100k Impressions, 4 Signups. Here's What I Got Wrong.

I built Ryva, an AI that reads your GitHub and Slack and surfaces the decisions your team is missing, what’s blocked, and what needs to happen next. Not a summarizer. A decision layer.

I shipped it. I posted about it across Reddit, LinkedIn, X, and Slack communities. I got 100k+ impressions on Reddit alone, 300+ LinkedIn outreaches, and eventually shipped a live public demo anyone can run in 30 seconds with no account.

4 signups. 0 paying customers.

Here’s what I actually learned.

Impressions are not interest

Reddit loved the posts. Upvotes, comments, awards on r/startups and r/SaaS. But Reddit engagement and “I will pay for this” are completely different signals, and I was confusing them for weeks.

I was optimizing for reach when I should have been optimizing for conversion. A post that gets 500 upvotes from developers who think Ryva is cool does nothing if none of them are engineering managers with a real coordination problem and the authority to change how their team works.

The painful realization was that 100k impressions at the wrong audience density is worth less than 100 impressions in the right Slack community. I was measuring the wrong thing and calling it progress.

The lesson: distribution without ICP focus is just noise with better packaging.

I was pitching before I was listening

My first wave of outreach read like this: “here’s what Ryva does, want to try it?” Replies were near zero.

Then I changed the approach entirely. Instead of leading with the product, I started engaging in threads where engineering managers and CTOs were already complaining about exactly the problem Ryva solves: missed decisions, context loss between standups, things falling through the cracks because they lived in a Slack thread nobody archived.

I stopped sending demo links cold. Instead I started sending micro-outputs, short snippets showing what Ryva actually found on a public repo, formatted like this:

PR merged. Decision to ship without migration complete.
Rollout owner missing. Migration state unclear across services.

Then I asked: “Is this the kind of thing your team deals with?” That one question opened more real conversations than weeks of direct pitching. Replies tripled. Not because I changed the product. Because I stopped leading with it.

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The demo link wasn’t enough

Around day 8, I launched a public demo at ryva.dev/demo. Enter any public GitHub repo, no account needed, and Ryva runs on it instantly. I thought this would unlock everything. It helped, but people still dropped off.

The reason was obvious in hindsight: a demo link still asks the user to do work. They have to think of a repo to paste, wait for results, and then interpret what they’re looking at. That’s still a commitment. That’s still friction.

What actually moved warm leads wasn’t a link. It was me running Ryva on a repo they already cared about and sending them the output directly. I found a public repo a warm lead was involved in, ran Ryva on it, and sent him the findings link before ever asking for anything. He replied almost immediately and asked me to share Ryva with his cofounder. That’s the difference between a demo link and a white-glove run.

The model I should have started with: do the work for them, show the output, then ask for access to their private repo only after they’ve seen something real.

Spreading across five channels meant owning none of them

At peak, I was posting on Reddit, LinkedIn, X, Rands Leadership Slack, and CTO Craft simultaneously. The logic felt right. More surface area means more chances to convert.

The reality was that I was nowhere deeply enough to build real credibility. Each channel got a diluted version of my attention. I wasn’t building a reputation in any one place. I was just generating activity.

After locking ICP to CTOs and engineering managers at 10 to 50 person startups, I cut to one primary channel and the signal quality improved immediately. The conversations got more specific. The people I was talking to actually had the problem. Spreading wide feels like leverage. It’s actually dilution.

What’s different now

ICP is locked: CTOs at 5 to 20 person startups are the primary target, not engineering managers who can feel the pain but can’t enforce a workflow change. One distribution channel, not five. Warm leads get a personal Ryva run on their own repo before I ask for anything. Every message ends with a specific ask tied to something concrete, not a vague “check it out.”

Ryva is still at zero paying customers. But the conversations are different now. They’re with the right people, about the right problem, and they’re going somewhere.

If you want to see what Ryva actually does, go to ryva.dev, enter any public GitHub repo, and it’ll show you the decisions your team is missing. No account. No signup. Just paste a repo and see what surfaces.

It’s a lighter version of the full product, but it’s real. If it finds something your team would care about, reply and tell me. I read everything.