?Built a landing page to validate demand. Zero signups. Now what?

From Indie Hackers’ From zero to validated: Lessons on building a pre-product wait list site and a thread on signup-rate norms: Building a landing page helps connect with future audiences and refine your pitch when done right. The same thread anchored realistic baselines: Goal of 100 visitors with 3–5% conversion to email signup (3–5 signups minimum) for validating demand. Pattern: zero signups conflates multiple failure modes. The diagnosis depends on traffic volume — if you got <50 unique visitors, you don’t have a demand signal yet, just a distribution problem. If you got 200+ visitors and 0 signups, that’s a real demand signal (problem too narrow, value-prop unclear, or no urgency). Step 1 today: check your visitor analytics. If <100 visitors, ignore the zero and focus on getting traffic. If ≥100, the page itself or the problem is wrong.

From an Indie Hackers post documenting an experiment: 10 “fake-door” SaaS apps in 30 days, zero product code: how I’m using AI agents to validate before building. The mechanic: A “fake door” is a landing page for a product that doesn’t exist yet with real pricing, real CTA, and a waitlist to test demand before writing code. Pattern: when one fake-door gets zero signups, the cheapest move is not tweak this page for two weeks. It’s run 5 more pages with different framings of the same problem this week — same audience, varied positioning (I track Polymarket odds vs I explain why markets moved last week vs Kalshi alerts for $1/month). Whichever framing gets even 3 signups is the real product hypothesis; the others are dead. This converts your zero into a parallel A/B that diagnoses framing vs problem in one week instead of months.

From WeekHack’s How to Create a Waiting List Page and Indie Hackers’ How I got my first waitlist request before even launching a landing page threads: Key lessons include talking about work early, always being ready to catch interest, and starting with people rather than features. A simple, ugly page with an email capture form will tell you more about market demand than a thousand lines of perfect code. Pattern: prediction-market analytics is a niche audience — Twitter/Reddit broadcast won’t reach them efficiently. The faster path is to manually find 20 active Kalshi/Polymarket traders (Discord servers, comments under prediction-market posts, Twitter advanced search for I bet on Kalshi) and DM them with a single sentence: Would a tool that explains why X market moved be useful to you? I’m building one if so. If 15 of 20 say no, the problem is narrow; if 15 say yes, you have your real distribution channel. Twitter and Reddit gave you zero because they’re broadcast — your audience requires search-and-DM.