Last week I stopped building first and started selling first.
I put up 3 pages for products that don't exist yet. Each has a real price ($19) and a real "Buy" button. Clicking it opens a box that says the product isn't ready and asks for an email.
That's a fake door test. Here are my numbers after 5 days.
| Page | Visitors | Saw the price | Clicked buy | Left email |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PNG to DXF converter (Pro) | 8 | 8 | 0 | 0 |
| A Claude Code skill | 5 | 5 | 1 | 0 |
| A $19 idea check | 29 | 9 | 0 | 0 |
42 visitors. 1 click. 0 emails.
It looks like 3 bad ideas.
It isn't. Not yet.
Why I'm not killing anything
My last product ran 8 weeks.
23 signups. 0 paid.
I spent those weeks rewriting the landing page. The real problem was that I never asked anyone to pay early.
So this time I wrote the rules down before launch:
- Judge each page only after 28 days.
- Fewer than 30 visitors by then? It's a traffic problem, not an idea problem. Extend 14 days.
- Still under 30 at day 42? Close it.
- Buy-click rate under 2%: kill. 2–5%: talk to the people who clicked. Over 5%: build it.
- Never more than 3 tests at once.
By those rules, all 3 pages are stuck at step one: almost nobody arrived.
5 visitors can't tell you anything. 1 click out of 5 is "20%", which is noise.
Read the funnel one step at a time
One total number hides everything.
The idea check page has 29 visitors. Only 9 scrolled down to the price.
That's not "people don't want it". That's "the top of the page didn't hold them". Different problem, different fix.
On my resume tool, 6 of 7 signups in one stretch reached checkout. None paid. If I had only watched "signups", I'd never have seen it.
So I track 4 steps per page:
- Arrived
- Saw the price
- Clicked buy
- Left an email
Each step has its own fix:
- Step 1 broken → it's distribution.
- Step 2 broken → it's the first screen.
- Step 3 broken → it's the offer.
- Step 4 broken → it's the popup copy or trust.
What I'm doing about step 1
The honest answer: more distribution, every day, for 4 weeks.
- One long-tail guide per page on my own site (Google is slow, so start now).
- Posts like this one.
- Answering questions where the buyers already are.
I'll post the day-28 numbers here, even if all 3 die.
The one I'd like you to try
The idea check is the one I care most about.
You type your idea. It looks at real search demand and at who is already making money in that niche. The free check runs on the page:
https://ideapanner.resuhive.com/?ref=devto#idea-check
What's the smallest number of visitors you'd trust before killing an idea?
Top comments (3)
Splitting the funnel into arrived, saw the price, clicked buy and left an email is the useful part. On the idea check page only 9 of 29 reached the price, so do you know if the price sits below the fold on mobile? That would tell you whether it's the first screen or just the layout.
This is a really useful way to look at it. I’m in a similar spot with a tiny paid tool right now. I got the first paying user pretty early, but the sample is still way too small to say much about conversion. The “under 30 visitors = traffic problem, not idea problem” rule is a good reminder. It’s really easy to start changing the product when the actual issue is just that almost nobody has seen it yet.
I’m curious to see your day-28 numbers.
One buy click in 42 visitors and zero emails is a rough first readout. The 28-day rule is the only thing keeping it honest.