r/plgbuilders

Most “founders” never launch anything. 

They build a project for months, never complete it and eventually scrap the product. Or launch it and get no customers.

Startups are truthfully a numbers game. Even the best founders have hit rates under 10%. Just look at founders like Peter Levels.

So how do you maximize your chances of success, the honest answer is to increase the number of startups you launch.

I’m going to get hate for this: but you should NOT spend hundreds of hours building a product… until you know for certain that there is demand.

You should launch with just a landing page.

Write a one pager on what you will build, and use a completely free UI library like Magic UI to build a landing page.

It should take you under a day.

Then what do you do?

Add a stripe checkout button and/or a book a demo button.

And then launch. Post everywhere about it(Reddit, X, LinkedIn, etc) and message anyone  on the internet who has ever mentioned having the problem you are solving.

Launch and dedicate yourself to marketing and sales for 1 week straight.

If you can’t get signups or demo requests within 1 week of marketing it 24/7... KILL IT and START OVER.

Most “startups” are not winners. And there are only THREE reasons why someone will not pay you, either:

1. They don’t actually have the problem.
2. They aren’t willing to pay to solve the problem.
3. They don’t think your product is good enough to try and pay for.

If people do sign up and check out with a stripe link you simply come clean with a paraphrased version of:

“I actually haven’t finished the product yet, but I’d love to talk to you about the problem you’re facing. I put a sign up link on the website to see if anyone would actually care about my product enough to pay for it”

Then you refund the customer.

This is where I’m going to get hate:

1. It is not unethical to advertise a product you have not finished building.
2. It is not unethical to put a checkout link and collect payments for an unfinished product to test demand… as long as you simply refund “customers”.

When you do eventually get sign ups or demo requests, the demand is proven. Only then do you invest 2 weeks in building a real product.

Do not waste hundreds of hours of your valuable time building products no one cares about.

Test demand with a landing page and check out link/demo request link.

If demand is proven: build it.

If demand isn’t proven: start over with a new idea.

Repeat.

You will get a hit if you do this… eventually.

This is personally how I tested 39 different startups… and killed 37 of them with little to no revenue to show for it.

For context: Of the 2 startups that DID get traction from this strategy:

1. One went on to hit $50M+ in GMV
2. Rivin.ai went on to raise an investment from Jason Calacanis and works with multi-billion dollar e-commerce brands to analyze Walmart sales data.

Stop wasting your time building products no one cares about. Validate. Build. Sell. Repeat.

We’ve built a free developer tool and want to use a plg model to move users into our paid tier. I know our users are in subreddits like r/webdev and r/javascript, but I’m struggling to get them to actually try the tool without looking like I’m just spamming links.

I’m looking for reddit marketing services that can help us build a community-first presence where we provide value and get the tool mentioned organically. My problem is that most growth services don't understand the low-friction nature of plg.

Has anyone used a service to successfully seed a tool in tech communities?

Strong opinion. Hear me out.

I've seen founders with perfect dashboards make terrible calls because they already knew what they wanted to do and used the data to confirm it.

But I've also seen founders flying completely blind make confident decisions that were just wrong in ways that were totally avoidable.

Bad instincts you can coach. Bad data just accelerates the wrong direction.

How much are you actually trusting your data right now?

For us it was the third time the Hubspot sync broke in a month.

No alert. no error. Just silently wrong. we found out on a customer call. that was the moment.

We'd spent more time maintaining the integration than building it. every tool promised seamless sync. every tool had undocumented edge cases. every edge case became someone's problem at the worst time.

So we ripped it out and built something simple we actually understood. A few tables, basic logic, one place to look. Not pretty. But it hasn't broken once.

Fighting bad integrations is expensive. It's just harder to see on a spreadsheet than a subscription fee.

What was your breaking point?

Everyone obsessed over the signup form. Email field, password requirements, OAuth buttons. Meanwhile activation rate was 18% because nobody ever reached the aha moment that the landing page promised. You don't need a shorter signup flow. You need to stop lying about what your product does in 30 seconds.

The dirty secret nobody talks about: lock-in: the institutional knowledge your team builds inside someone else's platform. Six months in, switching costs aren't about money... they're about retraining human brains. I ran my whole stack through skene.ai recently and genuinely couldn't believe how many indispensable tools were just comfortable habits wearing a pricing page. Keep it scrappy or keep paying forever.