In June 2025, I started building a product. I worked on it consistently till around September, shipped it, and up till now I still have 0 actual users.
After shipping, I spent the next couple of months reading and trying out different SaaS marketing tips and strategies. Some of them made sense on paper, some clearly worked for other people, but for me, most of them didn’t really lead anywhere.
So this isn’t a success story. I’m not writing this to discourage anyone either. I just want to share my own experience with some of the strategies I tried, things I think are worth trying, things you should probably avoid, and some realities you should be aware of before going all in on any of them.
I’ll also talk about how I plan to approach growing my product, Rendria, this year. I haven’t given up yet, but failing this much has definitely changed how I think about what I should be doing next.
For a bit of context
For most of last year, I was unemployed. Still kind of am, actually. I spent a lot of that time applying for jobs, getting a few interviews here and there, but mostly rejections. At some point, I started worrying that even if I did get a job, I’d be fired in a few weeks. It felt like my skills had gone stale. I hadn’t coded seriously in a long time.
I was burnt out from the whole process. I needed something creative, something that felt like progress on a daily basis, just to feel better about myself.
That’s how building a product came in. It wasn’t some big discovery. It was something I’d always wanted to do, I just never really felt like I had the time or space for it. At some point, I decided to go all in. I stopped job hunting and spent about three months building what is now Rendria.
Rendria is an API for automating image generation. The idea is simple: if you’re building an app that needs to export images, you shouldn’t have to build and maintain a rendering engine yourself. You just plug into Rendria and let it handle that part.
My end goal for Rendria was simple. I just wanted to make any real money from it and grow from there. Even $200 in MRR would have felt like a major success. $1,000 would have been mind-blowing. My expectations weren’t that high. I just wanted to make real internet money.
I never really imagined that three months in, I’d still have no users.
What I did and why it didn’t work
Looking back, I spent too much time chasing shortcuts. I was drawn to fast ways of getting users, the kind you constantly see in SaaS subreddits and Twitter threads about how someone hit revenue quickly.
The advice behind those stories isn’t wrong. Making money early is often about validating an idea. In my case, the idea was already validated. Rendria isn’t new or experimental. There are already companies doing the same thing, including one doing around $1M in ARR. That was part of the reason I chose to build it. I wasn’t trying to compete at the top, just to take a small part of the market.
The real issue was that I don’t enjoy sales, and I’m not very good at marketing. Without really thinking about it, I kept choosing strategies that relied heavily on outbound sales, which was a poor fit for both me and the product.
With that in mind, here’s what I actually tried.
Cold emails
Cold email didn’t really work for Rendria because it’s naturally a more inbound product. It solves a fairly specific problem, and job titles alone aren’t a good signal of buying intent. Even “developer” is too broad.
A good example of outbound done right is when people reach out based on actual usage signals, like already using a similar tool, not just having a certain role. That approach wasn’t really applicable in my case. I couldn’t find strong indicators of intent beyond someone’s job title, and that made outreach feel random.
The main takeaway for me was this: you need to know whether your product is better suited for inbound or outbound. And if you’re doing outbound, job titles alone are usually not enough.
I honestly don’t even know what to say about Reddit.
It’s often described as the holy grail for finding niche users, but the barrier to entry is higher than people admit. If you don’t have an old account with decent karma, you’re probably not going far.
I got banned multiple times, including on accounts that were two and three years old, simply because they had low karma. These were automatic bans, not moderators reviewing my posts. I tried again with new accounts, tried commenting and engaging more, and still got banned.
Even when things worked a bit, it was clear the best case scenario was short bursts of traffic from a viral post. That’s not a sustainable way to grow a product.
At some point, I just gave up on Reddit. The moderation friction alone made it feel like a bad fit for me.
Building in public
This one is a bit ironic, considering you’re reading this now.
Building in public wasn’t the problem. I was just doing it in the wrong place. I was mostly posting on LinkedIn, thinking I was reaching developers. In reality, most developers on LinkedIn are there for jobs, not to discover or adopt new tools.
So while I was “building in public”, I wasn’t actually building in front of the audience that mattered.
What I’m doing from now
For a while, I wasn’t sure what to do next with Rendria. I considered giving up on it altogether. But after thinking it through, the answer became obvious.
Instead of looking for shortcuts, I’m going to focus on what I always knew made sense but kept avoiding because it takes time: SEO and content marketing.
This approach fits the product better than anything else I tried. Rendria solves a specific problem, and people usually look for solutions like this when they already feel the pain. That makes search and educational content a much more natural way to reach the right users.
I avoided this path mainly because of how long it takes to see results. But looking back, if I had started when I first finished building the product, there’s a good chance I’d have some users by now. Even if not customers, at least real traction.
For the next three months or so, I’ll focus on this consistently and see where it leads. I’ll also share updates along the way.
Final thoughts
Thanks for reading.
If you’re building something or even thinking about it and things aren’t working out the way you expected, you’re not alone. Shipping is just one milestone. Everything after that is where the real work begins.
I’ll keep writing about what I’m learning as I try to grow this product, what works, what doesn’t, and how my thinking changes along the way. If that sounds useful, you can follow me here on dev.to to see future posts.
If you want to support what I’m building, you can check out Rendria here. If nothing else, I hope sharing this helps someone avoid a few of the mistakes I made.
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