Starting from Zero (Again): The Unsexy Reality of Building Something New

This newsletter is meant to be pure inside baseball. I’m not here to market to you—I’m here to share the nitty-gritty of actually doing the work that Twitter makes look so easy.

I started a new project recently that I think has revenue potential. But starting from scratch? Always a wild ride. You might be thinking, “Hey Andrew, don’t you have an audience? Doesn’t that help?” Nope. Nobody cares. More specifically, the audience you build for one thing isn’t necessarily the audience for your new shiny object. So, most of the time, I’m still starting with zero reach.

Case in point: after two weeks, I have exactly seven users. Two of them seem promising; the rest are tire kickers. And today, zero people installed the code snippet. But I’m still convinced this product can make money. It blows my mind that we can’t see revenue attribution past a basic signup. If you’re running ads, especially Google Ads, you’re stuck with dashboards showing clicks and maybe conversions—but those conversions are just page visits, like a thank-you page. There’s no way to track a user ID or email all the way through to churn. That’s crazy.

Running Google Ads takes patience and isn’t passive. You’re in there constantly tweaking keywords and trying to keep your CPC as low as possible. But without tracking user-level data, you really have no clue about the quality of those users. For example, I found out that we were getting tons of clicks from Morocco and some tiny country in Africa. No shade to those places (I have a good buddy living in Morocco), but they’re not my target users. No wonder there haven't been any conversions!

So, the growth strategy for userattribution.com is going to focus on content. I like what rb2b has done, and I think this product could fit in a similar space. I’m cool with waiting six months for an SEO strategy to kick in, and I’m applying the same patience to video SEO. I’m making videos every few days, highlighting features and showing off the product, but it’s going to take a while for those to gain traction.

I’m also aware that SEO might play second fiddle to having a large language model learn about the new product. AI search strategy is fascinating—it benefits incumbents with the scale to train foundational models, and older companies have more content that’s been scraped by these models. It makes it tougher for new companies to get noticed. Since those training cycles are only every few months, coming up with a compelling AI search strategy is tricky. Outside of foundational models, though, think about AI search in the form of TikTok or YouTube, which can deliver faster results. So yes, I’m writing posts, but my focus right now is on video content for YouTube. I’m sure TikTok will eventually play into the strategy too.

It’s been a bit surprising to try and find SaaS companies that run ads. They either aren’t talking about it or genuinely aren’t running them at all.

For the next month or so, the plan is to post several videos a week, maybe toss in a blog post or two, and see where I start to get some traction. Hopefully, I’ll get some real users on board soon so I can make the product more bulletproof and start adding features and integrations people actually want.

It’s all hard.