I shipped Parallax in 3 weeks. You paste a URL, it audits your UX against Nielsen's 10 heuristics + WCAG 2.1, scores it, and tells you what's broken. Took longer to debug the email capture form than to train the AI to think like a UX researcher.
The hard part wasn't the product. The hard part was realizing I had no idea if any of it mattered.
Here's what no one tells you about bootstrapping a dev tool:
Most founders operate blind. I do website audits and UX testing, mostly for games and side projects, and I was shocked how many teams don't have access to actual UX research. They're shipping based on gut feel and support tickets. So I built a 60-second UX audit that lives in a browser — drop a URL, get scored findings, five minutes later you've got actionable insights. Nielsen's heuristics, accessibility checks, remediation suggestions. The thing works.
But then I launched it and got 2 visitors a week.
That part was humbling. The product was good. Distribution was a ghost town.
The insight that actually surprised me: When I started diving into where UX problems hide, I found this weird pattern. Sites aren't broken because designers are bad — they're broken because founders never run UX checks. They think "UX audit" means hiring a consultant for $8K. So they don't do it. They ship something, watch it tank in analytics, then realize the actual problem was a 5-step form or a CTR below the fold.
An audit that takes 60 seconds and costs $0 should theoretically fix that. And it's absolutely happening — but only for people who know to look for it.
So here's what I'm trying:
Instead of waiting for SEO to eventually work, I'm doing what the playbooks actually recommend: write something real, post it where people building things actually hang out (here, Reddit, Indie Hackers), and see if that changes anything.
Try Parallax free (https://parallax-ux.com/audit) — paste a URL, audit runs in 60 seconds. Full findings behind an email gate (so I can follow up if something's broken). No credit card. No BS.
If this version resonates, cool — we'll keep shipping. If not, I'll learn that distribution is harder than I thought and should've just built a plugin instead of a SaaS.
Either way, the product's good. The distribution is the thing I'm trying to figure out.
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