Building a Product Isn’t the Hard Part. Getting Users Is

The product exists. The bill barely does. The users? That is where things become painfully real.

For months, I have been building Folivera, a career platform designed to help people improve their CVs, check how well they may perform in applicant tracking systems, and prepare stronger job applications. At the moment, cost of erolment and use is zero. That sounds like the perfect founder story: build cheaply, publish it, and watch people arrive. Except people do not simply arrive. I can add another feature more easily than I can persuade ten strangers to change how they already prepare their CVs even if it will cost them nothing to use it. That has forced me to confront a truth many builders postpone: making the product is not the hardest art. Creating demand, earning trust and turning attention into repeated use is.

Building has become cheaper. Attention has not.

I do not want to diminish the work involved in building software. Products still break. Authentication misbehaves. Interfaces that looked elegant on a laptop become chaotic on a small phone. A feature that took two hours to imagine can take two weeks to make reliable.

Still, the technical barrier has fallen dramatically. With open-source libraries, cloud free tiers and AI-assisted development, one determined person can now build what once required a small team and a serious budget. Folivera is evidence of that in my own life. I have spent months shaping the platform, but I have not needed a large office, a venture-capital cheque or a room full of engineers to put a working product online.

That is the good news. The awkward news is that these same tools are available to almost everybody else.

The internet is not short of products. It is drowning in them. A technically functional app enters a market where users already have habits, alternatives and very little patience. “It is free” does not automatically solve this problem. Free removes a price objection; it does not create urgency, credibility or understanding.

Zero cost is not the same as zero friction. A user still has to notice the product, understand it, trust it, try it and remember to return.

What Folivera is teaching me

Folivera solves a problem I know personally. Job applications are exhausting. People send the same CV repeatedly, hear nothing, and often do not know whether the problem is their experience, their writing, their formatting or the way an automated system reads the document. A tool that makes this process clearer should have an audience.

But “should” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.

A useful idea does not distribute itself. A polished dashboard does not explain why someone should leave their current method. An ATS score means very little to a person who does not yet understand what an ATS is. Even when the value is obvious to me, I still have to translate it into the user’s language: Why are my applications being ignored, and what can I change today?

This is where builders often hide inside the product. Coding feels productive because the feedback is immediate. A bug disappears. A page loads faster. A new button appears. Distribution is emotionally messier. You post and nobody clicks. You message twenty people and three reply. Someone signs up, explores for thirty seconds and never returns. The work is less controllable because another human being gets a vote.

Folivera is not necessarily failing because it does not yet have a crowd. It is still unproven. That distinction matters. Low adoption can mean the product is weak, but it can also mean the message is unclear, the audience is too broad, the channel is wrong or users are not reaching the moment where the value becomes obvious. My job is not to soothe myself with any one explanation. It is to collect enough behaviour to discover which explanation is true.

AZ Learner and the UCC SRC App taught me the difference

I have now seen two very different adoption stories from products attached to my name. AZ Learner is an independent student-support app. The UCC SRC App is the official platform of the University of Cape Coast Student Representative Council. As of this writing, Google Play displays AZ Learner in the 100+ download band and the UCC SRC App in the 3.5K+ band.

Those figures are not active-user statistics, and the bands do not tell us whether people stayed. Still, the order-of-magnitude difference is a valuable signal because the same developer sits behind both products. The major difference is not simply code quality. It is distribution context.

AZ Learner had to introduce itself. It had to explain why students needed another academic app, earn their trust and compete with timetables, WhatsApp groups, Google Calendar, course representatives and the wonderfully resilient Ghanaian habit of keeping everything in one’s head until panic becomes the notification system.

The SRC App entered with something AZ Learner could not manufacture alone: institutional relevance. Students already knew the SRC. The name carried an existing audience, recognisable authority and natural reasons to pay attention to announcements, documents, hostel information and campus activity. The product still had to work, but it did not begin as a stranger.

This taught me that distribution is not merely advertising. Sometimes distribution is ownership of the relationship. It is being attached to an institution, community or routine that already gathers the people you need. The SRC App did not have to create the UCC student community before serving it. AZ Learner had to build both a product and a constituency around the product.

