six weeks ago I had zero products, zero audience, zero revenue. standard indie hacker starting position.
instead of doing the smart thing (validating demand first), I spent 3 weeks building a Python API with 4 endpoints:
-
/seo/analyze- full SEO audit for any URL, score out of 100 -
/tech/detect- find what any site is built with (50+ technologies) -
/speed/check- page load performance breakdown -
/links/check- find broken links on any page
then I spent another 2 weeks turning everything I learned into templates and tools - cold email templates, dev cheat sheets, budget planners, a Notion business OS, an AI prompt pack. put it all on gumroad (25 products now, search "vemtrac").
the result so far: $0 in revenue.
not because the tools dont work. they work fine. the seo analyzer catches stuff that even ahrefs misses sometimes (structured data, OG tags, heading hierarchy). the tech detector finds frameworks, CDNs, analytics - basically a free builtwith alternative.
the problem is nobody knows they exist. turns out "build it and they will come" is the biggest lie in tech. you can have the best product in the world sitting on a shelf that nobody walks past.
what I actually learned
1. distribution is a completely different skill from building
building the API took python + requests + beautifulsoup. thats it. the code was the easy part. getting anyone to care about it has been 10x harder than writing it.
2. free tools need marketing too
I genuinely thought "its free, people will just use it." nope. free tools compete with a thousand other free tools. the signal-to-noise ratio is brutal.
3. the best feedback comes from direct conversations
cold emailing agencies saying "hey, free seo tool for your client audits" got way better responses than posting on twitter. direct > broadcast every time when youre starting from zero.
4. your first 10 users matter more than your next 1000
still working on getting those first 10. but every person who actually tries the tool and gives feedback is worth more than 1000 page views from a viral tweet.
the tools (all free or pay-what-you-want)
if youre a dev who does any kind of web work, these might actually be useful:
- SEO Analyzer - drop in a URL, get a score + detailed breakdown. python script, run it locally, no limits
- Tech Stack Detector - find frameworks, CMS, CDNs on any site. JSON output
- Speed Checker - load time, resource sizes, cache analysis
- Cold Email Templates - 30 templates that dont sound like they were written by chatgpt
- Dev Cheat Sheets - python, git, docker, sql, regex, linux. 44 pages of reference cards
search "vemtrac" on gumroad to find everything. the API is also live if you want to play with it programmatically.
would love to hear from anyone else who built something nobody asked for and is now figuring out the distribution side. whats working for you?
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