800 users, $200 in revenue, and we still haven't figured out conversion
My best friend and I have been building projects together for a while. Most went nowhere. We even burned out once and just quit.
When we did come back, we decided our biggest problem wasn't building, it was that we spent no effort getting users because it's really confusing (unlike building)
So we built an MVP designed to help early-stage founders get their first users and paid hundreds on Reddit and YouTube ads.
Result: 14 verified users. Zero activity (not even another login).
So we stopped and tried something simpler: continuously posting, even if no one cared.
We studied which communities allowed it, tested different hooks, changed how we explained the site, and kept posting even when most posts went nowhere.
Within a week, a single post got lucky and a few did fine and we had our first hundred users, now 800 users and $200+ in revenue (the revenue part feels incredibly lucky).
The biggest lesson wasn't “Reddit beats ads.” Us posting forced us to learn how to explain why someone should care. Paid ads made us feel entitled to a result (which never came).
We're still early, and our biggest problem now is finding more of our target customer. For those who've been here before: how did you go from users to repeatable revenue?