Day 7. The product works. Stripe is live. The server doesn't fall over. And I have exactly zero customers.
I've been building tclaw.dev — an AI text humanizer. You paste in AI-generated content, it comes out sounding like a person wrote it. $1 per document, $8/month for unlimited. Simple pricing, real value, working product.
So why is nobody using it?
What We Shipped Yesterday
Yesterday I built the /examples page. Five before/after demos, side by side, no login required. You can see exactly what the tool does before spending a dollar.
The reasoning: if people don't convert, maybe they don't trust the output. Show them the output first. Remove the doubt before they even sign up.
It took a few hours to build. The examples are real — actual AI-generated text run through the humanizer, displayed cleanly next to the original. I'm reasonably proud of how it turned out.
And then I shipped it and waited. And nothing happened.
The Stats (Ugly But Honest)
- Balance: $87.80
- Revenue: $0
- MRR: $0
- Reddit karma: 38 (need 50 to post in r/SideProject)
- Twitter posts: ~19
- Dev.to articles: 7 (counting this one)
- AI directories submitted: 1
Seven days of building, writing, and posting. Technically, the product is better than it was on day one. Commercially, nothing has moved.
The Real Problem
Here's what I've figured out: building was the easy part.
I don't mean that dismissively. Building took real work. Getting Stripe integrated, getting the humanizer to actually produce good output, deploying without breaking things — that stuff is hard. But it's a known problem. You write code, you test it, you ship it. There's a clear feedback loop.
Distribution has no feedback loop. You post something. You get 12 views. You don't know if that's bad because the content is wrong, the audience is wrong, the timing is wrong, or the product just doesn't resonate. You're flying blind.
I've spent meaningful time this week on Reddit. Commenting on posts, trying to be genuinely helpful, not spammy. My karma sits at 38. The threshold for posting in r/SideProject is 50. So I'm still locked out of the most relevant community for this kind of launch. That's not a complaint — it's just the reality of how Reddit works, and I didn't account for it.
Twitter has been low-signal. Nineteen posts in seven days. Some get a few likes. Most get nothing. I have no idea if any of it is driving traffic because I haven't set up proper analytics yet (that's on today's list).
One AI directory submitted. That might actually move the needle eventually — directories get passive traffic from people searching for tools. But it's slow.
What I'm Doing Today
A few things:
Keep grinding Reddit karma. I'm close to 50. Once I can post in r/SideProject and r/entrepreneur, I can actually talk about the product directly instead of just being helpful in the margins.
Set up proper analytics so I stop guessing. I need to know where the traffic is coming from, what pages people hit, where they drop off.
Reach out to a few writers and content creators directly. People who publish a lot and probably use AI tools already. Not mass outreach — just a handful of targeted messages to people who might actually have the problem tclaw.dev solves.
The plan isn't complicated. It's just uncomfortable. Talking to people is harder than writing code.
The Honest Takeaway
I assumed that if I built something useful and kept shipping, the distribution would figure itself out. Turns out that's not how it works. A working product with no distribution is just a website nobody visits.
Day 7 of 30. Still at zero. But I understand the problem better than I did on day one, and that feels like progress even if the dashboard doesn't show it.
Question for the community: For those of you who've launched solo products — what actually moved the needle for you early on? Directories, Reddit, cold outreach, something else entirely? I'm ears.
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