Tony Dinh tested LinkedIn Ads for TypingMind Custom in three rounds: broad targeting, Lead Gen forms, then a Lead Gen form turned into an AI quiz. $2,052.03 bought 183,663 impressions and a handful of leads, none of whom had come back when he posted. He stopped the channel.
Before Postiz went open source, Nevo David focused on SEO: an UpWork freelancer pitched news sites, bought backlinks and wrote many articles. After four months at around $3K a month he called it useless — with very low domain authority, even easy keywords wouldn't rank — and switched to open source.
Koran Thorne set out to get 50 users in 25 days with Reddit as the main channel. He built karma for two weeks, then his first posts were removed by Reddit's spam filter, his comments became invisible to everyone but him for nearly a week, and the account was banned sitewide. Day 10: 0 paying users.
Launching a $9/month membership with no list and no following, Taiko_TOEDA published the day-15 numbers: $0 revenue, 3 Product Hunt upvotes, 0 stars across 17 GitHub repos. The only thing that worked was a careful argument in someone else's replies.
Sofia DM'd 200 potential users. Two replied: one wasn't interested; the other pitched her his own SaaS — a better pitch than hers — and she became a paying user of it.
Muhammad Haris Zafar pushed ColdCraft across 22 AI directories, about 15 listing sites and daily posts on nine social channels. In 23 days: 8 signups, 0 paying. Directories and social posts produced no traceable signups; community posts and one-on-one conversations produced all of them.
Biyun Hu launched a Stripe app with four posts in a week and tracked every visit with her own beacon: zero human visits. She then analysed 600 r/microsaas posts — 42% of launch posts survived moderation, and the median survivor got 1 upvote.
Alexander Belyanin launched tinyfound, a newsletter of founders' first-customer stories, and spent month one offering people free write-ups of their own stories. The result: 5 new subscribers, banned four times on Reddit, banned on Substack, temporarily on Etsy — and Gmail started marking his emails as spam.