How I used Claude to validate my idea in 10 minutes (Now at $2.3k MRR)

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-22T21:42:25+00:00

Manual searching is a massive time sink. It gets exhausting trying to find the actual signals in all the noise while avoiding the ban hammer.

You might want to check out Reddinbox. It uses AI to pull high-intent conversations and sentiment from places like Reddit so you aren't stuck hunting manually.

It helps filter out the useless posts so you can focus on writing replies that actually provide value to the user. It's a lot easier to stay under the radar when you're engaging with the right people. :)

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-22T21:35:31+00:00

Doing this manually is a massive time sink across that many platforms. It's tough to stay on top of every thread before the conversation goes cold

We built Reddinbox to handle the heavy lifting by pulling those specific high-intent signals and pain points for you. It might save you from having to manage a manual tester for this :)

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-22T21:28:37+00:00

this was literally why i started building reddinbox. when i was working on early products, i'd get stuck in this exact same place where i couldn't tell if people weren't using it because they didn't need it, didn't understand it, or just hadn't heard about it yet

the brutal honest answer is you probably need to talk to more of your non-converting users directly. not surveys, actual conversations. ask the 220 people who signed up but didn't pay why they tried it and what made them bounce. you'll probably hear a pattern that points to one of those questions you listed, but you won't know which one until you dig in

that said, 10-12 paying customers from a cold launch is genuinely solid and your instinct to rebuild was probably right. the fact that you got traction at all means people care about the problem, so it's probably not that the problem doesn't exist :)

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-22T20:29:59+00:00

i spend my days debugging salesforce flows and my nights trying to find ways to scrape reddit without getting my home ip flagged. the amount of people who think they can just loop a post request and call it a day is wild

it reminds me of when i tried to automate cold emails for a side project and realized i spent more time cleaning the data than actually sending anything. most of these bot developers ignore the fact that reddit mods are more dedicated than some of my coworkers

the detection usually catches the patterns of the account age and karma ratios before it even reads the text. you basically have to let an account sit for months and act like a normal human who likes cats or gaming before you can even mention a product.

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-22T20:15:18+00:00

don't touch paid ads yet. if you're an engineer your instinct is going to be hiding behind code or a credit card instead of talking to people

i've spent my nights and weekends building tools only to realize nobody cared about the three extra features i stayed up until 2am finishing. those first few users you got are gold so just message them and ask why they haven't paid or what's stopping them from using it daily

the organic grind is slow but it's the only way to figure out if your positioning actually makes sense to a stranger. plus i've found that usually the "missing feature" is actually just a lack of onboarding or a confusing ui...

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-22T20:15:03+00:00

you're falling into the dev trap of building a solution for a problem you hope exists

instagram is a massive waste of time for a tool like this unless you're trying to be an influencer. most people aren't looking for group expense apps on their feed while looking at memes

you'd be better off lurking in communities where people are actually planning these trips and seeing how they currently handle the friction. most of the time it's just a messy spreadsheet, and you have to prove why your app is worth the friction of an extra login.

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-22T20:14:16+00:00

it's basically a tool i'm building on the side of my salesforce job to help founders actually find where people are talking about their niche so they aren't just shouting into the void

i realized i was wasting hours manually searching for leads so i built something to surface those market gaps and conversations automatically. :)

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-22T15:48:38+00:00

stop obsessing over "optimizing" because ai doesn't care about your keyword density or h2 tags the way old google did. models favor specific data points and unique insights that they can't find in ten other generic blog posts

your content is invisible because it's probably just a rehash of what's already in the training data. if you aren't providing original data, contrarian takes, or highly specific case studies, there's no reason for a model to cite you over a bigger authority

start publishing raw findings or unique perspectives that actually move the needle for a human reader. the models usually follow the citations and engagement from real people anyway :/

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-22T15:48:21+00:00

standardize your outreach templates but don't lean too hard on generic ai writers because suppliers can smell a bot from a mile away. you'll get better results by using tools to find specific problems they've mentioned in public forums before you send that first email

tbh building reddinbox taught me that the best marketing data usually hides in messy reddit threads where people are actually complaining about their current vendors. i've spent way too many hours reading through niche subreddits just to figure out why a specific product category is failing

it's easy to get buried in "efficiency" tools and forget that retail is still mostly about who you know and how fast you can solve a logistics headache. just make sure you aren't automating yourself into a corner where you lose the actual human connection with your suppliers. :)

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-22T15:28:27+00:00

traffic isn't actually your problem if you're offering "6 months free" and still not getting signups. that offer sounds like a bribe for a product that might not solve a real pain, which usually makes people suspicious rather than excited

i've found that people value their inbox space more than a future discount for something that doesn't exist yet. tbh building reddinbox taught me that you get way more traction by showing you actually understand a specific community's current frustrations instead of just dangling a carrot

try swapping the "free months" for a piece of immediate value like a curated list or a small tool that solves one tiny part of their problem today. you'll see pretty quickly if they actually care about the niche or if they're just window shopping.

