An AI tool founder initially thought his product was failing, only to discover organic growth and critical hidden issues impacting user experience by digging into the real data.
Ever built something amazing and felt like nobody cared? Your real problem might not be a lack of interest in your product, but rather not seeing the full picture. That’s what a solo AI tool founder discovered, and his experience is an important lesson for all of us.
After an hour spent refreshing his analytics dashboard, convinced his product was dead, and feeling everything slip away, he finally decided to stop staring at the real-time counter and actually read the data. The founder of Katto, an AI tool that turns long videos into short vertical clips, had believed nobody was signing up. But once he looked at the database, he found a surprise: he had 129 users, 58 of them in the last seven days, all organic, with no ad spend. This was certainly not a dead product!
So, why did it feel like one? Because he had been judging a slow morning instead of the overall trend, and because two silent 'leaks' were quietly undoing everything the traffic brought him. The first, and most painful, 'leak' was the failure rate. On one recent day, close to six out of ten jobs failed. After digging into the actual reasons instead of panicking, he found that about half the failures were due to a bug in the download step, where YouTube's bot walls interfered. The other half were free-plan users trying to use videos longer than their plan allowed.
The download failures were the most damaging because they were invisible to him but fatal to the user. Imagine someone hears about your tool, signs up, tries to use their video, and the very first thing they attempt just dies. These users don't file bugs; they don't email you. They simply leave and never come back, and they certainly never pay. That’s why the founder spent his day on unglamorous infrastructure work, migrating the backend to new infrastructure to address these problems.
What does this mean for you? Don't be fooled by surface-level numbers or by judging a quiet morning. Dig into your real data. Look for silent bugs or 'leaks' that are ruining the user experience. Your product might be growing more than you think, but hidden issues can silently kill user retention.
After an hour spent refreshing his analytics dashboard, convinced his product was dead, and feeling everything slip away, he finally decided to stop staring at the real-time counter and actually read the data. The founder of Katto, an AI tool that turns long videos into short vertical clips, had believed nobody was signing up. But once he looked at the database, he found a surprise: he had 129 users, 58 of them in the last seven days, all organic, with no ad spend. This was certainly not a dead product!
So, why did it feel like one? Because he had been judging a slow morning instead of the overall trend, and because two silent 'leaks' were quietly undoing everything the traffic brought him. The first, and most painful, 'leak' was the failure rate. On one recent day, close to six out of ten jobs failed. After digging into the actual reasons instead of panicking, he found that about half the failures were due to a bug in the download step, where YouTube's bot walls interfered. The other half were free-plan users trying to use videos longer than their plan allowed.
The download failures were the most damaging because they were invisible to him but fatal to the user. Imagine someone hears about your tool, signs up, tries to use their video, and the very first thing they attempt just dies. These users don't file bugs; they don't email you. They simply leave and never come back, and they certainly never pay. That’s why the founder spent his day on unglamorous infrastructure work, migrating the backend to new infrastructure to address these problems.
What does this mean for you? Don't be fooled by surface-level numbers or by judging a quiet morning. Dig into your real data. Look for silent bugs or 'leaks' that are ruining the user experience. Your product might be growing more than you think, but hidden issues can silently kill user retention.
