Build in public: How I spent 3 months building a product in 2025 and got 0 users
Introduction
In June 2025, I started building a product. I worked on it consistently until around September, shipped it, and up till now I still have zero actual users.
After shipping, I spent the next couple of months reading and experimenting with different SaaS marketing tips and strategies. Some of them made sense on paper. Some clearly worked for other people. But for me, most of them didn’t really lead anywhere.
This isn’t a success story. I’m not writing this to discourage anyone either.
I just want to share my own experience — the strategies I tried, what I think is worth trying, what you should probably avoid, and some realities you should be aware of before going all-in on any of them.
I’ll also talk about how I plan to approach growing my product, Rendria, this year. I haven’t given up yet, but failing this much has definitely changed how I think about what I should be doing next.
For a bit of context
For most of last year, I was unemployed. Still kind of am, actually.
I spent a lot of that time applying for jobs, getting a few interviews here and there, but mostly rejections. At some point, I started worrying that even if I did get a job, I’d be fired in a few weeks. It felt like my skills had gone stale. I hadn’t coded seriously in a long time.
I was burnt out from the whole process.
I needed something creative — something that felt like progress on a daily basis — just to feel better about myself.
That’s how building a product came in. It wasn’t some big discovery. It was something I’d always wanted to do, I just never really felt like I had the time or mental space for it.
At some point, I decided to go all in.
I stopped job hunting and spent about three months building what is now Rendria.
What I built
Rendria is an API for automating image generation.
The idea is simple: if you’re building an app that needs to export images, you shouldn’t have to build and maintain a rendering engine yourself. You just plug into Rendria and let it handle that part.
My end goal was modest.
I just wanted to make real money from it and grow from there.
- $200 in MRR would have felt like a major success
- $1,000 would have been mind-blowing
My expectations weren’t high. I just wanted to make real internet money.
I never really imagined that three months in, I’d still have no users at all.
What I did and why it didn’t work
Looking back, I spent too much time chasing shortcuts.
I was drawn to fast ways of getting users — the kind you constantly see on SaaS subreddits and Twitter threads about hitting revenue quickly.
The advice behind those stories isn’t necessarily wrong. Making money early is often about validating an idea.
In my case though, the idea was already validated.
Rendria isn’t new or experimental. There are already companies doing the same thing, including one doing around $1M in ARR. That was part of the reason I chose to build it. I wasn’t trying to compete at the top — just to take a small slice of the market.
The real issue was simpler:
I don’t enjoy sales, and I’m not very good at marketing.
Without really thinking about it, I kept choosing strategies that relied heavily on outbound sales — which was a poor fit for both me and the product.
Here’s what I actually tried.
Cold emails
Cold email didn’t really work for Rendria because it’s naturally a more inbound product.
It solves a fairly specific problem, and job titles alone aren’t a good signal of buying intent. Even “developer” is too broad.
Outbound works best when you can reach out based on real usage signals — for example, someone already using a similar tool. That approach wasn’t really applicable in my case.
I couldn’t find strong indicators of intent beyond job titles, and that made outreach feel random.
The takeaway:
You need to know whether your product is better suited for inbound or outbound. And if you’re doing outbound, job titles alone are usually not enough.
I honestly don’t even know what to say about Reddit.
It’s often described as the holy grail for finding niche users, but the barrier to entry is much higher than people admit.
If you don’t have an old account with decent karma, you’re probably not going far.
I got banned multiple times — including on accounts that were two and three years old — simply because they had low karma. These were automatic bans, not manual moderator reviews.
Even when things worked a bit, it was clear the best-case scenario was short bursts of traffic from a viral post.
That’s not a sustainable way to grow a product.
Eventually, I just gave up on Reddit. The moderation friction alone made it feel like a bad fit for me.
Building in public
This one is a bit ironic, considering you’re reading this now.
Building in public wasn’t the problem.
I was just doing it in the wrong place.
I was mostly posting on LinkedIn, thinking I was reaching developers. In reality, most developers on LinkedIn are there for jobs — not to discover or adopt new tools.
So while I was “building in public”, I wasn’t actually building in front of the audience that mattered.
What I’m doing now
For a while, I wasn’t sure what to do next with Rendria. I even considered giving up on it completely.
But after thinking it through, the answer became obvious.
Instead of looking for shortcuts, I’m going to focus on what I always knew made sense but kept avoiding because it takes time:
SEO and content marketing.
This approach fits the product better than anything else I tried.
Rendria solves a specific problem, and people usually search for solutions like this when they already feel the pain. That makes search and educational content a much more natural way to reach the right users.
I avoided this path mainly because of how long it takes to see results.
Looking back, if I had started when I first finished building the product, there’s a good chance I’d have some users by now — or at least real traction.
For the next few months, I’ll focus on this consistently and see where it leads.
I’ll also share updates along the way — what I’m working on, what’s working, and what isn’t.