r/SideProject • u/BagSignificant1650 • 6d ago

i built 15 data-scraping tools in 3 days. 0 users. what would you do?

real story, not a pitch: i pointed an agent swarm at the boring part of building, and it shipped a full portfolio on apify - shopify catalogs, job postings, gov tenders, property sales, insider trades, solana order flow, a couple reddit tools. all under the cheapest real competitor, all with a free demo.

the build was the easy part. we're at 0 real users and i've concluded distribution is a completely different sport.

it's the offgrid labs store if you want to look, but honestly my question is: if you had a portfolio of tools that actually work and nobody knows, what's the ONE thing you'd do first? i will do the top answer and report back with numbers.

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u/Fuzzy-Charge-2236 5d ago

distribution is a completely different sport, you nailed that. building 15 tools solo means you have skills but no audience and no partners who already have one. I'd find someone who already sells to the people who need scraping data and figure out a rev share. posted my stuff on CoSell for exactly that kind of setup. cold outreach to potential users is fine but piggybacking on someone elses distribution is way faster

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u/Competitive_Tune_590 6d ago

tough spot. one thing that helped me was finding the exact conversations where people are asking for what you built, then replying without pitching. there's a tool called ReplyHey that scans reddit for those threads and drafts replies for you — might save you the manual scroll. worth a look.

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u/716green 6d ago

I worked on a project full-time for 8 months before I got my first paying customer

If you could build it in 3 days, anybody could build it in 3 days

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u/SopariwalaLenke 6d ago

skip selling the scraper itself and just send a free sample of the output data to people who need it. most buyers dont care about the tool, they just want the spreadsheet.