TLDR

I started TryScribe because I needed a tool that did not exist. Four months in I had users and zero steady income. This is how I felt, what I changed, and what I learn while I am still building.

The night that made me honest

It was 1:30 in the morning. My laptop light made a small rectangle on the wall. I had been editing a short video, then answering one client message, then fixing a tiny bug that had nothing to do with the main feature. The code worked but the product did not feel finished. I felt the weight of everything around me. Not the world. My own expectations.

You have seen the polished launch tweets. You have not seen the nights where you try to make a small thing work and it still fails. That night I decided to stop pretending that growth was a straight line. I wrote down what I actually had, and what felt broken.

Why I kept going even when nothing looked like success

At first I thought I could build everything alone and it would all fit together. I believed if the product was clean, people would come. That was naive. The truth is simple and ugly. Building a product is part making, part convincing, part waiting.

I kept going because of small signals. One person sent a polite message with a bug report and a thank you. A creator told me the idea sounded promising and asked to join a waitlist. These were tiny, but they proved the product was not useless.

Mostly I kept going because I liked the work. I liked the moment when a slow animation finally felt natural, or when a score that measures an opening actually matched what I felt after watching a dozen drafts. Little wins made the hard parts worth it.

The "Silent Failures"

On paper, my failures looked like small mistakes. In reality, they were stealing my time and confidence.

My biggest trap was the expectation of fast growth. I thought a single good demo would make the product obvious to everyone. It didn't. Attention is messy and noisy. I also relied too heavily on one channel; I had one video explode in views and assumed that would translate to steady users forever. It didn't. Virality is not the same as product motion.

But the most dangerous failure was product scope creep. I kept adding small features because they "seemed useful." The focus blurred, and I ended up with a product that did five things imperfectly instead of one thing well. Because I hadn't built a tight onboarding, people would try it for thirty seconds, get confused, and leave.

The Pivot: What I Changed

I had to be ruthless to save the project.

First, I narrowed the product to one main idea. We focused entirely on judging the opening hook of a video. That’s it. This gave users a single promise they could understand immediately.

Next, I rewired the onboarding. I removed the menus and the options. Now, new users see one action and get one clear result. The goal is to show value in 30 seconds, not 3 minutes.

Most importantly, I stopped adding features without data. Features need a reason, and that reason is user action. If a change doesn't increase a clear metric, we don't ship it. This required me to start talking to users honestly. I stopped looking at dashboards and started listening to what people were actually trying to achieve. That changed the product faster than any analytics tool ever could.

The Builder’s Manifesto

If I could go back to Day 1, these are the rules I would force myself to follow:

Keep the scope ruthless. If two sentences cannot clearly explain what your product does, you are not focused enough. Ship the simplest version. The quickest way to learn is to make someone use the most basic version of your idea and watch where they get stuck. Measure the core loop. For TryScribe, the only metric that matters is: Did the user try a second time after seeing the feedback? Everything else is vanity.

Expect slow months. Plan for them. Use them to learn, not to panic and add a dozen useless features.

The part I don't like to show

Revenue isn't the only metric, but I want to be transparent. Four months passed with a small group of users and no reliable monthly revenue. It was discouraging. I asked myself if I should just get a job for stability.

I decided to hold both paths at once. I kept freelancing to cover the bills, and I kept building TryScribe to build my future. The freelancing gave me the financial safety to take my time and iterate on the product properly. The tension between the two was actually productive it forced clarity.

Final thoughts

The next few months are about validation. We are confirming the core hook logic with top creators and working to improve that crucial "first minute" experience. We are turning the waitlist into a community rather than just a list of emails.

If you are building and it feels slow, that means you are doing real work. Slow isn't a verdict; it's the process of shaping something that resists easy shortcuts.

If you are curious about TryScribe and want to try a test build, join the waitlist here: https://hook.tryscribe.in