Hey, {{first_name | Founder}}!
A founder on IndieHackers shared a story about launching AnveVoice. Here is what they did: they built a voice AI tool and positioned it for anyone with a website. Over six months, they created a massive programmatic SEO push, spinning up 20,253 pages. It worked well enough to bring in over 1,000 monthly visitors. The result? Zero signups.
Now, what actually went wrong?
The real cause: they optimized for broad curiosity, not an urgent problem.
The comfortable explanation everyone repeats is that SEO just takes time to mature, or that they simply needed to publish even more pages to reach the right people.
The most likely real reason is that more indexed pages and broad traffic will never save you if you have not proven that a specific group of people urgently wants to buy. The false assumption was that casting a massive net would eventually catch a few paying users. But by positioning around a generic "voice AI for websites" concept, they captured people who were just browsing for information, rather than buyers facing an immediate, painful problem.
This kind of massive programmatic SEO push is terrible for finding your first users when your product is meant for "everyone." It is only useful for scaling visibility once you already know exactly what makes a specific type of person buy.
What would actually have worked? Before scaling thousands of pages, they needed to prove that one narrow group of people with a real deadline would actually sign up. They needed a small demand test using specific messaging and direct outreach.
In fact, this is exactly what saved them. The founder pivoted away from "everyone" and targeted businesses facing an immediate WCAG accessibility compliance deadline. Once they added that urgency and consequence, they secured over 100 users.
P.S. If you want to find the first channel that fits your startup, run your free Distribution Scan.