If you see a product idea that genuinely interests you, but you don't buy it, what is usually stopping you?

I'm asking because I've noticed something frustrating: people are often willing to say “I'd be interested in this” or give you an idea for a product, but when you ask what would actually make them buy it—or ask for feedback on how to build it properly—the conversation just dies.

I'm not expecting everyone to buy every product. That's obviously not realistic.

But if someone is interested enough to suggest an idea, wouldn't it be more useful to say what's missing, what you'd expect from the product, what price you'd consider, or why you wouldn't buy it?

For people who actually sell digital products: how do you get useful feedback from potential buyers instead of vague interest?

I'm doing some research before creating my next digital product, and I want to do things differently this time.

I've already made the mistake of creating something first, putting it on Gumroad, and then realizing I had no audience and no real evidence that people wanted it.

So I'm not looking for digital product ideas.

I'm trying to find real problems that people are already experiencing.

If you're comfortable sharing, I'd love to know:

What is something you're currently struggling with?

What have you already tried to solve it?

What didn't work?

Are you currently using a workaround, tool, service, spreadsheet, template, course, etc.?

What do you wish existed that would make this problem easier?

If you've already spent money trying to solve it, what did you pay for?

It can be related to work, studying, business, hobbies, productivity, software, freelancing, content creation, finances, organization, or anything else.

I'm especially interested in problems where you think:

“Why is there still no good/easy solution for this?”

Please don't suggest something just because you think it could make money. I'm much more interested in problems you've personally experienced.

I'm not selling anything here and I don't have a product to promote. I genuinely want to understand what problems people are dealing with before I build anything.

Thanks — even a small annoyance you've been putting up with for months is useful.

I’m a beginner trying to figure out the digital-product space, and I’d like some honest advice from people who have actually sold digital products.

I previously made a digital product, put it on Gumroad, and got 0 sales. I also had basically no audience, so I realize now that simply uploading something to Gumroad and waiting for sales was a pretty flawed approach.

After getting feedback from people here, I’m now trying to separate two different problems:

Is the product actually something people want?

Or am I simply putting it somewhere with no audience/discoverability and expecting people to find it?

So I'm wondering about the platform side of things.

If you were starting from my position — no audience, beginner, and selling things like PDFs, ebooks, templates, or other digital products — would you:

Stay with Gumroad and focus entirely on bringing my own traffic?

Use something like Payhip, Ko-fi, Lemon Squeezy, etc.?

Use an actual marketplace that already has buyers/discoverability?

Or forget about the platform for now and validate the product somewhere else first?

I'm not expecting a platform to magically generate sales. I'm mainly interested in whether switching platforms provides any meaningful advantages in terms of discoverability, conversion tools, analytics, payments, trust, or anything else that actually matters.

If you've personally used multiple platforms, I'd especially appreciate hearing:

What did you use, why did you switch, and did switching actually make a noticeable difference in your sales?

I'm trying to learn from people who have actually done this rather than just picking a platform because some YouTube video says it's the "best Gumroad alternative."

I’m a 20-year-old guy looking for a female best friend, strictly platonic. I’m not looking for a girlfriend or anything romantic.

Ideally, someone around my age who’s chill, easy to talk to, and interested in building a genuine friendship. We can talk about random stuff, share memes, discuss life, movies, games, whatever.

One boundary: I’m not looking for late-night calls or conversations. I prefer normal daytime/evening chats.

If you’re also looking for a genuine platonic friendship, feel free to DM me. 🙂

I've already made the mistake of creating products first and looking for buyers afterward.

I previously made a digital wallpaper pack and a prompt engineering guide, but neither got any sales.

So this time I want to approach it differently:

Find a real problem → validate demand → build the product.

For people here who have actually sold digital products, I'd love to learn from your experience.

How do you find product ideas with real demand?

Specifically:

• Where do you look for problems people are willing to pay to solve?
• What signs tell you that an idea has actual buying demand?
• How do you validate an idea before spending days/weeks creating it?
• Do you use Reddit, Etsy, Gumroad, Google, TikTok, YouTube, etc.?
• Have you ever found a product idea from people repeatedly asking for a solution?
• What's one digital product you made that surprised you with how well it sold?

I'm not selling anything and I'm not asking for product ideas just for the sake of ideas.

I'm trying to understand the research/validation process so I don't make another product nobody wants.

If you've learned something from your own failures or successes, I'd genuinely appreciate hearing about it.

