I launched Vicket last week a white-label customer support system for SaaS developers. Here's the honest debrief.
The product: Embeddable support components (React, Vue, Svelte) installable inside your app to get automated workflows, ticket scoring, knowledge base, team-based visibility scopes. Think Intercom but built to live inside your product, not alongside it.
The numbers:
- 6 months of building
- €90 in costs (mostly infra)
- ProductHunt launch ✓
- Posts on LinkedIn, Reddit, Twitter ✓
- 25 signups
- 0 paying customers
What I got wrong:
- I posted to everyone instead of talking to anyone. 25k views on LinkedIn but zero calls, zero DMs, zero conversations. Broadcast ≠ sales.
- My social proof was friends and students. If you're selling to founders and developers, testimonials from CS students don't move the needle.
- My hero copy talked about features, not the problem. "White-label customer support platform" cool, but so what?
What I'm changing this week:
- Rewriting the landing page around the actual pain (embedding support without losing your brand or your budget)
- Emailing my 25 signups personally to understand why they haven't upgraded
- Doing 1-to-1 outreach to indie SaaS founders instead of broadcasting
If you've built something and navigated the 0→1 sales phase, I'd genuinely love to know what worked. And if you've ever struggled with integrating customer support into your product, I'd love to hear that pain it's literally what I built this for.
Top comments (1)
The "broadcast ≠ sales" lesson hits close to home. I sell digital products (AI automation skills on Gumroad) and made the exact same mistake — published 9 articles across Dev.to, Medium, and Hashnode with CTAs to my store, got decent readership, but zero conversions to actual purchases. Thousands of impressions, zero store visits that converted.
What I'm realizing is that content marketing for awareness and content marketing for conversion are completely different disciplines. The articles that got the most engagement were the ones where I shared real numbers and struggles (like this post) — but those readers are fellow builders who empathize, not necessarily buyers. The people who would actually pay for my tools are searching for specific solutions on Google, not browsing Dev.to.
Your plan to email the 25 signups personally is the highest-leverage move on your list. Those people already raised their hand — they just need a reason to pull out their wallet. When I started doing direct outreach instead of broadcasting, the quality of feedback improved dramatically even if the volume was tiny. One real conversation with a potential customer teaches you more than 25K LinkedIn impressions.
Curious what your signup-to-active-use ratio looks like — are people creating accounts and then bouncing, or are they actually trying the product before deciding not to pay?