Most founders lie in their build-in-public posts. Not dramatically, not with fake numbers - they just leave out the parts where they sat at their desk at 2am wondering if they'd wasted a year of their life. I'm going to try not to do that here.
Seven Months. Four Products. Zero Paying Users.
I started MentionFox in January with a simple thesis: B2B companies are terrible at knowing when they matter online. They set up a Google Alert, check it twice a week, and call it "monitoring." Meanwhile, the Reddit thread where someone just asked for a tool recommendation in their exact niche - with 47 comments and a hot streak - disappears into the feed unread. I thought I could fix that.
What I did not anticipate was how many different versions of "fix that" I would build before finding one that anyone actually cared about. In seven months I shipped four distinct products. A social listening dashboard. A lead generation layer on top of it. An AI-visibility tracker that tells you whether large language models mention your brand when asked relevant questions. And an investor research tool that surfaces companies based on signal patterns, not just keywords. All under one roof, all built by me, all currently generating exactly zero dollars in recurring revenue.
I am not writing this as a confession. I am writing it because the gap between what I built and what I understand now is the actual story, and I think it might be useful to someone.
What I Actually Built and Why It Kept Shifting
The first version was a clean social listening product. You put in your brand name, a competitor's name, a topic - and MentionFox would surface mentions from Reddit, LinkedIn, Hacker News, niche forums, and a handful of other places most tools ignore. The differentiation I kept pitching was depth over breadth: fewer false positives, smarter relevance scoring, actual context around each mention instead of a stripped-out snippet.
I showed it to about thirty people. Twelve of them said "I already use Brand24" or "we have Mention." Four said they'd try it. None came back. I went and looked hard at every comparison I could find between the existing players, tried to find the genuine white space, and realized my problem was not features. It was that I was selling a workflow change to people who had already decided social listening was a line item, not a priority.
So I added the lead generation layer. The idea was that instead of just watching mentions, you could act on them - get notified when someone in a forum asks a question that makes them a warm prospect, click through, respond. This felt like the most defensible angle because it connected the data to revenue in a direct line. Founders and sales leads could justify the spend because it would pay for itself. I still believe this is the right framing. I just built it too fast and did not talk to enough people before shipping.
The AI-visibility tracker came third, almost by accident. I was doing research on a competitor and found myself manually prompting GPT-4, Claude, and Perplexity with things like "what's the best social listening tool for B2B startups?" and then writing down which brands appeared and how prominently. I thought: this is tedious and someone should automate it. Then I thought: I am someone. That module went from idea to functional prototype in about ten days, which is either a testament to how scoped it was or a warning sign about how insufficiently I validated it. Probably both.
The investor research tool is the newest and the most speculative. The thesis is that investors doing deal sourcing have the same problem as sales teams doing prospecting - they are working from incomplete signal. If you can tell a VC "this category is seeing a 340% spike in bottom-of-funnel discussion on niche forums over the last 60 days," that is a data point they did not have. I have had two genuinely interesting calls about this feature. I have shipped it to no one yet.
What I Measured, What It Told Me, and What I Ignored
Here is the honest data picture. Over seven months I have had 214 signups to various waitlists and early access forms. Of those, 61 completed any meaningful onboarding step. Of those, 9 became what I would call active trial users - meaning they came back at least three times in a two-week window. None converted to paid.
The activation problem is worse than the conversion problem. Most people who signed up never got to the moment where the product clicked. I spent two months optimizing the core UI before accepting that the issue was earlier in the funnel - the value was not obvious in the first four minutes, and I was not there to explain it.
What I ignored for too long: I kept getting feedback that said "this is interesting but I'm not sure where it fits in my workflow." I coded that as a positioning problem and wrote better copy. It was actually a product problem. The product was asking users to form a new habit without giving them a compelling forcing function - a notification that arrives and demands action, a weekly report that makes their boss ask questions, something. I was building a dashboard when I should have been building an alert.
I also ignored the pricing feedback too long. When I did show people a number - even just a hypothetical - the conversations got real fast. People who said "this is cool" suddenly said "for that price I need it to do X, Y, and Z." That specificity was more useful than any amount of abstract feedback. I should have put a pricing page in front of people in month two, not month six.
The One Thing That Actually Worked
The lead gen alert for Reddit and niche forums, when it worked, worked well. Two of my nine active trial users told me unprompted that they had found and responded to real warm prospects using the tool. One of them said he closed a small deal with a company he found through a MentionFox alert, a company he would never have encountered otherwise. He has not paid me yet because I fumbled the handoff from trial to paid. That is on me and I know exactly how to fix it.
That one data point tells me the core thesis is not broken. The delivery layer, the onboarding, the pricing conversation - all of those are broken, or were. The idea that B2B companies miss high-intent signals every single day because their monitoring is too shallow or too slow - that is still true. I have watched it be true in real time.
What I Am Actually Going to Do
I am stopping new feature development for sixty days. One version, one use case, one customer type. I am going to focus entirely on B2B founders and heads of growth who want to find warm leads on Reddit and niche forums before their competitors do. That is the use case with the most direct revenue connection and the most believable value proposition for a first-time conversation.
The AI-visibility tracker and the investor research module are not going away - they are just going to wait. If you are a VC or an analyst and the investor signal product sounds interesting, get in touch directly. I am happy to talk. But I am not going to pretend I can serve four customer types simultaneously when I have not yet served one well.
If you want to see how MentionFox handles lead generation from social mentions - the alerts, the relevance scoring, the workflow from signal to outreach - here is where that lives. And if you want to see what I am charging, and more importantly what you actually get at each tier, here is the pricing. No free trial currently because I am fixing the onboarding first. I would rather talk to you directly than watch you bounce in four minutes.
Seven months in. Still here. Still building.
If you found this useful, I write about solo-founder distribution, B2B SaaS, and what's actually working in the AI-search era over on my Substack (one post per week, no spam).
I'm building MentionFox - a B2B intelligence suite that combines brand mention tracking with AI-visibility (GEO) measurement, investor research, and outreach automation. There's a free tier and a 5-day trial of Pro at mentionfox.com/pricing.
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