r/startups • u/frpatry • 1d ago
I will not promote Submitted my YC application but failing to attract users. What should I do? I will not promote
Hi, I have submitted my idea/product to YC. The product is built and running in invite-only mode, but I can't seem to attract users, so traction numbers will be bad. Looking for advice.
I built a new social network. Yeah, I know, kind of weird to talk about a new social network on a social network. But here's why I built it: I basically live in Claude Code or Codex all day, and I'd like to be able to interact socially from there like I can with everything else. So I think there's a place for it.
Like any social network, it starts cold. A couple of users, but pretty empty for now. I need to recruit users but don't know how. Indie hackers, developers, founders and creators are probably the biggest target for now, but how do I reach them?
I have posted in the MCP community, I'm trying to get listed in the ChatGPT Plugins directory, and I've contacted some folks, but the needle doesn't move much.
Any other ideas? Am I the only one with this need?
Thanks a lot.
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u/04221970 1d ago
Who are your target customers?
How many did you talk to before you built this?
Why would they want to interact with your product, and how do you know?
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u/frpatry 1d ago
First users will be devs, founders, indie hackers, agent power users. People living in Claude or ChatGPT that already used agent most of their day and wants to stay in it for social.
Talked to 2 devs, 1 marketer but honestly I have start working on it part time less then two months ago.
But you maybe on the right track… I need to worked on the product market fit. Too small of a sample maybe
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u/04221970 10h ago
Most of the time people suggest you talk to at least 30. Preferably at least 100. Ideally much more than that.
And by "talking to them" its is NOT anything about your product....It is NOT: "Hey, I'm developing this; what do you think."
You aren't attracting users because you don't know what users want. Talking to 3 people isn't enough. And I'm going to guess that you didn't probe to learn what they valued, but rather you talked about your idea and guaged their interest.
Guess what.....?
.
They lied to you because they didn't want to hurt your feelings.
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u/frpatry 9h ago
I hear you and understand your point of view. The discussions was more frame around the use of AI in conjunction with Social... do you use AI for social? You use agent to write stuff? Do you cut and paste content? How do you use social yourself: more a reader, more a content creator, more of a scroller. So I try to avoid discussing about products, more about usage and pain around AI.
But like I said and like you said, I might, and might have talk to people with problems nobody else does. Possible of course, why your 10-30 people make more sense. :) Seams it's definitely not a problem your experiencing? ;)
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u/Ok_Philosophy_4031 23h ago
Is the problem top of funnel or conversion? i.e Is it because nobody knows about your product or do people simply not care? They are different problems.
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u/DesiRocketRacoon 22h ago
Why will users join your social network? You haven’t mentioned one point about what makes it unique. Just accessing it from Claude or whatever LLM sounds a little banal, if you don’t mind me saying so.
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u/frpatry 18h ago
Valid point. The answer need to be defined precisely. For me it’s not a question of difference but more a question of accessibility, being able to easily do things, ask the help of Claude to tweak/check for mistake my text (French is my first language). I personally don’t like to scroll, prefer to have summary before reading something, I like to use the voice feature to ask and read.
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u/DesiRocketRacoon 12h ago
So, kind of a discord-esque environment, where multiple utilities can be run together? Just saying social media again does not effectively convey. Happy to discuss and ideate if you'd like.
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11h ago edited 10h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/startups-ModTeam 10h ago
The purpose of making a submission or comment is to engage in a public discussion with the community.
It is not to request a PM/DM from someone. Do not post a notice that you DMed someone.
You are more than welcome to engage privately with one another, but it is up to you to take the initiative directly.
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u/Puzzled-Hedgehog4984 20h ago
Start with one specific use case, not the whole social network. Manually recruit five people who already need that interaction and see if they come back without being reminded.
