I rebuilt everything. Still have not made a penny. But it feels different now, something has changed.
Some of you might remember my earlier posts here. The one where I spent £210 on ads and got zero paying customers. The one where I was asking about funding and had nothing but a half built product and a lot of stubbornness.
A lot has changed since then.
The platform has 125 signups now. Still zero paying customers, I am not going to sugar coat it, it is what it is. But the platform is unrecognisable from what it was.
It started when I tried to sign up to my competitors. StoryWorth, Remento, Heirlooms, StoryKeeper, Meminto, Keepsake, My Life in a Book. I could not sign up unless I paid first. I also realised their entire goal was to get you to buy a book. That was it. Buy the book and their business ends there. So I went back to the drawing board and started from scratch. I wanted to build something unique that stood out from the masses. I became focused on overtaking my competitors and changing the whole Memory Preservation business.
Ancestorii was basically a single user tool. One person uploading photos and building timelines alone. That is not how families work. Nobody preserves memories by themselves. So I ripped the backend apart and rebuilt it around families. A family that can invite other members to contribute, thus becoming a shared library with multiple people contributing to the same timelines, albums, voice notes, and capsules. Signups shot up to an average of around 4 a day on just £4 daily meta spend. No other advertising cost.
Then I went physical. But differently to the competitors. They are essentially book printers with a prompt system bolted on. Ancestorii is a living library. The digital side is the foundation. Timelines, albums with voice notes, time capsules. And when you are ready you can turn any of it into something physical. Hardcover memory books. Canvas prints. Acrylics. The physical products come from the library, not the other way around.
I think there is a real gap here. People are tired of social media where everything is performative. Tired of memories scattered across six cloud accounts and three old phones in a drawer. They just want a quiet place where it all lives together and their family can contribute without it being public.
Google's AI Overview started referencing me as the founder which was a strange moment, and i did get a small sense of pride.
I still work full time shifts. I build on my days off. No investors. No co founder. No formal software background. Just stubbornness and an unhealthy number of late nights.
The next bridge is revenue. 125 people signed up and none of them have paid me anything. That is the honest truth. But the product finally feels like something families would actually use together rather than something one person tries alone and forgets about.
If anyone here has crossed that gap from free signups to first paying customer I would genuinely love to hear how. I am all ears..