When You Launch... and Hear Only Crickets, or 10 Reasons for It and How to Fix Them

Discover why your launch failed and how to fix it with easy steps.

You poured your soul into building your product. It solves a real problem (you think), it works (mostly), and you’re proud of it. You polished your app, fixed tons of bugs, added last-minute features, and now you believe the world is ready to get it, accept it, line up for it, and pay!

But then you launch. You post on Product Hunt, share on Reddit, drop the link in a few Discords. And then — silence. Crickets. No one bites. WHAT IS GOING ON?

First things first.

In most cases, it doesn’t mean anything. It doesn’t mean that you were wrong about your hypothesis on the market/product/users, and it doesn’t mean you just threw away the best time of your life for nothing... maybe... but let’s review the most common reasons for crickets and how not to go insane and fix them.

Here are some common reasons why this happens ("common" doesn’t mean that they apply to you). We listed them in order of importance but again, it doesn’t mean that they take place in your case. Each reason has its own fix. We suggest you check and try to fix all of them—you never know what caused crickets in your case until you start analyzing.

The reasons caused by the product

1. You solved the wrong problem

You might be solving a problem you have—but that others don’t care enough about to pay for. They may not even care enough to look at your product. It’s a common problem for developers. When working on some problem, they can discover some potential problem that other developers or other groups may have but, as they don’t know how that group actually works and what it does, they are not able to identify the pair "problem-solution."

Example. Imagine someone just discovers the power of APIs. At the same time, that person is learning Spanish to prepare for the next great vacation. To save some time, he creates a small, simple project that connects to some language resource like translation services and allows him to hit its endpoint right from Postman or even a browser. Suddenly, the thought comes, "What if I create an API library for foreign language teachers?!" They could use the endpoints to get word translations, pronunciation audio files, check grammar, and other cool stuff. No sooner said than done! A couple of weeks of hard work, preparing a landing page, finally—the launching day and... crickets! Who knew that teachers have no idea about endpoints?

How to fix

The simplest, cheapest, and fastest way to figure out and fix this problem is to talk to your users. But "simplest" doesn’t mean "easiest." Ideally, you can grab one or two of your users, put them in front of a computer, and let them play with your product (this approach was described in the famous book by Eric Ries, "The Lean Startup" The Lean Startup | The Movement That Is Transforming How New Products Are Built And Launched), but in most cases, it’s just impossible. What you can do instead:

1. Find the community where your users can be found; find some posts or comments where people are complaining about something that you think your product can help with. Send them a direct message asking if they really have the problem and give them access to your product for free (maybe for a limited time), in exchange for feedback. Also, you may offer them a cheap gift card ($10) or any other perks.
2. Ask them whether your app solves their problem, and how exactly they use it. Knowing what exactly they are doing with your app may give you more insights than direct questions.
3. If you can’t find anyone or can’t formulate who your users are, you probably created a product that nobody needed. But it’s still not the end. Try to imagine what changes if you replace one or several components. Say, in the example with the language API, what if instead of public API endpoints, you could create a UI that allows people to hit those endpoints to access learning resources?
4. Try to figure out if the problem exists. You may ask on forums, communities, or by sending direct messages. Do not ask whether they would use your product, or would pay for it—you will get answers you can’t rely on. Ask about the problem, how they solve it now, how severe it is, and if they are willing to find better solutions. This book can help you with the right questions: momtestbook.com by Rob Fitzpatrick.

2. Unpolished, glitchy product

Bugs, lag, or even small UX frustrations are enough to make early users bounce. There are common problems related to the landing page performance:

• huge and slow videos that are loading simultaneously
• cool but heavy and resource-consuming animations
• mix of many different fonts
• acid colors
• a website not working in some browsers or devices (mobile)

How to fix

1. Hire a person or a company to test the whole workflow. As a cheapest variant, ask your relatives and friends to register and start using it. Do not tell them how to use it; watch them and see if there are obstacles they get stuck with.
2. Run your app on multiple devices and browsers; start testing the app in the browser’s simulator.
3. Use performance checkers, use Google Search Console with Core Web Vitals, or any other free checkers.
4. Compress all the images; check if your bundled scripts are in the production version (the debugging version is much bigger).
5. Make sure that you do not use heavy animations and large videos that can slow down the whole website.
6. Ask for feedback in design/UI communities.

