Got my first paying customer months ago.. then nothing

I built Weightless.so earlier this year with the goal to make it the fastest option to start collecting emails on a landing page. Got a couple users: some Twitter friends, some strangers. But no real traction.

Right away, I started using it myself in other projects and I think it did deliver on the promise on being a super easy and fast option to process email subscriptions (at least, if you are a developer). But that alone didn't prove very useful to me. Once I got some subscribers in, I needed a way to send them an email, and if at that point I still needed to switch to Mailchimp or ConvertKit, I might as well had started with either of those tools from the beginning.

So I converted this tiny tool into a little bit of a monster, at least for a 1 person team, and added the remaining 90% of the codebase to start sending emails.

This got a bit more traction and interest. More people signed up. And one person even subscribed to the paid plan (sending emails is a paid feature). I thought things were finally starting to take off. But then the micro-hype faded away quickly and even this one customer didn't end up actually using Weightless to send emails.

It's been months since then. Since this is a side project, I am not spending money, or much time on marketing it. But I did try some things, more than on any of my other failed projects. Result is clear: I am failing to find a market for my product.

A handful of users are still using it as an email capture tool (free plan), but not even this group is growing. Apart from them, I am using it myself on my personal blog, and a couple other side projects.

So I am not ready to pull the plug. When I started Weightless, I shut down my previous SaaS-wannabe to better focus. And right now, I don't feel like starting another SaaS product. What I am going to try next is to grow a content website, and most likely, try to use Weightless as the newsletter engine for it. Maybe Weightless succeeds because of that website, or that website doesn't succeed because of Weightless. Will report back when I know.