I've been shipping side projects for a while now. I can usually go from idea to live product in a day. That used to feel like a superpower. Now it feels like the least important skill I have.

12 days ago I launched a tool that checks whether ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini actually recommend your product when someone asks. You get a visibility score. I tested it on my own product first.

12 out of 100.

I'd been building for months. Writing blog posts. Doing SEO. And the AI that half the internet now uses to make buying decisions had never heard of me.

So here I am. I built the measurement tool. I can see the problem in numbers. I just can't solve it for myself.

What 12 days actually looks like

Day 1 — Launched. Shared on Reddit. Got 5K views. Felt great for about 4 hours. Traffic vanished by dinner.

Day 8 — Let an automation bot post from my brand's Twitter account. Got permanently banned within hours. Weeks of building that account, gone overnight. I sat there staring at the suspension notice, refreshing like it might just be a mistake. It wasn't. I didn't have a backup plan because I never imagined I'd need one. That was the first time during this project I genuinely felt sick.

Day 10 — First real user signed up. Organic Google. No idea how they found me. $0 spent on marketing. I still don't know their name. They checked one product and left.

The silence is worse than the numbers

The hardest part isn't low traffic. It's that the few people who do come don't tell you anything. No feedback. No complaints. Nothing. You're left guessing if the product is bad or if they just didn't care enough to stay for 30 seconds.

Day 11 — Score went from 12 to 32. Structured FAQ schema, rewritten descriptions, and just consistently existing in public seem to help. So the product works. It measures real movement. But knowing the score doesn't automatically attract users.

Today — Posted on Indie Hackers. Crickets. Zero engagement. The post is still sitting there with no comments. I've refreshed the page more times than I want to admit.

The gap nobody talks about

So here's where I'm at: 17 blog posts, a working product, a beta program with 100 free spots, and a handful of real users. The math doesn't make sense. I know how to build. I don't know how to make people care.

The irony isn't lost on me. My product literally measures whether you're visible to AI. And I'm invisible.

I keep reading advice like "just provide value" and "build in public." I am. I'm writing, I'm shipping, I'm sharing real numbers. But there's this gap between doing the right things and the right things actually working, and nobody really talks about that part.

I don't have a lesson to wrap this up with. I'm just in the middle of it.

If you've pushed through this part — the part where the product works but nobody knows — I'd love to hear what actually changed things for you. Not theory. What actually happened.