What I learned trying to sell an app nobody has used

Michael Shadpour — Fri, 30 Oct 2026 16:54:04 +0000

This summer I built Starling, a Chrome extension that drafts replies, quote posts and posts on X in your own voice. It learns how you write from your old posts, and nothing goes out until you press Post. Behind it there's a FastAPI backend, Stripe billing, an owner dashboard and about 5,500 automated tests.

Then I realized I don't want to run a subscription business: support, payments, servers, all of it. So I tried to sell it instead. It has never launched, so it has 0 users and $0 revenue.

Here's what a month of trying to sell it taught me.

1. Cold email gets you read, not bought. I sent about 700 personal emails to companies that build X tools or AI writing tools, and to people who buy small apps. 13 people wrote back. Most were polite no's, a couple were curious, and nobody made an offer.

2. Check your spam folder. The most serious buyer replied within a day of my email. His reply went straight to spam, and I found it 10 days later. By then he'd moved on.

3. Price wasn't the problem. I went from $1,950 to $1,200, then to an auction starting at $299. Views went up. Bids didn't. For a product with no users, a buyer isn't really pricing the code, they're pricing the risk that it won't work for them.

4. Proof beats pitch. I re-ran the full test suite on the exact version a buyer would get (4,838 tests passed, 0 failed) and put the result in the listing. What buyers really want, though, is to see it running for someone who isn't me, and that's the proof I'm still missing.

5. Communities beat outreach. One honest post on Indie Hackers about not being able to sell it got more than 20 comments and better advice than weeks of email.

6. Have a backup. A developer I emailed offered to launch it with me for free if it doesn't sell. That took a lot of pressure off.

Update (30 October): I've stopped the sale and taken Starling off Flippa. Every piece of advice I got pointed the same way: the missing piece is real users, not a lower price. So I'm launching Starling as a real product instead, and I'll share how that goes.

90-second demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJUr3JpdA3s
Website: https://starlingwriter.com

If you've launched something with no audience, I'd love to hear what worked for you.

DEV Community: Michael Shadpour

What I learned trying to sell an app nobody has used