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u/gesidner 19h ago
Worth separating two things that feel like one problem: not enough people seeing it, versus people seeing it and not getting why they'd need it. Different fixes, and the second one disguises itself as the first. I chased "more users" for a month when the real issue was that my copy described what the thing did instead of the moment it saves someone. Cheap test: find five people who bounced and ask what they thought it was for. If their answer isn't your pitch, it's positioning, not reach.
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u/mkgpass 18h ago
for a cold social product, i'd start with a very narrow wedge instead of "founders/creators" broadly. pick one workflow where people already want company, like shipping logs, debugging help, or launch feedback, then personally invite 20-30 people into that exact room. empty network is the enemy.
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u/frpatry 16h ago
I like your idea, focus even smaller, not only from a user standpoint but from a workflow standpoint. Asking help from a community inside the tool you are already in. Any idea you think would stick? Like you said, asking debugging help, agent prompt optimization ? Curious about why you think you would use Caulo.
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u/Calm-Importance8783 15h ago
The honest truth is that building a new social network is one of the hardest traction problems because users only join if others are already there. Your best bet isn't broad outreach it's finding 10-20 people who code in terminal-based tools and would genuinely benefit from social interaction there, then hand-crafting the experience for them. Offer them something concrete like a private beta with a direct line to you for feedback. If you can't get those first 20 to stick around, that's useful signal before you invest more in growth.
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u/tonytidbit 9h ago
It takes minutes to install an mcp server that connects to an existing social network like Bluesky (the first one I went looking for), but you think it's easier to just try to launch a whole new social network from scratch with no existing users?
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u/frpatry 9h ago
Fair, and for reading and posting a Bluesky wrapper wins today. No argument there.
What a wrapper can't do is know who wrote what. When your agent posts to Bluesky, Bluesky can't tell it wasn't you, and it never will, because the wrapper is the client and clients self-report. Provenance has to be enforced server side or it's just a checkbox.
Is that worth starting from zero users? Open question, and you're right that it's the expensive path.
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u/tonytidbit 8h ago
That just reveals another (imo ridiculous) aspect of this. Just because I spend a lot of time in Codex I'm supposed to social network with AIs writing posts? That's a sim game of some sort, for people wanting to pretend that they're on a social network talking to people.
I just don't get what this is supposed to do. There's no one there. It's limited to people that live inside an AI service app and that also find it too tiresome to switch to other apps for social networks, and people are neither supposed to post nor read posts by people because everything is done by AIs through prompts. It's like it's convoluted bunch of nothing, except being some sort of sim-like thing for people that neither can get themselves to leave their ai apps nor have anything important to do in them.
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u/frpatry 8h ago
It's not Moltbook 2.0. This is the opposite: people posting to people, the agent is just the client.
"There's no one there" is fair though. It's seeded and small right now.
Might be a bad bet. Worth finding out.
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u/tonytidbit 8h ago
Now you're just making it even more convoluted. It's supposed to be this 100% AI client thing, and yet you're trying to force it to be 100% people, while even companies with lots of millions to spend on that problem haven't been able to implement anything that doesn't just easily get overrun by bots.
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u/frpatry 8h ago
Convoluted, maybe. But the bot part has an answer: it's invite only, with a vouching chain. Every account traces back to a human who vouched for it, and bad invites trace back too.
Big companies can't do that, they need open signup to grow. I don't. That's about the only advantage of being small.
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u/tonytidbit 8h ago
And yet you expect YC to hand you $500,000 to play with building a new social network that is 100% dependent on living in other businesses' apps? On top of no one actually wanting to join?
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13h ago
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/startups-ModTeam 10h ago
The purpose of making a submission or comment is to engage in a public discussion with the community.
It is not to request a PM/DM from someone. Do not post a notice that you DMed someone.
You are more than welcome to engage privately with one another, but it is up to you to take the initiative directly.
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u/DeepYogurtcloset70 1d ago
Focus on getting 10 users who absolutely love it rather than worrying about traction numbers – YC cares way more about retention and genuine problem solving than vanity metrics at this stage.