I built an AI tool for agencies, spent 40 days on SEO and community, and still have zero paying strangers. Here's what I'm seeing.
About 40 days ago I launched ReqBrief. The idea is simple: instead of sending clients a brief form they half-fill and return with three sentences, an AI interviews them conversationally and outputs a structured project brief. Built it because I work at a web agency and watch scope creep kill otherwise good projects every week.
Here's where I am right now, honestly:
5 blog posts live. 1,050 impressions in Search Console across 43 different queries. 6 clicks total. Zero paying strangers. The people who signed up are people who already knew me.
The SEO signal is real and moving in the right direction. "Project brief" alone is at 198 impressions this month, up from zero five weeks ago. But impressions don't pay for server costs and they definitely don't tell you if the product actually solves the problem for someone who doesn't already trust you.
The thing that surprised me most: I thought getting the first stranger to pay would be a distribution problem. Turns out it's also an attention problem, a trust problem, and a "do they even understand what this does in 8 seconds" problem, all at the same time.
Reddit helped with karma building. Product Hunt got 2 upvotes from people I didn't know. Indie Hackers is where I'm showing up now.
I'm not writing this because I have answers. I'm writing it because I'm 40 days in, the organic signal is growing, and I genuinely don't know if I need more patience or a different approach entirely.
For those who got past this exact point: what actually changed things for you? Was it one specific channel, or did everything just compound at once?
The approach is very interesting. Nowadays, one of the biggest problems we face daily is TIME... and managing to save time somehow is half the battle in having a valuable tool. However, with so many tools being launched, most of them, despite solving a problem, unfortunately remain invisible, and this is the BIGGEST problem for anyone launching a new tool on the market today. Congratulations on the tool and good luck on the rest of your journey...
This is a useful breakdown because it separates traffic from trust.
I’m testing something similar from the opposite direction: before building more, I’m trying to see whether a small manual sample gets strangers to respond.
For agency tools, I’d probably test one narrow workflow manually with 5-10 agency owners before waiting on SEO. If they won’t react to the manual version, the polished product may not be the bottleneck.
scope creep from bad briefs is a real and specific pain, but it's also the kind of pain agency owners have learned to live with rather than actively shop for a tool to fix, since the workaround (more meetings, more emails) is annoying but familiar. curious whether you've talked to agency owners who aren't your existing network about how they currently handle this, not whether they'd use ReqBrief, just how painful it actually feels day to day. that answer would tell you a lot about whether this is a "vitamin" or a "painkiller" problem for the buyer
The 40-day frame is real, but what you are describing is three separate problems that look like one.
Impressions with no clicks usually means the intent of who is searching does not match what the page is selling. For "project brief" as a query, most people landing there are researching how to write a brief, not looking for a SaaS that does it for them. Different buyer stage, different content, different close path.
The strangers-who-know-you problem is almost always a trust gap. Agencies will not hand client conversations to a tool they found on Google until they have seen someone like them use it first. The highest-converting path for agency tools is usually one real case study posted where agency people already complain about scope creep - r/webdesign, freelancer Slack groups, LinkedIn. Not a product link. A story.
Running a similar grind right now with BillWatch (billwatch-landing.vercel.app) - legislative change alerts for small businesses. Pre-order sprint is live, trust-building is exactly the hard part. Day 40 is too early to call it. Keep going.
40 days with growing impressions but no strangers buying is normal, not a verdict — SEO impressions are intent you haven't earned a click from yet. Two things moved the needle for me building in public: (1) writing for the exact problem-aware query, not the broad term ("X vs Y", "how to do Z" pulls people who are already deciding), and (2) putting genuinely useful free things in front of people where they already hang out, so a link earns a save instead of getting ignored as an ad. For you that might mean a tiny free version of the brief-builder that needs no signup. It rarely compounds from one channel; it compounds when the content, the proof, and the distribution all start pointing at the same problem at once. Keep going — day 40 is early.
I can relate to this. With my font tool website schriftgenerators. de, the first few weeks looked similar—impressions started growing, but actual users and conversions barely moved. What eventually helped wasn't just more SEO; it was making the value obvious within seconds and getting the product in front of people who already had the problem. Early traction often feels invisible until trust, clarity, and distribution start compounding together.
This resonates more than I'd like. I launched on Product Hunt a few weeks ago — quiet, a handful of upvotes. But GitHub quietly gave me something better: organic stars, a couple forks, even a merged PR from someone I'd never talked to. Starting to think the real signal for tools like ours doesn't show up on day-one dashboards at all. Curious what "few real signs of life" has looked like for you beyond the SEO numbers.
This is useful because it separates “traffic work” from “trust work.”
