I’m a bootstrapped builder who’s tried launching a handful of products with my co-founder during our 6-products-in-12-months challenge last year. My co-founder has been in the B2B startup world for 20 years, so we assumed that experience would make B2C SaaS growth a sure thing. It didn’t.
Our first step into B2C was Olovka.ai, a $9.95/mo writing tool for students and researchers. We were excited, did a spiffy Product Hunt launch, wrote blog posts, posted on socials… but after the initial buzz, growth dropped off hard.
Here’s what we tried (and what didn’t work):
- PPC/ads: Not viable at under $10 a month. We’d be waiting forever to break even, and being bootstrapped, that wasn’t an option.
- Content, SEO, social: Glacially slow, especially at the start.
- Communities, DMs, cold outreach to journalists: Nice conversations, almost no adoption.
- UGC videos on TikTok: Nothing went viral.
- “Growth hacks”: Felt disingenuous, didn’t stick.
Honestly, there were weeks of nothing. It was frustrating to see the dashboard stuck on “no new users.” I know a lot of makers hit this wall—especially when moving from B2B playbooks to B2C reality.
What Finally (Quietly) Worked
What slowly (then suddenly) moved the needle was finding where our target users already spent their time and participating—without pitching.
For Olovka, that place turned out to be YouTube. Every day there were videos about “AI tools for students, writing, and productivity,” with thousands of viewers.
Instead of shilling our product, I started leaving genuinely helpful comments: sharing tools that worked (including ours), giving practical advice, and answering questions. It felt less like marketing and more like joining the conversation.
Doing this manually was slow, so I built a tool to find relevant videos, generate natural comments that mention the product, keep them near the top, and track which ones got traction.
Did It Actually Work?
Surprisingly, yes. Over about 3 months:
- We went from ~500 signups to over 24,000
- Organic and direct traffic took off
- Conversion rates climbed past launch week numbers
- We started seeing way more people Googling our brand
- SEO improved thanks to more mentions and curiosity
If you’re curious about the details, I put everything into a case study:
Case Study · Olovka gets 24k users in 3 months
My Takeaway (For Other Builders)
If you’re building a SaaS and you’re stuck, here’s what I wish I’d heard earlier:
Find conversations your audience is already part of. Add something useful. Don’t force it.
It’s not a silver bullet, but it’s what finally worked for us.
