlier" advice approximately one thousand times.

and then I built 70+ endpoints before talking to a single user.

I think what happens is that building feels like progress. every new endpoint is a thing you did, a box you checked, a feature you can put on the landing page. talking to users is uncomfortable and inconclusive and slow.

so you keep building because building is the part you're good at.

the fix for our next version: we're shipping with 10 endpoints. if someone needs something else, they ask, we build it in 24 hours, we see if anyone else asks for the same thing. if three people ask for the same feature it gets added to the core. everything else stays custom.

What's the feature you built that nobody actually uses?

when we launched, I had a theory. write useful content on Reddit, get leads. post on LinkedIn, get leads. do outreach, get leads. classic B2B playbook.

two months later I actually looked at where our paying customers came from. the data destroyed most of what I assumed.

the numbers

73% of paying users had touched one of our free tools before signing up. not the landing page. not a Reddit post. not an outreach DM. a free tool.

we have 8 of them on our homepage. no signup, no email gate, no card. you land on the page, use the tool, get real data back in about 3 seconds. that's it.

the other 27% came from various things: Reddit comments, LinkedIn posts, word of mouth, the TV appearance we somehow ended up getting. all combined, less than a third.

I was not expecting this. I had spent way more time on content and outreach than on the free tools. the ROI was completely inverted.

why free tools convert better than content

I've been trying to understand this for a few weeks now and I think it comes down to one thing: demonstration vs. description.

a blog post or a Reddit post describes what your product does. it asks the reader to trust you before they've experienced anything.

a free tool demonstrates it. the person does the thing, sees a real result, and forms their own opinion. no trust required from you. the product does the convincing.

the mental shift for the user is completely different. after a landing page they think "maybe this works." after a free tool they think "I just saw it work." those are not the same buying decision.

what surprised me even more

the free tools also started ranking organically on Google for specific keywords we never targeted. turns out nobody else was offering these as standalone tools with no signup wall. so Google just gave us the traffic.

and the users who came through the free tools churned significantly less than users who came through other channels. they already understood what the product did before they paid. there was no "oh this isn't what I expected" moment.

what I got wrong early

I spent the first 3 weeks of the launch optimizing our landing page copy. changing headlines, testing CTAs, rewriting the value proposition. none of it moved the needle.

the free tools didn't change. and they quietly drove most of our revenue the whole time.

in hindsight this makes sense. a landing page is a promise. a free tool is proof. I was optimizing the promise while ignoring the proof.

the part I'm still figuring out

the free tools work but they're also a support surface. some people use them heavily without ever converting. that's fine as a marketing cost but it raises the question of where to draw the line between "free enough to build trust" and "free enough that nobody needs to pay."

we haven't solved that yet. right now we draw the line at volume and at features that require the full API. but I'm not sure that's the right place.

curious if anyone else has found free tools to be a major conversion driver, or if this is specific to our category. and if you've figured out where to draw the free tier line, I'd genuinely like to know.

a few weeks ago I appeared live on BFM Business (biggest business TV channel in France, roughly the CNBC equivalent) to pitch my SaaS. prime time morning show.

no PR agency. no cold email blasts. no media request forms.

here's exactly what happened.

what I actually did

I opened my AI agent and wrote one prompt. something like: "find journalists, producers and media creators in France who have covered AI, SaaS, startups or automation in the last 30 days. prioritize tech press, business TV and podcasters. qualify them by recency and engagement. draft personalized DMs that reference their recent content and explain why my story fits what they're covering."

the agent searched across LinkedIn and pulled recent posts and engagement data from journalists at tech publications, business TV channels, podcasters and newsletter writers. it found 44 relevant profiles, scored them against the criteria, narrowed to 10 and drafted a personalized message for each one. one of those 10 was a producer at BFM Business who had posted about AI startups 3 days earlier.

I reviewed the drafts, approved them. they went out.

Got a response within days. the week after I was live on air.

the whole thing took maybe 15 minutes of my time.

why this works when cold outreach doesn't

most founders approach press like they approach sales: volume. blast 200 journalists with the same pitch and hope someone bites. conversion rate on cold PR outreach is maybe 1 to 2% if your pitch is excellent.

the difference here is intent data. instead of finding everyone at BFM, the agent found the people who were actively covering topics close to mine right now. not "works at this TV channel" relevant. "posted about AI tools for founders last tuesday and asked followers for guest suggestions" relevant.

a message that references something someone posted 3 days ago isn't a cold DM. It's a warm one. the person doesn't feel like they're receiving pitch number 200.

warm targeted messages convert at 60 to 70%. cold mass outreach converts at 5 to 10% on a good day.

10 warm messages outperformed what 500 cold emails would have done. and it took 15 minutes instead of a week.

the 3 things that made the messages work

1. I didn't pitch the product. I pitched a story. journalists don't care about your features. they care about "will this be interesting for my audience." the story wasn't "my SaaS does X." it was "a founder used his own AI agent to book himself on your show, which is exactly the kind of thing your viewers want to learn about."
2. each message referenced something specific they had posted recently. not "I love your show" but "I saw your segment on AI tools for SMBs last tuesday and noticed you were looking for French founders in this space." that one sentence separates you from everyone else pitching them.
3. under 4 sentences. the message's only job is to get a response, not to close the deal.

the bigger lesson

most founders over index on volume in everything they do. more emails, more DMs, more connection requests. it works to some extent but it's massively inefficient.

the shift that changes everything: stop doing targeting manually. define the criteria, let the agent find the people who match right now, review and approve before anything goes out.

This applies to PR, sales, partnerships, investor outreach. 10 warm messages beat 500 cold ones every time.

happy to go deeper on the prompt structure, the qualification criteria, or how to apply this to outreach beyond press.