From 200+ Followers to 41K Views: Our Launch Story with 69 Beta Sign-ups in 12 Hours

Me & my brother @tuantruong are both borned coders, and we got so many lessons on diving into building products while ideas are not validated. It often turns into 0 MRR results.

So Our First Principle : Validate first, then build, no less than 50 pre-users for every MVP built
Easier said than done , as always.

How we came up with the idea of our product :

While working on the AI email editor project , we were doing a lot of data hoarding on templates, content, emails … I was getting lazy so decided to take full use of AI, as deep as optimizing on which models do the best in keyword extractions. I then realized that many are facing the same problems when scraping the web in the old way.

We came up with a challenge for ourselves to create a tool, the idea is super simple for the surface :

**User:** Scrape me the top 50 products from https://www.amazon.com/s?k=top+items+sold+on+amazon with product title, product description summarised with AI, rating, product price and image. Then make it to run at 6h am everyday, save a copy on my account here and send me a copy to my email.
**AI:** here you go, email hit your inbox everyday now with data

Build a quick demo

We got ourselves to 48 hours of building up the demo, using the Vercel Generative UI concept. Our landing page is built on top of the legendary Shipfast boilerplate. We spent at least 24 hours trying to optimise our landing page, we even did a concept paper on the idea. Then a couple more hours to make sure we deliver the best in place screen recording demo.
Our intention is to make sure we don’t look like self promotion or sales, so we tried not to put any links showing up on the video. Only provide the link when asked.

Now to the promoting part

Now how to get viral when we only have 200+ followers each, our posts wouldn’t reach anything.
Here comes the Thick Skin part, we turn into Reddit as many suggested. The first subreddit that I tried was DataHoarder, with 741K members, often 300-400 online at any time. I have read the rules and find it quite a grey area to post video anyway, trying to not show any sales advertisement. I intended to put in US night hours with the thinking that the Mods may be sleeping and let the post live a bit. The bit took off, and we got 16 upvotes within 1 hour, and about 5 users signed up for the beta. Then the planned nightmare kicked in, one of the mod decided it is time to turn it off:

Now comes the tragedy, we didn’t know where to go next, and tried to message the moderator without any reply. Still aiming to validate and has nothing but a thick skins to try and fail. We were scouting for another subreddit, with even more traffic and more members. We then found OpenAi to be the exact fit. We still keep the data hoarding text on the title, because we learned that it seems effective.
We posted on OpenAI and hullla, we even got into top 1 at one point :

Here is the link to the post : *reddit post*

The results came in surprisingly, we got 100+ visits to our websites, we got 69 users signed up within 12 hours, and more still coming in. Our analytics of the reddit thread come in with a big surprise :

More importantly now that we have the actual demands with so much detail about the pain points that users have written to us. It sure helps us release the exact MVP that our users want. We event has people from 25+ countries to join us on our beta version.

It ‘s still a long way to go for us, but I hope the lessons learned here become an inspiration for all indies out here, who are building stuff.

Thanks hope to connect and share more with you guys on our twitter @tuan & tu