People Liked My Product. They Just Didn't Need It.

I recently learned something about building products that I probably should have understood much earlier: People liking your product doesn't necessarily mean they need it. I built a platform called Rizzzler, an open-source profile/link-in-bio platform. The idea was pretty simple. I'd seen people using platforms where they could put a link in their social media bio and create a small personal page. I thought I could build my own version - something simple, fast, customizable, and a little more fun. So I built it. And because I wanted people to be able to trust what they were using, I made the project open source too. I spent a lot of time building the actual product. There are profiles, customization, coins, notifications, milestones, community chat, and other small systems intended to make the platform feel less like a static link page and more like something people could actually interact with. At that point, I thought: "Okay, now I just need people to find it." That turned out to be the easy part. Then I started promoting it. I submitted Rizzzler to places like Product Hunt, SaaSFrame, and other platforms where people discover new products. And for a few days, things actually looked pretty good. I started getting visitors. At one point, the traffic was above the 25th percentile for the category I was looking at in GA4. People were visiting. Some people signed up. And I started getting feedback like: "Good UI." "This is good." "Someone finally made link-in-bio profiles look cool." Those comments felt great. They also gave me a slightly dangerous impression: Maybe I've built something people actually want. Then the traffic stopped. Not gradually. It just became cold again. The initial spike from launching and posting about the product disappeared, and there wasn't enough organic interest to keep bringing people back. That was the part I didn't expect. The product wasn't necessarily bad. This is something I've been thinking about a lot. I don't think the main problem was that Rizzzler was completely useless. People could understand what it did. People could use it. Some people even liked the design. But when I actually talked to people about creating an account, I started hearing a different kind of feedback. Something along the lines of: "The product is good, but I don't really need this." And honestly, that sentence taught me more than the positive reviews did. Because a positive review tells you: "This is nice." But a person refusing to use your product tells you: "This doesn't solve a problem important enough for me to change my behavior." Those are very different things. I underestimated marketing. When I started building, I mostly thought about the product itself. How should the UI look? What features should I add? How can I make it faster? How can I make people interact with it? So I kept adding things. Coins. Community chat. Milestones. Notifications. Small features intended to encourage people to return. But there was a problem underneath all of that: I was trying to improve retention before I had really proven that people wanted to return. That's a mistake I understand much better now. You can't solve a demand problem by endlessly adding features. And you can't necessarily advertise your way out of a demand problem either. The interesting part about advertising This made me question something I've been thinking about: Is advertising a product actually worth it if people don't already have a reason to use it? You can put your product in front of people. You can post it on Product Hunt. You can submit it to directories. You can write posts. You can share it on social media. You can get hundreds or thousands of impressions. But if someone sees it and thinks: "That's cool, but I don't need it." then the traffic doesn't really mean much. You may get visitors. You may get likes. You may even get compliments. But once the promotion stops, everything goes quiet again. That's basically what happened to me. The traffic came when I told people about Rizzzler. Then the traffic went away when I stopped telling people. That was a pretty useful reality check. And some users did join. This is another part I don't want to ignore. Rizzzler wasn't completely empty. Some people signed up. Some visited more than once. But most weren't coming back regularly. And that made me look at another assumption I'd made. I had built things like newsletters, milestones, coins, community chat, and other mechanisms to encourage interaction. But those things don't automatically create a reason for someone to return. If the underlying product isn't something they genuinely need, a notification or reward system isn't going to magically turn it into a habit. Retention starts with value. Not with notifications. So what did I actually learn? Probably more than I expected from one small project. - Building isn't the same as validating. I spent a lot of time making the product better before fully understanding whether the problem was important enough to solve. Next time, I want to validate the need much earlier. - "People like it" isn't enough. A person saying your product is cool is nice. A person changing their behavior because they need your product is much more meaningful. - Marketing isn't just posting links. I used to think of marketing mostly as getting the product in front of people. Now I think it's much more about understanding: Who actually needs this? Why do they need it? And why would they choose this instead of doing nothing? - Traffic can be misleading. A launch can create a nice graph. But a spike isn't the same thing as sustainable growth. The more interesting number is what happens after everyone stops talking about you. - Features can't manufacture demand. You can build a coin system. You can build a community. You can build notifications. You can build a beautiful dashboard. But none of those things matter much if the user doesn't have a strong reason to come back. - Open source doesn't automatically create users either. I made Rizzzler open source partly because I wanted people to be able to inspect and trust the project. I'm still happy that I did it. But open source is not a substitute for distribution, product-market fit, or understanding your audience. It's one part of the product story - not the whole story. But I'm not calling Rizzzler a failure. Actually, I don't think of it that way. If anything, it gave me something I couldn't have learned by just watching videos about startups. I experienced the entire cycle myself: Build → Launch → Get attention → Get feedback → Watch the attention disappear → Figure out why. And that experience is valuable. I also learned that I genuinely enjoy building things. Even after seeing the traffic disappear, my first thought wasn't: "I'm never building again." It was: "Okay... what should I build next?" That's probably the most important thing I got from this. So, what's next? I'm thinking about building something else. Maybe it will make money. Maybe it won't. Most of the things I've built so far have been free anyway. But this time, I want to start with the problem before the product. I want to talk to people first. I want to understand what annoys them, what they already use, what they refuse to use, and what problem is actually painful enough for them to care about. Then I'll build. Maybe the next thing will work. Maybe I'll make another mistake. Either way, I think that's part of the process. I don't necessarily want to build something just because it can make money. I'd like to build something that I created, that other people genuinely find useful, and that contributes something to the world - even if it's small. And I'll try to keep improving it, keeping it useful, and updating it as quickly as I can. That's probably a better goal than simply watching a traffic graph go up. If you're building something too: what was the biggest lesson you learned from your first product? And if you have an idea for something worth building, I'd genuinely love to hear it. Maybe we could even build something together. Top comments (0)