Going to post this publicly because it forces me to be honest with myself.
What I'm building: an AI visibility tool for B2B SaaS. Shows you which competitors AI assistants are recommending in your place, then generates the corrective content to close each gap.
A week in and honestly the picture is mixed.
What's drawing attention
Scan-based cold emails where I include the prospect's real numbers in the pitch. Don't have open-rate data yet because I only turned tracking on this week (lesson learned), but a few of the replies referenced the specific findings, which at least tells me people are reading past the first line.
Public scan teardowns as blog posts have been the single biggest traffic source — one post drove. around 40% of the week's sessions on its own.
People who run the free scan tend to stay on the result page for a while and some come back. So the top of the funnel is doing something.
What's not happening
Nobody has paid yet. Zero conversions.
So the gap I'm staring at is the one between "this got their attention" and "this was worth paying to fix". Either the free scan is showing the problem but not making it feel urgent enough, or the offer on the result page isn't sharp enough, or both. I don't know which yet.
What hasn't worked at all
Cold emails to hello@ and info@ and contact@ mostly bounce or go to a black hole. Had to harden email discovery to filter those out,and now anything that's clearly a shared inbox gets routed to LinkedIn.
Which surfaced the next problem — LinkedIn gates cold DMs unless you're already connected or paying for InMail. I stockpiled about 30 of these before fully internalizing that the channel itself is the friction, not the message.
And the bigger one: I spent way too much of week one building internal infrastructure — process docs, scripts, automation — when none of that puts the product in front of buyers.
What I'd do differently if starting over today
Put a lead-capture form on the homepage on day one instead of day seven. I just shipped this and immediately wished I had earlier.
Submit to Hacker News and post to LinkedIn at the start, not when you finally feel "ready".
Pick a sharper differentiator from the beginning. I ended up at "AI is recommending your competitors instead of you" and that one sentence does more work than the previous month of positioning copy did.
Where I'm at
Day 7. 0 of 20 paying. 34 days to go.
The specific thing I'm trying to figure out: how do you close the gap between someone running a free tool, getting a result that clearly shows a problem, and deciding it's worth paying to fix.
For those of you who've gotten through that wall — was it copy on the result page, follow-up email, a different offer shape, something else?