Hey! I’m a 20-year-old guy looking to meet a few girls on Reddit who are genuinely interested in making new friends and having normal conversations. Just to be upfront: I’m a guy, and I’m only looking for platonic friendships. I’m not looking for anything romantic or NSFW — just friendship, getting to know each other, sharing interests, random conversations, memes, movies/music, life stuff, etc. A few preferences: Girls only, please. Preferably not Indian, just because I’d like to meet people from different backgrounds and cultures. No pressure for late-night or constant conversations. I’m more comfortable with casual conversations whenever we’re both free. Ideally looking for people who actually want a friendship rather than a one-day chat that disappears. If you’re also looking for a genuine online friend, feel free to comment or DM me. Tell me a little about yourself so we have something to start with! 🙂

Hey! I’m a 20-year-old guy looking to meet a few girls on Reddit who are genuinely interested in making new friends and having normal conversations. Just to be upfront: I’m a guy, and I’m only looking for platonic friendships. I’m not looking for anything romantic or NSFW — just friendship, getting to know each other, sharing interests, random conversations, memes, movies/music, life stuff, etc. A few preferences: Girls only, please. Preferably not Indian, just because I’d like to meet people from different backgrounds and cultures. No pressure for late-night or constant conversations. I’m more comfortable with casual conversations whenever we’re both free. Ideally looking for people who actually want a friendship rather than a one-day chat that disappears. If you’re also looking for a genuine online friend, feel free to comment or DM me. Tell me a little about yourself so we have something to start with! 🙂

Hey everyone! I’m 20M and looking to meet some girls from anywhere in the world. I’m not looking for guys — specifically hoping to connect with girls around my age.

I’m open to chatting about pretty much anything: hobbies, music, movies, everyday life, random late-night conversations, or just getting to know each other. I’d love to make genuine international friendships and see where the conversation goes.

If you’re 18+ and interested in making a new friend from another part of the world, feel free to DM me! 😊

Please tell me a little about yourself when you message so we have something to start with.

Hey everyone,

I'm a solo developer researching ideas for a small SaaS product.

I'm not here to sell anything—I'm trying to understand real problems before I build anything.

I'd love to know:

What's one repetitive or frustrating task you deal with every week?

What have you tried to solve it?

If a tool completely solved that problem, would you pay for it? If yes, roughly how much?

I'm looking for honest answers, even if the problem seems small. Thanks in advance!

Hey! I'm a 20-year-old guy from India looking to meet some new people and hopefully make a few genuine friends.

A bit about me: I'm into gaming (mostly BGMI), tech, cybersecurity, working out, and I enjoy learning new things. I can be a bit quiet at first, but once I get comfortable, I enjoy having good conversations about pretty much anything.

I'm looking for people around my age (18–25) who are interested in getting to know each other, sharing memes, talking about hobbies, or just checking in from time to time. If we click, that's awesome.

If this sounds like your kind of friendship, feel free to send me a message and tell me a little about yourself. Looking forward to meeting some new people! DM me if possible

Hey! I'm a 20-year-old guy from India looking to meet some new people and hopefully make a few genuine friends.

A bit about me: I'm into gaming (mostly BGMI), tech, cybersecurity, working out, and I enjoy learning new things. I can be a bit quiet at first, but once I get comfortable, I enjoy having good conversations about pretty much anything.

I'm looking for people around my age (18–25) who are interested in getting to know each other, sharing memes, talking about hobbies, or just checking in from time to time. If we click, that's awesome.

If this sounds like your kind of friendship, feel free to send me a message and tell me a little about yourself. Looking forward to meeting some new people! DM me if possible

Hey everyone! I'm a 20-year-old guy from India, and I've realized it's been a really long time since I've had female friends. Most of my friend circle has always been guys, so I'd genuinely like to meet more women, hear different perspectives, and build some normal, platonic friendships. A little about me: Into gaming (BGMI and PC games) Studying cybersecurity Love technology and learning new things Working on improving myself through fitness Enjoy memes, random conversations, and sharing day-to-day life I'm not looking for anything weird or romantic—just genuine conversations and friendships with people around my age (18–25). Of course, everyone is welcome to message me, but I'd especially love to make more female friends since that's something I've been missing for a while. If you decide to message me, tell me your age, where you're from, and one interesting fact about yourself. I'll happily do the same. Looking forward to meeting some awesome people!

I'm curious to hear from programmers of all experience levels.

If you could go back to day one of learning programming, what's one thing you wish existed that would have made your life easier?