I’m learning the same thing right now: people can understand a tool exists, but still need a reason to believe it belongs in their workflow.
What stood out to me is that several different explanations still seem capable of surviving the evidence you've collected so far.
That's usually where things get difficult.
Not because there aren't signals.
Because the same signals can often be used to justify very different conclusions about what's actually wrong.
That's what I found most interesting reading this.
That's probably the most accurate description of where I am. The 1,050 impressions with 6 clicks could mean the landing page isn't clear enough, or it could mean the people finding it aren't the right people, or it could mean the product category isn't something people think to search for directly. All three explanations fit the same data. The only way I've found to tell them apart is to get one stranger to actually go through the full flow and tell me where it broke for them, which is harder to engineer than it sounds.
That's actually the part I'd be most interested in discussing further.
The challenge doesn't seem to be generating explanations.
It seems to be deciding which explanation deserves enough confidence to shape the next move.
What's the best email to reach you on?
Hi, the "do they understand what this does in 8 seconds" problem is the one worth solving first, before more SEO or more community posts.
1,050 impressions and 6 clicks tells you people are finding the page and leaving. That's not a traffic problem yet — it's a clarity problem. The brief form angle is solid but "AI interviews them conversationally" can still read abstract to someone who's never felt the pain of a half-filled brief coming back with three sentences.
What actually moved things for me when I was at a similar point was going direct to the people who had the exact problem — not through SEO, but by finding the forums and Slack groups where web agency PMs complain about scope creep and showing up there with something useful, not a pitch. The first paying strangers usually come from a conversation, not a search result.
The other thing: your built-in advantage is that you work at an agency and watch this problem weekly. That's not just context — that's a sales channel. Getting one or two agency owners in your network to run a real brief through it and share the output publicly would do more than five more blog posts right now.
40 days is early. The signal is moving. But I'd spend the next two weeks on direct outreach to agencies before waiting on organic to compound.
If you want to think through the outreach angle or how to position this for agency decision-makers, happy to connect: https://teams.live.com/l/invite/FBAk3iOSJkDyS11JQ?v=g1
The 8-second clarity problem is a fair call. I've been treating the landing page as "done" but you're right that "AI interviews them conversationally" is still abstract to someone who hasn't lived the pain yet. The direct outreach angle is something I've been avoiding partly because it's harder to scale and partly because I'm based in Iran which adds friction to a lot of the obvious channels. But the "one agency runs a real brief and shares the output" idea is something I can actually do this week. Thanks for the honest read.
This resonates. Agency owners are a uniquely tough sell. they've seen a thousand tools come and go, and most of them are running so hot that onboarding something new feels like a liability, not an investment.
One thing that surprised me when selling into agencies: the buying decision is almost never about whether the tool works. It's about whether the agency owner trusts that it won't create more overhead than it saves. That trust usually doesn't come from demos or case studies, it comes from seeing a specific use case that's costing them money right now.
ReqBrief is solving a real problem though. Scope creep from poorly defined briefs is a killer. What kind of agencies are you targeting? The pain point varies a lot between, say, a web dev agency vs a marketing one vs a boutique design shop.
That trust gap is exactly what I keep running into. The agencies I'm targeting right now are web dev and WordPress shops, mostly 2-10 person teams. The pain is specific: client says "I want something like Airbnb but simpler" in the kickoff call, six weeks later they're confused why the budget ran out. The brief exists to close the gap between what they pictured and what they actually described.
The overhead concern is real though and honestly something I haven't fully solved yet. Right now the flow is: agency sends client a ReqBrief link, client does the AI interview on their own, agency gets the structured output. No new meeting, no back-and-forth form. But you're right that "it works" isn't the same as "it fits into how we already work." That's probably the next thing I need to figure out.
That makes sense. The interesting part is that you've already removed most of the friction on the client side. The challenge now seems to be changing agency behavior rather than improving the brief itself.
One thing I've noticed is that agencies are often willing to adopt a new process if it removes something they're already doing instead of adding another step. For example, if the ReqBrief link naturally becomes part of their existing proposal or onboarding workflow, it feels less like a new tool and more like how projects start.
Have you seen any agencies use it repeatedly yet? I'd be curious whether the resistance comes from the owners themselves or from the account managers who have to run the process day to day.
No repeat usage yet from agencies, which is probably the most honest answer to your question. The resistance I've seen so far is mostly at the owner level, "sounds useful" followed by silence, which usually means it didn't fit into how they think about starting projects. The account manager angle is something I hadn't considered though. The people who actually send the kickoff email are usually not the owner, and if they're the ones who'd use it day to day, maybe that's who needs to see it first.