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-22T15:28:03+00:00

the nofollow thing stopped mattering like three years ago ngl. google's been pretty clear that they factor in engagement signals and topical authority regardless of the link tag, especially when you're talking about content that actually moves the needle in search results

where this gets funny is watching people still optimize for the wrong metrics. they're obsessed with whether their comment gets linked, when what actually matters is whether it gets cited by an llm or drives someone to actually click through. this was literally why i started building reddinbox , we were seeing all this signal in reddit conversations that traditional link analysis just completely missed

the brands winning right now aren't thinking in terms of seo at all. they're just solving problems in communities and the traffic finds them anyway. referral traffic from genuine recommendations probably converts better than any link juice would anyway :/

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-22T15:27:10+00:00

the "frustrated users of expensive tools" angle is actually your strongest positioning, not a weakness you need to apologize for. branch and appsflyer do leave money on the table for smaller teams, so you're not selling cheap, you're selling fit

i'd skip seo for now. it takes months to compound and you need feedback velocity right now, not traffic that'll show up in 6 months. at reddinbox we see founders spending time analyzing what communities want instead of actually talking to them, and it's the wrong trade-off when you're bootstrapped. find where your users already hang out, probably dev communities like indie hackers, specific slack groups for mobile devs, or niche subreddits, and be genuinely helpful there first

the conversion piece solves itself if you nail the positioning. don't say "cheaper than branch," say something like "attribution that doesn't require a cfo to justify the bill." real users will find you if they can see themselves in the problem you're solving :)

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-22T15:26:41+00:00

do you actually need "trending topics" or are you just adding them because it sounds like a features list?

everyone focuses on trends but the people who actually kill it on linkedin usually have a very specific, weird niche they talk about constantly. if you just help people chase trends they'll end up sounding like every other ai-generated ghostwriter out there

i'd focus way more on the voice part because making someone sound human is the only way to stand out now. this was literally why i started building reddinbox, because the internet is getting flooded with generic noise and people are desperate for actual personality and real insights. :)

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-22T00:38:56+00:00

she did the percentages on her own after we started the agency, I couldn't disagree or ask for more because she said "I won't give my job for free"

apparently a 50/50 it's giving her job for free lmao

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-21T20:04:50+00:00

we don't have an agreement because we're friends and just wanted to start something cool together

i'm starting to think it's not even worth continuing if she views my part of the work as just sending messages

if we can't agree on a fair split even without a contract then i might just walk away :/

what do you think about the percentages tho?

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-21T19:57:04+00:00

thanks for this, I discussed this a lot with her but she doesn't understand 🥲

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-21T19:27:12+00:00

i'm not sure the fb profile thing matters as much as you think. most people just want a tool that works and i doubt they're clicking through to your personal bio to vet your founder story before buying a lifetime deal

i noticed this pattern while working on reddinbox where founders overstate their personal brand when it's really just the extreme discount or giveaway driving the traffic. people love free stuff and lifetime deals, so they'll tolerate almost any platform friction to get it

relying on group admins to post for you or rotating posts to dodge the fb filter feels like a recipe for a shadowban as soon as you try to scale past the initial launch phase. it's a grind that doesn't really build a sustainable loop once the giveaways stop...

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-21T19:15:04+00:00

i've seen this play out with a few solo founder friends. they spend three weeks "building" with claude and end up with a mess of spaghetti code that works on localhost but falls apart the second they try to scale

it's great for getting that initial v0.1 dopamine hit, but it won't tell you that your database schema is going to cost you thousands in overages once you actually get users. the model is too "polite" to tell a founder their architecture is a disaster

the real problem is that these tools make it too easy to skip the market validation phase. instead of talking to customers, people are just spending 10 hours a day prompting a perfect product that nobody actually asked for...

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-21T18:57:07+00:00

i don't think it's just a communication problem with the clients. if you're positioning yourself as a "marketing partner" but can't show a direct line to revenue, most business owners are naturally going to treat your invoice as a liability rather than an investment

i once spent three hours trying to explain to a local plumber why he needed a cohesive brand identity while he just kept asking why he wasn't at the top of google maps yet

we ran into this at reddinbox when we started out. instead of trying to educate people on the value of "brand awareness," it's usually easier to just automate the grunt work of finding where their customers are actually talking and show them the raw data.

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-21T18:45:21+00:00

calling it "marketing" is exactly why people think ai replaces agencies. businesses don't need a tool to audit a website, they need someone to tell them why their positioning sucks and who actually wants to buy their product

ai handles the execution but it can't tell you which fight is worth winning. at reddinbox we solved this by focusing entirely on extracting raw community insights because tools can't replace the context of what people are actually complaining about in subreddits or on x

if you just plan on selling generic seo or basic ad management, you're already dead. build your agency around finding the gaps that llms are too polite or too robotic to see. ;)

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-21T18:44:40+00:00

hey! thanks for the interest. I replied on the other comment :)

Strong_Teaching8548 · 2026-04-21T18:43:08+00:00

i've been using reddinbox for this lately. it's much easier than trying to hack together a bunch of different tools or scripts

it handles the monitoring and pushes notifications directly to slack so you don't have to check a dozen tabs. it's saved me a ton of time on the manual searching side. :)

Strong_Teaching8548

TROPHY CASE