solo founder, launched about 5 weeks ago. the product is crawlmouse.com, it crawls your site and grades your internal linking A to F, finds orphan pages, stuff buried too deep, weak hubs. paste a url, get the grade, no signup. i built it because the desktop crawlers are overkill when you just want one question answered.
the numbers so far, since this sub likes receipts: 20 free users, 1 paying. google organic clicks after 5 weeks of doing SEO properly for my own site: zero. literally zero, DR 0 domain, everything ranks page 4 to 9. every single user came from reddit, mostly from comments where i answered someone's question and the tool happened to fit. two posts brought 9 site audits within 4 hours. my only google clicks are people searching "crawlmouse" by name after seeing it here. so reddit feeds google for me, not the other way around. if you're pre-traction and grinding blog posts, that's your cautionary data point.
the accidental marketing lesson: the thing people keep reacting to isn't a feature, it's the pricing structure. free tier is actually free forever, no credits, no trial countdown, no "you've used your 3 audits this month." i did that originally because i just wanted people to use the thing, but it turns out the entire SEO tool market has spent two years making people miserable with credit systems, ahrefs is sitting at a 1.8 on trustpilot mostly over credits, and people burn a month of credits in an hour. so "no credits" has become the line that gets quoted back to me. i didn't plan that. sometimes your positioning is just the wound the incumbents left open.
honest downsides so nobody thinks this is a victory lap: 1 paying customer is not a business, my email capture is basically zero so i can't even follow up with the users i do get, and reddit found two real bugs in my grading logic within hours of my first post, which was humbling and also weirdly the most useful QA i've ever gotten. one guy's site is navigated entirely through a search box and my tool gave him an F, we ended up debugging his site architecture together in the comments and he went F to C in a day. that thread converted better than anything i've written.
the thing i'm building now, and honestly the most fun part: an AI readiness score. the tool already reads the raw html your server returns, which happens to be exactly what GPTBot and claude and perplexity's crawlers see, because none of them run javascript. so a site can look perfect to you and be half empty to an AI crawler. i keep running audits where the human version of a site and the bot version are basically two different websites, and the owner has no idea. so i'm turning that into its own score next to the linking grade, how much of your site an AI crawler can actually access and read. it's not a "you'll rank in chatgpt" promise, nobody can honestly promise that, it's just showing you what the machines actually see, which right now almost nobody checks.
so my ask from this sub: run your side project through and tell me if the grade feels fair, the edge case reports are how i'm improving it. and i'm curious what founders here actually want to know about their AI visibility. like if you could see one thing about how chatgpt or claude sees your site, what would it be? genuinely shapes what i build next