Did I just spent 6 months building a product that no one wants
For the past few months, I've been building a product "Linden". Its a low latency deterministic layer for ai agents. Linden helps businesses verify AI-generated outputs before they lead to real-world actions. It evaluates AI outputs against expected schemas, trusted data, and business rules to determine whether an action should be allowed, flagged, regenerated, blocked, or sent for human review. Linden helps businesses ensure their AI agents don't just produce convincing answers — they make decisions that align with actual business requirements, verified information, and configured limits. I have tried cold email outreach that didn't work. Published a professional demo across multiple platforms, drove 0 signups. Now, i don't know if I just built something that serves no purpose. However, when i was building this, i did a research, looked at a lot of articles talking about the same thing. If this problem exists, then why no one willing to try it out?
Discussion Highlights (9 comments)
armchairhacker
In general, if you won’t use your solution, and have no-one else asking for it beforehand, it’s not worth it.
reticulates
There are thousands of these already, many have raised a lot of money. If your product and cold outreach is generated slop (as half your post is) it is doomed to fail. The easiest next step is to look at what your competitors are doing and copy them.
barapa
I don't get why you built it if your plan was to finish and theN do cold outreach. Why wouldn't you test the idea before and as you built?
faangguyindia
I built MacroCodex and initially had zero users, https://macrocodex.app/ I didn't know how to get users, didn't have any marketing budget either. Then one day, I woke up and realized we had 17,000+ users. I submitted a "Show HN" to Hacker News and got "flagged" by GLP boosters; they simply didn't believe that our app results in guaranteed weight loss or gain within 2–3 weeks, despite having a Telegram community with 2,000+ members and a product with reviews. They reasoned "If it was this easy, why 40% americans are obese?" They said, "If it really works, then it will be a weight-loss breakthrough with a much bigger impact than GLP-1s, without needing any injections or drugs," but anyone can test it without paying a cent or without looking at any ad or giving away their sensitive personal info. That helped a lot! We had community with many members, documented method with research citation: https://macrocodex.app/knowledge/rethink/adaptive-tdee/ , testimony and reviews. Do not worry about people who do not believe, focus on ones who do and help them get the best possible results. That's what i did. There are naysayers, but do they matter? Look at what they are saying is there any substance in that or any actionable advice? Use it to your benefit; ignore the rest. What changed? I started talking about the problem it solves. The average person will always think they can outsmart a "dumb app" So instead of trying to convince pro bodybuilders, models, or actors, I focused on beginners. Beginners started seeing results, and those results got the pros interested. Experts are often skeptical of new approaches until they see people getting significantly better results with them. You don't need everyone to believe in your product. If it genuinely solves a problem, even the haters can't stop it from growing.
brailsafe
Not trying to insult here, but my takeaways are: Your websites are sloppy, vague, generic. Sloppy in both the AI sense and in terms of quality (buttons aren't consistently sized, excessive use of lists of roundrects, beige/light-beige/cyan colour scheme is a bit rough). I don't know what your pitch is, whether you're offering a service or a product or what they are, or why you're worth picking over anything else. It looks like you wanted to make a consulting website or something and then picked the most confusing, least compelling way possible to convey that. It's just a bunch of numbered sections and tag clouds with nebulous meaning and obviously AI generated.
codemax98
Marketing is the hardest part of any product. If you learned in the process, you can never say you lost the time
DEF14A
I was a commission-based salesperson at a SaaS company for several years. Your cold-email outreach didn't work because it was probably also AI written. When I was selling, I would write super short, warm, personalized emails by hand that sounded like a human wrote them, and wouldn't use AI to clean it up. My response rate hovered between 0.5 and 1.5%. My coworkers would copy and paste Claude-written emails into Gmail, and their response rate was 0.005%-0.05%. My biggest question, and this is not rhetorical, I'm genuinely curious for your reply: what was the problem that led you to build this product? Did you have the problem yourself? Did you talk to current and former coworkers about whether they were also having this problem? The other people here are rightly pointing out that your description of your own product sounds AI-written and soulless. The way you overcome this is by passionately talking about the problem instead of the product :)
ungreased0675
Did you talk to potential end users before you built this?
haebom
Yes, you did.