I built a product the complete wrong way and now I’m salvaging it by turning it into a huge learning opportunity.

I built a product, Rippl, before I ever thought of any users and now I’m in a tough situation. I have zero users (free or paid). This is how you build the wrong way.

The right way of doing things is to start by finding a group of people to sell something to. Then, you figure out what their problem(s) is and build something to solve that problem. I have heard this said so many times in person and when reading books, watching videos, listening to podcasts, etc.

I clearly wasn’t paying attention (lol).

Note: don’t take this article as me trying to sell Rippl to you right now. My real goal is to explain what I’m dealing with in real time.

What is Rippl & Why I Built It

When I first decided to go down the path of solopreneurship, I had a vague idea that I wanted to build in public. That’s to say: I wanted to share my journey, progress, and failures openly and online.

I started by launching my blog and my idea was to repurpose the content in my blog for social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Bluesky, and Threads. These posts are organized into mini-campaigns and one blog article creates 3 campaigns containing 7 posts.

It didn’t take me long to realize that repurposing the blog content was taking way longer than writing the blog article itself.

That drove me crazy and I didn’t want to deal with that so I built a product, Rippl, that would do the repurposing for me. It was only meant to be for myself.

This morphed into being something that I wanted to build as a product to see if I could generate any revenue from it.

And that’s where the problem started.

I assumed that if I was dealing with this problem, I surely cannot be the only one.

Fast forward a little bit and I find myself in the current situation where Rippl has been launched for a month or two and it has zero free or paying users.

This is a bummer but it also isn’t a surprise. It was naive of me to assume that if I’m having a problem then others must surely have the same problem.

It was even more naive of me to think that they would pay for a solution to the problem.

I also recognized that this was an awesome opportunity to learn about sales and marketing.

There could be no users for a few different reasons:

1. There is no product market fit. Meaning, nobody actually wants the product.
2. I’m not doing a good job at highlighting how my product solves the content generation problem for bloggers.
3. I’m not getting the product in front of the right people. I may even be wrong in assuming that bloggers are the people who would want this product in the first place.

I’ve been holding off on writing any new code to focus on sales and marketing, so I decided this was an awesome opportunity to take advantage of that timing.

I dove head first into learning about sales and marketing.

My Attempts at Sales & Marketing

I decided to try two different approaches.

The first is value-first cold outreach and the second is Google Ads.

Value-First Cold Outreach

For the cold outreach, I continued assuming that bloggers are a likely group of people who would be interested in Rippl. The product reformats long-form content for social media and bloggers are generally writing long-form content.

I post my blog articles on Substack so I started targeting writers who were in the top 100 for a given category or trending in a given category.

I knew this was going to be difficult and somewhat uncomfortable for me. It’s generally tough to go to a complete stranger, pitch them on an idea, and have them give you money. Just because it’s tough, it doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

It’s something that I’ll have to do eventually so now was a good time to start.

I didn’t want to show up empty handed with my outreach. I think providing value to someone, for free, can help build some trust and did exactly that.

I plugged the author’s articles into Rippl and created the social media posts and campaigns for free, put them into a PDF, and shared it with the author.

That way I would DM them and say something like:

"Hey! I found your newsletter and loved your recent article about [some topic]. [Give a genuine compliment about the article after you actually read it].

I've been using this strategy for repurposing long-form content into social posts and it's been really helpful for growing my own audience. I put together a mini social media campaign based on your article - figured it might be useful for you too: [link to attachment]

Are you currently promoting your newsletter on social platforms? I'd love to help out with your strategy because I'm going through the same growing pains. Either way, hope you find it useful!"

So now my cold outreach shows up with something to help them out.

This process is a bit time consuming so I’m only going to do it for 10 or 15 people. I’d be happy with any type of response. If they like the tool and want to learn more, great! If they don’t like it, maybe they’ll point me in a direction where I can pivot my product to and find product-market fit.

We’ll see how this approach turns out.

Google Ads

For Google Ads, I set a budget to run this experiment for a month to see what happens.

I have never done anything like this before so everything is new to me.

The ads campaigns are set up to target what people are searching for that could be related to Rippl:

• “tool to repurpose content”
• “turn blog post into social media posts”
• …etc.

The campaign went live on October 10 and the results have been insanely cool. It is genuinely something that makes me smile when I look at it.

We’re now 4 days in and there are more than 1,500 impressions. This means that an ad for Rippl has appeared more than 1,500 times in someone’s Google search!

There are also more than 50 clicks. This means that more than 50 people clicked the ad they saw and ended up at the Rippl website.

And how many free or paid users has this created!?

...

Zeroooooooooo.

And I’m more than ok with that.

It has only been 4 days into a month-long experiment. People are seeing the ads. People are clicking on the ads.

It’s really exciting to see strangers clicking the thing.

It doesn’t matter that it hasn’t converted into any paying users yet.

The most important part is that I now have a decent enough understanding of Google Ads campaigns to get one up and running and actually see traffic being directed to something I built.

That kind of knowledge is going to be useful for everything I build moving forward and that feels so good. That feels like a big win.

The First Dollar Problem

My new success metric for Rippl is to get one paying customer.

Just one. A total internet stranger who lands on the page and clicks the buy button.

This is important.

I built Rippl the textbook wrong way. I built a product before I ever thought of users.

But if I can still manage to make at least one dollar from this situation, it’s going to be huge. It will show that you can even have success doing things the “wrong” way.

It could also question the premise that there is a right or wrong way. Sure, some ways will be better than others but “right” vs “wrong” may be an oversimplified approach.

And if I can squeeze success from a bad situation, it would make me feel that much more confident about what kind of success I can achieve when using a better, more logical approach.

The Open Question

So, let’s say that I get that one user and I am able to still make at least $1 from the tough situation that I put myself in.

What then? What’s next?

I could:

• Stick around and grind for more users.
• Interview the user to see how I can pivot Rippl.
• Recognize that this product is taking too much effort for too little reward, shelf it, and apply these lessons to the next thing

And how long should I continue while having zero users?

Honestly, maybe another 3 weeks or so. If I spend a month with a sales/marketing approach that doesn’t bear any fruit, I eventually need to cut my losses and move on.

Time is my most valuable asset and I need to treat it accordingly.

Messing Up a Little Less, Every Day

This is what learning looks like in public. It’s messy, weird, and honest. It doesn’t always make sense.

I like the fact that it doesn’t make sense.

It’s messing up a little less. Every day.

If you’re building something or thinking about it, I hope it helps you understand that messing up is completely fine.

Just maybe start with users first lol.

And please reach out! I’d love to hear about your journey.