3. Pricing/plans problems

We see very often that founders work so hard on their products that they set up inadequately high pricing. The reason is obvious: "we know how much labor we put in, so the price can’t be low." The problem is your users don’t care about how much you worked, how much you pay for third-party services, tools, frameworks, libraries, hosting, database, and so on. All you need to take into account: who are your users and whether the problem is so bad that they are going to pay a high price. If your end-users are developers, don’t expect they will pay you: they always prefer to get all the solutions for free, even if the price is their time to install and set up a tool. The best customers are always businesses but you need to understand the segment and their budget. If it’s your case, check if your pricing is too low: businesses don’t trust a cheap product.

How to fix

1. Review your users, their available budget, and willingness to pay.
2. Consider giving free access, a free plan, or a trial period. You may limit usage to prevent abuse.
3. If you are asking for credit card info even for a free plan or trial, stop doing it—people are always more likely to try a product if it doesn’t ask for payment information.

The reasons caused by the presentation of your product

4. Boring, generic website

If your site looks like it came from a template graveyard, people won’t trust the product. There are tons of free templates that can be found on the Internet, but there are several that we see over and over again—avoid them at any cost. For example, this popular template Stellar template - SaaS Landing Page—it’s really good but we’ve seen it a thousand times... Also, avoid using the Undraw library of pictures—great, but really overused.

How to fix

1. Even if you are using a super-popular, overused template, you can add something that will make your site interesting and catch the eye: add photos (the website https://www.pexels.com has a huge collection of free, not-overused, high-quality photos).

2. Do not use AI-generated pictures as they usually look tasteless and have bugs.

3. Do not use Undraw pictures as they are overused.

4. Try to create some theme for your website: castles, cartoons, animals, legos... see this collection of landing and other pages for inspiration: The Best Landing Page Design Inspiration, Templates and More | Landingfolio

5. Follow these basic design rules:

6. never use more than 2 main colors, the best combination is 2 main colors + one supplement (e.g. violet + green + grey); use the color wheel to find the best combination of main colors

7. never use more than 2 fonts and more than 3 font sizes

5. You showed your product to the wrong audience

We see it over and over again. For example, there is a post, "Hey guys, I created an app for truck drivers/painters/teachers..." in the subreddit /SaaS and they ask for feedback. What?

How to fix

1. Find the relevant communities and show your product there. It may be a hard task, especially for Reddit—they are usually super-sensitive to promotions of any kind. One of the tricks: instead of posting, try to mention your product in comments. As soon as you see that someone talks about a problem that your app can help with, comment. Do not pretend that you have nothing to do with the app; instead, be honest, give a lot (like free access), and ask for feedback.
2. When posting on social networks, don't forget to add relevant hashtags.
3. You may also add "mentions" of significant people who could be interested in your app.

6. Your messaging misses the mark

You're using jargon. You're too vague. Or you're trying to sound smart instead of being clear. The message of your website, especially the landing page, should be clear and must answer 2 questions: what your product does and which problem it solves, and how it does what it does.

The examples of bad messages:

"Powerful Features to Streamline Your Data Validation" "Comprehensive evaluation for AI" "Scale your analytics without hiring"

It's not clear what the product does, how it can help, and which problems it solves.

How to fix

1. Use this comprehensive manual on the landing page: Startup Handbook: Landing Page Copywriting
2. Remove the following words from your texts: "revolutionizes", "innovative", and similar ones.
3. Show your landing page to your grandma or elderly neighbor to see if they are able to quickly understand what your product is about.
4. Post your pitch many times, each time using different wordings to see what exactly resonates.
5. Make sure that your landing page doesn't have too much text and long explanations. If you see it's long, make it twice as short. Then make it shorter again. And again. Keep shortening until it doesn't make sense to remove any more words. Remember the "5 seconds rule"—if a visitor doesn't understand your product in 5 seconds, they’ll just close it and never come back.
6. Try to focus on a specific niche first and create a message just for them. You can even create a separate landing page for a niche.

