10 comments

  • DEF14A 17 minutes ago

    I was a commission-based salesperson at a SaaS company for several years.

    Your cold-email outreach didn't work because it was probably also AI written. When I was selling, I would write super short, warm, personalized emails by hand that sounded like a human wrote them, and wouldn't use AI to clean it up. My response rate hovered between 0.5 and 1.5%. My coworkers would copy and paste Claude-written emails into Gmail, and their response rate was 0.005%-0.05%.

    My biggest question, and this is not rhetorical, I'm genuinely curious for your reply: what was the problem that led you to build this product? Did you have the problem yourself? Did you talk to current and former coworkers about whether they were also having this problem?

    The other people here are rightly pointing out that your description of your own product sounds AI-written and soulless. The way you overcome this is by passionately talking about the problem instead of the product :)

  • brailsafe 34 minutes ago

    Not trying to insult here, but my takeaways are:

    Your websites are sloppy, vague, generic. Sloppy in both the AI sense and in terms of quality (buttons aren't consistently sized, excessive use of lists of roundrects, beige/light-beige/cyan colour scheme is a bit rough). I don't know what your pitch is, whether you're offering a service or a product or what they are, or why you're worth picking over anything else.

    It looks like you wanted to make a consulting website or something and then picked the most confusing, least compelling way possible to convey that. It's just a bunch of numbered sections and tag clouds with nebulous meaning and obviously AI generated.

  • faangguyindia 40 minutes ago

    I built MacroCodex and initially had zero users, https://macrocodex.app/

    I didn't know how to get users, didn't have any marketing budget either.

    Then one day, I woke up and realized we had 17,000+ users.

    I submitted a "Show HN" to Hacker News and got "flagged" by GLP boosters; they simply didn't believe that our app results in guaranteed weight loss or gain within 2–3 weeks, despite having a Telegram community with 2,000+ members and a product with reviews. They reasoned "If it was this easy, why 40% americans are obese?"

    They said, "If it really works, then it will be a weight-loss breakthrough with a much bigger impact than GLP-1s, without needing any injections or drugs," but anyone can test it without paying a cent or without looking at any ad or giving away their sensitive personal info. That helped a lot!

    We had community with many members, documented method with research citation: https://macrocodex.app/knowledge/rethink/adaptive-tdee/ , testimony and reviews.

    Do not worry about people who do not believe, focus on ones who do and help them get the best possible results. That's what i did.

    There are naysayers, but do they matter? Look at what they are saying is there any substance in that or any actionable advice? Use it to your benefit; ignore the rest.

    What changed? I started talking about the problem it solves.

    The average person will always think they can outsmart a "dumb app" So instead of trying to convince pro bodybuilders, models, or actors, I focused on beginners.

    Beginners started seeing results, and those results got the pros interested.

    Experts are often skeptical of new approaches until they see people getting significantly better results with them.

    You don't need everyone to believe in your product. If it genuinely solves a problem, even the haters can't stop it from growing.

      matt3210 21 minutes ago

      > guaranteed weight loss

      :stare:

        faangguyindia 15 minutes ago

        I don't blame anyone for being skeptical, it's a big claim specially to those who have failed in weight loss or weight gain.

        It's free to test for anyone. We've got a community with 2,000+ members. We do not collect names, phone numbers, DOBs, or other sensitive info.

        There are no ads, no subscription, and no paywall. We've got users, reviews, testimonials, etc., and several articles with research citations detailing how our method works.

        What does a user stand to get scammed out of? What does a user lose if they give it a try?

  • armchairhacker an hour ago

    In general, if you won’t use your solution, and have no-one else asking for it beforehand, it’s not worth it.

  • codemax98 18 minutes ago

    Marketing is the hardest part of any product.

    If you learned in the process, you can never say you lost the time

      nercht12 15 minutes ago

      Certainly for the introvert who designed the thing. It always helps to find a good-communicator salesman to help you sell your product.

  • reticulates an hour ago

    There are thousands of these already, many have raised a lot of money. If your product and cold outreach is generated slop (as half your post is) it is doomed to fail. The easiest next step is to look at what your competitors are doing and copy them.

  • barapa an hour ago

    I don't get why you built it if your plan was to finish and theN do cold outreach. Why wouldn't you test the idea before and as you built?