How I got ZERO response from 30 initially collected emails

This was my first time when I decided to validate my idea. More precisely, not an idea, but what I have already done for my needs, and what others I thought might need.

My wife is a Chinese language teacher and she has an Instagram account, where she finds clients, communicates with them, and solves all payment issues. She once complained to me that it annoys her to scroll through the chat list to find someone who was at a certain stage in her course. So I figured out that creating a simple extension and sort of CRM would help her make this task easier. In a couple of weeks I built a simple MVP, showed my wife, she was satisfied and now she is less stressed doing management stuff in her business.

As a newborn indie hacker, I thought this might interest someone and decided to post this story on a few reddits. Here is one of the posts. How surprised and inspired I was when dozens of people began to write encouraging comments, PM messages, and like this post. I was very much charged with the energy and needs of people. As a result, I received 30 emails, +300 karma and about a hundred comments (not that much but come on it’s my first try!). “This is it!” - I thought and began to adapt the software for the public.

A few weeks later, I finished preparing the software for launching (though a lot of things remained not automated, but it doesn’t matter - for early adopters, right), bought a domain, set up analytics and sent letters to those 30 people and wrote in person to everyone who showed interest in the post on reddit. After a week, I have received NO response. Z-E-R-O. 0.

Of course, the sample is too small to draw any conclusions. And given the initial interest of the audience, I still leave some odds of getting the first paying customer. I will definitely try to find a narrower audience on reddit and where else my target audience can live.