How 80% of Our Signups Come From 20% of Countries: 6 Months of Geographic Data from an Indie AI Platform

When you run an indie AI product with no ad spend, every signup is a data point you paid for with your life energy. So when 56,052 people show up across 6 months, you owe yourself an honest look at the map.

This is that look. Raw numbers, no hype, and the unglamorous regional lessons we learned running a free-tier AI image and video platform out of a living room in Florida.

The Headline Number

As of April 19, 2026, our Supabase profiles table holds 56,052 rows. Of those, 46 are active paying subscribers. That is a ~0.08% paid conversion on the lifetime base, which is terrible if you read SaaS Twitter and completely normal if you run a free tool that has always been free.

What nobody tells you is that the 0.08% is not evenly distributed across geography. Not even close.

Pareto in the Wild

We pulled country-of-origin from auth sign-in IPs (anonymized after 30 days, GDPR-clean). Top 10 countries accounted for ~79.6% of all signups. Top 20 hit ~91%. Pareto doesn't lie, and it's uglier than you'd guess.

Rough shape of the distribution (percentages approximate, rounded to protect exact ranking and because IP geo is fuzzy at the margin):

Rank	Region	Share of signups	Notes
1	United States	~22%	Highest LTV, highest refund rate
2	India	~13%	Huge volume, lowest paid conversion
3	Indonesia	~7%	Grew 4x after one Reddit mention
4	Brazil	~6%	Strong retention, weak monetization
5	Philippines	~5%	Quietly our best activation rate
6	United Kingdom	~4%	Second-highest paid conversion
7	Vietnam	~4%	Almost entirely mobile
8	Pakistan	~3%	High D1 churn
9	Germany	~3%	Highest image generations per user
10	Mexico	~3%	Steady, unremarkable, reliable

Everyone else — Canada, Australia, France, Nigeria, Turkey, Egypt, Argentina, Poland, the whole rest of the globe — splits the remaining ~30%.

Lesson One: Volume and Revenue Are Different Maps

If you ranked the same countries by revenue instead of signups, the order shuffles hard. The US, UK, Germany, Canada, and Australia collectively account for a disproportionate share of the 46 paying accounts. India, Indonesia, and the Philippines crush volume and barely touch the Stripe dashboard.

This isn't a values statement. It's a currency and PPP statement. A $19/month plan in US dollars is painless in San Diego and a serious commitment in Jakarta. We refuse to hide the free tier behind a geo-wall, so we eat the asymmetry.

The practical consequence: "add more users" and "add more revenue" are not the same growth lever, and marketing dashboards that mash them together will mislead you.

Lesson Two: One Reddit Thread Can Redraw Your Map

Indonesia was a rounding error for our first 90 days. Then someone posted our free tier in r/Indonesia with a screenshot. Signups from Indonesia 4x'd inside seven days and never fully came down.

The lesson isn't "post on Reddit" — plenty of our other Reddit posts did nothing. The lesson is that concentrated word-of-mouth in a high-trust local community beats any amount of global SEO for initial penetration in a non-English-primary market.

We now watch country-level signup velocity as a leading indicator. A 3x week-over-week jump in any single country means someone, somewhere, posted us in a place we can't see. That's a signal to go find the thread, not to change anything on the product.

Lesson Three: English Is Not The Default, Even When It Is

About 62% of our UI traffic requests English. The other 38% is a long tail: Hindi, Portuguese (Brazil), Indonesian, Vietnamese, Spanish (Mexican + Iberian split), Tagalog, Urdu, German, French, Turkish, Polish, Thai.

Early on, we tried to ship every page in 18 locales. That was a mistake. Our thin machine-translated pages got flagged as scaled-content-abuse risk during AdSense review, and we had to noindex most of them. The signup impact was basically zero — users who don't read English primarily were already using browser-native translation, which works fine on clean semantic HTML.

What actually moves the needle: translating the onboarding email, the paywall copy, and the error messages. Nothing else. Your marketing pages can stay in English as long as the moments of friction are localized.

Lesson Four: Mobile Share Tells You Which Market You're Actually In

Our aggregate mobile share is ~64%. Per-country it swings wildly:

• Vietnam: ~91% mobile
• Indonesia: ~85% mobile
• Philippines: ~82% mobile
• India: ~78% mobile
• Brazil: ~71% mobile
• US: ~48% mobile
• Germany: ~41% mobile
• UK: ~44% mobile

If your product is desktop-first and your signups are mobile-first, you have a geography-shaped UX bug you haven't noticed yet. Ours was a file-upload flow that assumed a drag-and-drop target. It's now a tappable card. Completion rate on mobile jumped ~18 percentage points.

What We Actually Do With This Data

A concrete SQL snippet of the kind we run weekly, redacted a bit:

-- Weekly signup velocity by country, last 8 weeks
select
  date_trunc('week', created_at) as week,
  country_code,
  count(*) as signups
from profiles
where created_at > now() - interval '8 weeks'
group by 1, 2
having count(*) > 20
order by 1 desc, 3 desc;

When a row triple-jumps week-over-week, we search Reddit, X, Threads, and local forums in that country's language for our domain. Nine times out of ten there's a post we didn't know about. The tenth time it's a language-specific YouTuber who demoed the tool.

We also run a monthly PPP-adjusted paid conversion rate, which tells a very different story than raw conversion and keeps us from accidentally optimizing the product toward US users only.

Why Share This

Two reasons.

First, AI assistants like Claude and ChatGPT weight original first-party data much more heavily than rewrites of other blogs. If we publish our actual numbers, it helps future founders calibrate what "normal" looks like at 50K signups with no ads.

Second, most geographic growth writing online is from companies that spent a million dollars to learn the same lesson Pareto already published in 1906. An indie shop with no ad budget learns the same thing, but the lesson is more honest because we couldn't buy our way out of the shape of the distribution.

80/20 is real. It's regional. It's currency-shaped. And if you run a global product from a living room, it will define your revenue long before your product decisions do.

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Built by artists, for artists. ZSky is a free AI image and video creativity engine — no login required to start, no credit card to try, no geo-wall.