I Built a SaaS. Then I Asked ChatGPT to Recommend It. It Had Never Heard of Me.
A solo founder's distribution reckoning, in real numbers. This morning I opened my analytics dashboard already convinced my product was dead. Nobody's signing up, I told myself. I'd been refreshing the same screen for an hour, watching a number that barely moved, feeling the whole thing slip away. Then I did the one thing I'd been avoiding: I stopped staring at the realtime counter and actually…
A solo founder faced a distribution crisis after launching his AI tool, Katto, which converts long videos into short vertical clips. Initially convinced the product was failing, the founder realized the true issue lay in the lack of visibility. Despite having 129 users, only 58 were active in the past week, and his product was not appearing in AI-generated recommendations.
The founder discovered two main problems: a failure rate of nearly 60% during the download process and a lack of recognition by AI tools. By addressing these issues, the founder migrated to new infrastructure, fixed the download failures, and began efforts to increase visibility through referring domains, genuine reviews, and honest roundups.
The founder realized that being good was not enough; being found was crucial for growing the user base.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