7. The benefits aren’t clear

Users don’t instantly see what’s in it for them. Features ≠ value. We see it over and over again.

"AI-powered extractions"... who cares how it's done? "18 supported formats"... is that a lot or not, and why do I care if I need only one format? And so on.

Another problem with benefits and features is that they are the same as your competitors'. Think about why you created the product. If the reason was that you tried to mimic someone else's success, you are in big trouble. If not, you need to articulate clearly how your product is different. It may be a small but important feature—stress it.

How to fix

1. Check all the features you list and ask yourself if they are about features and implementation or about solutions to users' problems.
2. Avoid talking about yourself, talk about users and their problems.
3. Usually, people buy a product if it saves them money or time, or allows them to make money—which of these does your app help with? Refine your message.
4. Clearly state how your product is different from existing solutions. Do not tell users "it's easier to use" or "it has a better UI" — most of them don't care. But if your app supports a format that other applications don't, stress it.
5. Add use cases (even fake ones), stories, example screenshots.

8. Wrong channel, wrong timing

Even a great post can flop if it's shared at 3 AM or in the wrong community. Sometimes it's obviously wrong, sometimes not at all.

Example 1. I was preparing a list of directories to publish a startup (\~90) sorted by rank, with links and screenshots. Approximately 2 days before, someone published a similar list with even fewer directories—that post just blew up, collecting hundreds of likes and comments. But when I published mine in the same subreddit, for some reason it hardly collected 20 likes. Everything was almost the same but something was different—maybe that person had more followers.

Example 2. Several years ago, I launched a cool boilerplate for SaaS and posted about it on Hacker News. The post was not noticed; I had just a couple of upvotes and comments. I hid the post, changed the title a bit, and published again—that time, the post had more than a hundred upvotes, 70+ comments, and almost 500 stars on GitHub over the next 2 weeks. Definitely, it was just the right time.

How to fix

1. Post about your app multiple times, in different communities, at different times. Do not stop after one or two unsuccessful postings.
2. A tweet at 2 PM on a Tuesday can do 10x better than a Reddit post at midnight. Know where your audience hangs out.

The reasons caused by psychological and other factors you can't control

9. Your website doesn't look trustworthy

It's a common reason people don't react to a brand-new website. It looks too new, too young, and people just don't trust you.

How to fix

Be patient. Keep working on improving your website, its discoverability, and adding more relevant content, FAQs, documentation, and changelog. The process may take months, but if you see increasing interest, it means you are on the right track.

10. People's inertia

If your potential users have a problem, they may use other tools to solve it. Even if those tools are worse, more expensive, or slower than your app, it's often hard for people to try something new—just because they are used to it. For example: using Vim editor and Git CLI. From my personal experience, I found Git CLI very hard to use and confusing, but once I created a workflow that is hard to break, I prefer to use it—even if I can use a nice-looking, easy-to-use visual tool.

How to fix

Educate people: write manuals and guides explaining your product and how it's better than the obsolete, hard-to-use approach. You may not be able to convince people who are already using something, but when people are still searching for a tool, it may help.

Other recommendations

1. Try to build in public. Post on your social media, share your progress (show screenshots, tell people about your problems and how you solve them, and so on), and participate in discussions about a problem or similar tools.
2. Have a public board/community of features and tasks like GitHub discussions or Trello—let people see what you are working on and vote for the features to be implemented.
3. Do not publish your product on Product Hunt if you do not have a big audience. This tool only works when there are already many people who know your product.
4. Be patient. Although Reddit and other communities are full of stories about people getting their first 2K users "in just a week," 95% of them are fake and have only one goal, which is to find their users. It's rare luck to get people's attention quickly, so if it's not your case, keep grinding: keep posting, talking to people, writing, and publishing. Read this article about building a product called A Less Annoying CRM: they gained six paying users after SIX months, and only 47 paying users after a year, now their ARR is millions. The Indie Hackers Podcast: Tips for Growing Your Online Business