Examples:

A cheat sheet

A roadmap

A PDF guide

A website

A template

A collection of projects

A YouTube series

An interactive tool

For me, I wish I had a simple roadmap explaining what to learn and in what order instead of feeling overwhelmed by the number of options.

I'm interested in hearing:

Your experience level.

The resource you wish existed.

Why it would've helped you.

Hopefully, this thread can help beginners and maybe inspire people to build useful resources for the community.

I'm trying to figure out whether my expectations are unrealistic.

I've published several cyberpunk/programmer wallpaper packs on Gumroad at around $3.99, but each product is only getting 2–7 views and 0 sales.

I'm not looking for marketing advice in general—I specifically want numbers from people who have sold on Gumroad.

Please comment with:

Product type:

Views before first sale:

Price:

Time taken to get first sale:

Main traffic source:

For example:

Product type: Notion Template

Views before first sale: 87

Price: $9

Time: 2 weeks

Traffic: Pinterest

I'm hoping this thread can become a useful data point for new Gumroad sellers as well.

Thanks!

I'm trying to figure out whether my expectations are unrealistic.

I've published several cyberpunk/programmer wallpaper packs on Gumroad at around $3.99, but each product is only getting 2–7 views and 0 sales.

I'm not looking for marketing advice in general—I specifically want numbers from people who have sold on Gumroad.

Please comment with:

Product type:

Views before first sale:

Price:

Time taken to get first sale:

Main traffic source:

For example:

Product type: Notion Template

Views before first sale: 87

Price: $9

Time: 2 weeks

Traffic: Pinterest

I'm hoping this thread can become a useful data point for new Gumroad sellers as well.

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I'm new to selling digital products on Gumroad and I'm trying to figure out what actually works. I've spent time creating products, but I'm struggling with getting traffic and making my first few sales.

Some of the problems I'm facing are:

I don't have an existing audience or social media following.

Gumroad's built-in discoverability doesn't seem to bring much traffic.

I'm not sure whether my products are the problem or my marketing is.

I don't know which platforms are best for promoting Gumroad products (Pinterest, Reddit, YouTube, etc.).

I'm finding it difficult to understand what kinds of digital products sell consistently.

For those of you who have successfully made passive income with Gumroad or similar platforms:

Where did your first 10 sales come from?

How did you drive traffic when you were starting from zero?

What types of digital products worked best for you?

Did you use paid ads or only organic traffic?

If you could start over today, what would you do differently?

I'd really appreciate any advice or lessons you've learned. Thanks in advance!

Hey everyone,

Just need to vent a bit and honestly look for some perspective from people who have been here.

I’m a developer, and recently I’ve been trying to build out a minimal, faceless digital brand centered around focus and discipline. I spent hours designing and optimizing a premium, dark-mode technical asset (a clean "Hacker Definition" workspace wallpaper/poster) optimized perfectly for high-end setups and terminal environments. I got the storefront live on Gumroad, set a low price point ($4.99) to keep the psychological barrier to a minimum for an easy impulse buy, and even built a programmatic vertical video pipeline using React-based code to promote it on YouTube Shorts.

The pipeline actually worked a bit. My initial short got 11 views, and out of those, I managed to get 3 people to click through directly to the storefront. I know a click-through rate like that shows the aesthetic hook is working.

But once they land on the page? Absolute silence. Zero sales.

It’s incredibly draining to put your technical skills and time into creating something clean, getting past the setup hurdles, actually getting people to look at the page, and then just watching the counter sit at zero. I know that a 1–2% conversion rate is often the average for most digital product stores, but when you are starting with such small volume, it feels like hitting a massive brick wall where you're doing the work but the engine just won't start.

For those of you who sell digital assets or software online: How do you push past this initial dead-zone without losing your drive? When you see visitors click but fail to convert, how do you figure out where the invisible friction is? Is it just a pure volume game where I need to let the automated video pipeline push out more variations and wait for the algorithm, or do you change the product entirely when the early response is just cricket noises? Have any of you found success by putting your checkout page through a tear-down or asking people to run through the flow and explain their hesitations out loud?

Appreciate any real insights.

Most prompt engineering advice treats all models the same way — one framework, apply it everywhere. In practice, the specific model changes what actually works. Sharing what I've found holds up consistently with Claude specifically, since it's a good example of a model that rewards a particular kind of structure.

