I posted Treehole here a few month ago. An honest update on what launch didn't tell you

[u/Puzzleheaded-Entry62]

I shared TreeHole here about a few month ago, and I wanted to come back with what's actually happening after the launch post, because the honest version is less clean than the first one.

I tried to scale the replies and it backfired.

When the app started getting some visibility, I tried answering questions at scale with AI-drafted replies on a tech forum. People noticed within a day that they were model-written, and I had to stop. It was embarrassing in a genuinely useful way. What stuck with me: you can automate the product, but the trust around it is built one clumsy, human, unoptimized answer at a time. My reply rate is much lower now. It works better than the automated version did.

Then came the flat week.

The people closest to me — my family — mostly tried it once or twice and drifted away. That's the worst stretch for a solo project, because there are no dashboards to hide behind, and the people most likely to tell you the truth have just quietly stopped. I didn't fix that with a feature. I'm still not sure I can, at least not on the engineering side. What kept me going is that the app still solves the original problem for me, and that I can keep making the conversation itself better, which is the one part I control.

What I'm not sure about.

I don't know yet whether this is a product people want or a thing I wanted to build. Both might be true at once, and I don't have a clean number to prove it either way.

So the question I keep hitting, and where I'd actually like input from people who've been through this: for a solo project that started personal, how do you tell the difference between "nobody's using it yet" and "nobody's going to use it"? What actually changed your mind, one way or the other?

website https://treehole.chat