The four gates between a product and a user

When builders say they need “more marketing,” the phrase is often too vague to be useful. A person normally has to pass through four gates before becoming a real user:

1. Awareness: Do the right people know the product exists?
2. Trust: Do they believe it is legitimate, safe and capable of helping them?
3. Activation: Can they reach a meaningful result quickly?
4. Habit: Is there a reason to return or recommend it?

A builder can have an awareness problem and mistakenly redesign the dashboard. Or attract registrations and celebrate while nobody uploads a CV, completes an analysis or acts on the feedback. Sign-ups are not the finish line. For Folivera, the meaningful event is closer to this: a job seeker uploads a real CV, understands the feedback, improves the document and leaves better prepared to apply.

That is activation. Everything before it is a promise.

How builders should grow when they do not have a giant budget

1. Identify the first twenty people before adding the next twenty features

“Job seekers” is not a usable first market. “Final-year UCC students applying for their first graduate roles” is. A narrow audience is easier to find, interview and serve. If you cannot write down twenty specific people or communities that contain them, your market is still an abstraction.

2. Sell the painful outcome, not the feature list

Most people do not wake up wanting an ATS checker. They want to understand why nobody replies to their applications. Folivera should lead with that anxiety and the result it offers, then explain the machinery. Features are evidence; the outcome is the invitation.

3. Borrow distribution through legitimate partnerships

The SRC App showed me the power of an existing relationship. Builders should look for student associations, departments, career offices, professional groups, churches, local businesses or online communities that already serve the intended users. The goal is not to spam their members. It is to offer a programme, tool or result valuable enough for the trusted organisation to introduce.

4. Recruit and onboard early users manually

Paul Graham’s famous advice to do things that do not scale remains useful because early growth is also research. Sit with someone while they use the product. Watch where they hesitate. Help them complete the process. Ask what they expected to happen. The first users are not a crowd to impress; they are a source of uncomfortable, necessary truth.

5. Give users a recurring reason to return

A one-time tool can still succeed, but retention will always be difficult if the value ends after one click. Folivera could connect the CV analysis to saved versions, role-specific tailoring, application tracking, interview preparation or reminders to update a profile. The product should not add random features for the sake of activity. It should support the next step in the same journey.

6. Measure the funnel, not your feelings

Track a small sequence: visit, sign-up, first meaningful action, completed result, return and referral. If 100 people visit but only five sign up, the message or trust layer may be weak. If 60 sign up but only three upload a CV, onboarding may be the problem. If many complete an analysis but nobody returns, the value may be too shallow or too infrequent. Each leak demands a different response.

7. Ask for referrals only after delivering value

“Please share my app” is a favour. “Your CV improved from this to this; invite a friend who is also applying” is a credible recommendation. People share outcomes that make them look helpful, not products that make them feel like unpaid marketers.

What I would do with Folivera for the next 30 days

If I applied these lessons ruthlessly, I would pause broad promotion and run a focused experiment:

• Week one: recruit twenty final-year students or recent graduates through direct outreach and UCC communities.
• Week two: personally guide each person through one real CV analysis and record every point of confusion.
• Week three: publish anonymised before-and-after improvements, collect honest testimonials and approach two trusted campus or career communities with a concrete workshop offer.
• Week four: run a simple “Fix Your CV in 15 Minutes” campaign and measure how many people move from seeing the message to completing a useful result.

The goal would not be virality. It would be proof: proof that a defined group has the problem, understands Folivera’s promise, reaches value and tells somebody else.

Y Combinator’s guidance on finding the first ten customers makes a similar point: early users rarely materialise because a founder found the perfect automation tool. They usually come through a network, personal conversations and work that feels inconveniently manual.

I am writing this from the middle, not the victory lap

This is not one of those founder essays where the struggle becomes charming because the company eventually reached a million users. I am still in the difficult part. Folivera has taken months of building, its current direct cost is almost nothing, and getting consistent users remains harder than putting another feature online.

But that lesson is useful precisely because it is unfinished. It is changing how I judge progress. Shipping matters, but a deployed product with no learning loop is only a website waiting politely. The next milestone is not another impressive page. It is a small group of people receiving enough value that their behaviour changes.

Building creates the possibility of value. Distribution carries that value to another human being. Trust persuades them to try it. Retention proves it was worth their time.

A product is code, design and intention. A living product is all of that plus users. The bridge between the two is the real art.