1. Explicit structural tags change output quality, not just readability. Separating instructions from content with tags instead of blending them into one paragraph:

<instructions>
Summarize the following transcript in 3 bullet points.
Focus only on decisions made, not discussion.
</instructions>

<transcript>
[paste transcript]
</transcript>

Removes ambiguity about where instructions end and content begins — the gap this closes gets bigger the longer the document is.

2. An explicit reasoning request before the answer changes judgment-heavy output more than almost anything else. A line like "before answering, briefly reason through the tradeoffs, then give your final recommendation" measurably improves quality on comparison or decision-based tasks.

3. Long context is only useful if you frame the role before the content. Dropping in a long document with zero framing forces the model to guess what to extract:

<role>
You're reviewing this contract for a small business owner
with no legal background.
</role>

<document>
[paste document]
</document>

<task>
Flag financially risky clauses in plain English, skip
standard boilerplate.
</task>

None of this is universal — it's specific to how this particular model was trained to weight structure. Curious if others have found similar model-specific quirks worth sharing, prompting feels like it needs more of this and less "one framework fits every model."

Wrote this up properly with a full template if useful to anyone — happy to share.
Most prompt engineering advice treats all models the same way — one framework, apply it everywhere. In practice, the specific model changes what actually works. Sharing what I've found holds up consistently with Claude specifically, since it's a good example of a model that rewards a particular kind of structure.

1. Explicit structural tags change output quality, not just readability. Separating instructions from content with tags instead of blending them into one paragraph:
   <instructions>
   Summarize the following transcript in 3 bullet points.
   Focus only on decisions made, not discussion.
   </instructions>

<transcript>
[paste transcript]
</transcript>
Removes ambiguity about where instructions end and content begins — the gap this closes gets bigger the longer the document is.
2. An explicit reasoning request before the answer changes judgment-heavy output more than almost anything else. A line like "before answering, briefly reason through the tradeoffs, then give your final recommendation" measurably improves quality on comparison or decision-based tasks.
3. Long context is only useful if you frame the role before the content. Dropping in a long document with zero framing forces the model to guess what to extract:
<role>
You're reviewing this contract for a small business owner
with no legal background.
</role>

<document>
[paste document]
</document>

<task>
Flag financially risky clauses in plain English, skip
standard boilerplate.
</task>
None of this is universal — it's specific to how this particular model was trained to weight structure. Curious if others have found similar model-specific quirks worth sharing, prompting feels like it needs more of this and less "one framework fits every model."
Wrote this up properly with a full template if useful to anyone — happy to share.

I kept noticing the same pattern in bad AI outputs — it's almost never the model's fault, it's one of five things missing from the prompt. Wrote it down as a framework, sharing it here since it's helped a few people I've shown it to.

The 5 building blocks of a prompt that actually works:

1. Goal — the exact outcome, not the vague topic. "Write a marketing email" vs. "write a re-engagement email for users who haven't logged in in 30 days."

2. Context — background the model has zero way of knowing on its own: who you are, what you've tried, what it's for.

3. Constraints — length, tone, what to avoid. Negative constraints ("don't use corporate jargon") are underrated — they cut out way more bad output than positive instructions do.

4. Output format — bullets, table, JSON, number of options. If you don't specify, the model picks the most generic default.

5. Examples — showing the style you want beats describing it almost every time.

A quick before/after:

Weak: "Write a social media post about my coffee shop."

Strong: "Goal: Instagram caption for our new oat-milk pumpkin latte, launching Saturday. Context: indie coffee shop, audience is college students + remote workers, cozy over corporate. Constraints: under 40 words, witty tone, avoid 'delicious.' Format: 3 options + hashtags."

Same model, completely different quality of output. The gap is always one of these five gaps.

Happy to go deeper on any of these if useful — also put together a longer breakdown with templates if anyone wants it, just ask in the comments.

Hey everyone!

I'm 20 years old and from India. I'm looking to make some genuine female friends to chat with and hopefully build long-term friendships. I'm not looking for anything weird or rushed—just good conversations and getting to know new people.

A bit about me:

🎮 I enjoy gaming, especially BGMI and story-driven games.

💻 I'm studying Cyber Security and like learning about tech and AI.

💪 Currently working on my fitness and trying to build a "bear mode" physique.

🎥 I also enjoy creating content and working on creative projects.

I'm usually online in the evenings. We can talk about games, movies, music, life, goals, memes, or whatever comes naturally.

If you're around my age (18–25) and think we'd get along, feel free to send me a DM or leave a comment. Looking forward to meeting some awesome people!

Have a great day! 😊