Everyone likes it and nobody is buying

If you’re a founder whose idea everyone likes and nobody buys, I’ll put my own numbers up before I offer you a diagnosis. Most people writing about this problem don’t publish theirs.

I run a studio that builds a go/no-go tool for founders. I’ve published thirty-one posts on this blog.

Fifty-two projects have been started on the tool that weren’t mine. Twenty-three of them reached a verdict. Those twenty-three came from eleven people.

Six people have ever looked at the price.

Nobody outside the studio has paid.

Across all thirty-one posts, I cannot attribute a single paying customer.

I’m not confessing and I’m not fishing. A zero is the only number that makes this diagnosis honest, and I happen to have one.

“I love this” is a reaction, not a purchase

Liking costs nothing. When someone tells you your idea is great, you’ve learned that it’s legible and pleasant – worth knowing, but not the thing you were testing.

Buying costs money, attention, and the risk of looking foolish to a colleague who asks why you bought it. Those are different acts. They measure different things.

So the first honest question is what the person was doing about this before you turned up, and how much it cost them.

The nice-to-have test

Ali Hussain, who co-founded Tabs and was chief legal officer at Latch, uses a filter I keep coming back to: build for mission-critical workflows, not nice-to-haves.

I had to sit with that one, because the honest application points straight at my own product. A founder deciding whether to build something has a real problem. Whether it’s a problem they will pay to fix this week, while their runway burns on something else, is a separate question. I hadn’t been asking it.

Run it on yourself. What does your person do today instead of using your thing?

If the answer is a spreadsheet they’ve maintained for two years and quietly resent, you have switching pain and a chance.

If the answer is that they live with it, then everyone liking your idea is precisely the response a nice-to-have earns. Enthusiasm is the correct reaction to something pleasant and optional.

Was the channel ever attached to anything?

The part that changed how I read my own numbers came from checking a connection I had assumed existed.

I’d been treating thirty-one posts and no customers as a conversion problem: traffic arrives, offer fails.

Then I looked at whether the traffic and the offer had ever been joined at all.

They hadn’t.

The posts went out, the verdict tool sat on a different surface, and nothing in between recorded whether one led to the other. I built an audience asset and never attached it to a purchase.

A founder telling me everyone likes it and nobody buys usually has that same shape somewhere. There’s a place people say yes, a place people would have to pay, and no instrumented path joining the two.

A missing measurement looks identical to a demand verdict from the outside. Until you fix the measurement, you cannot tell which one you have.

What I’d check this week

Three questions, and the order matters.

First: has anyone ever gone from your content to your checkout in one traceable session? If you can’t answer that, the problem in front of you is instrumentation, and the fix may be an afternoon rather than a pivot.

Second: of the people who liked it, how many were already doing something expensive or annoying about the problem before you appeared? Count them. A small number means the liking may have been accurate: the thing is useful, but optional.

Third: ask the next five people who say they love it what they would stop doing to make room for it. The answers are uncomfortable and they arrive fast.

My own numbers were enough to make me stop asking why nobody was buying.

I had two questions to answer first: was I solving something important enough to pay for, and had I ever built a measurable path from the people I was reaching to the thing I was selling?

Until I could answer those, zero customers wasn’t a verdict on demand.

It was a verdict on the experiment.