Distribution Eats Product

Four months of talking to nobody

Zero is a hard number to look at every morning with your chai. I know, because I looked at it for about a hundred and twenty mornings in a row.

The product-description rewriter was finished in eleven days. Finished is generous. It worked: you pasted in a dull line like "Soy candle, 8oz, vanilla scent" and it gave you back three warmer versions that sounded like a person had written them. I was proud of it. So I did what I thought founders did next. I made it better.

I spent the first month on prompts. I tested them on four hundred product descriptions I had copied from real Shopify stores, keeping score in a spreadsheet with a column called "sounds human?" I spent the second month on the interface, including (I am not proud of this) nine days choosing between two shades of green for the main button. I spent the third month adding features. Bulk upload. A tone slider. A setting for British or American spelling, which I needed and almost nobody else did.

The analytics dashboard told the real story. Most days, three visitors. Two of them were me on different browsers. The third was usually a bot from somewhere I could not place on a map.

"Who have you shown it to?" Meera asked one evening, around month three.

"It's on the website," I said.

"That isn't what I asked."

She was right, and I hated it. I had shown it to my cousin, who said it was "nice" in the voice he uses for wedding food. I had posted one link on Twitter to my 140 followers, most of whom were also developers building things nobody was buying. I had not written to a single person who owned a shop. I told myself it wasn't ready. The truth was simpler. Building felt safe and asking felt like begging.

In month four, mostly out of guilt, I recorded a two-minute demo video. One take, my laptop on a stack of books, the window open because Jaipur in May gives you no choice. Halfway through, the neighbour's dog started barking at a vegetable cart. I kept going. I had no energy left for a second take. I uploaded it to YouTube and put the link in a reply on a small Shopify forum thread where someone had asked, quite desperately, how to write fifty product descriptions before a holiday sale.

Two days later, an email arrived from a candle shop in Ohio. Linda wanted to know if the thing worked on scented wax melts as well as candles. I said yes. I didn't actually know. She signed up at $19 a month and wrote, "your demo video had a dog barking in the background and I figured you were real."

I read it standing up in the kitchen, and then I read it to Meera, who listened to the whole thing and asked one question.

"Which forum was that?"

Selling as a person, not a logo

The answer, by the way, was a forum I never went back to. I had found the one place where my customers were standing around asking for help, got a customer out of it, and then returned to fiddling with the tone slider. That is how slowly some of us learn.

So when the lettings tool had its three paying agents and nothing else, I swore I would do it properly this time. I bought a list of 400 estate agency email addresses for $60 and wrote what I believed a serious company would write. I sent it to the first sixty on a Tuesday morning. Here it is, unedited, because I have kept it as a warning:

Dear Sir/Madam, I am reaching out to introduce an innovative AI-powered solution that helps property professionals streamline listing creation and ensure compliance. Our platform saves agencies valuable time. Would you be open to a 15-minute call this week?

One reply came back. It was from a man called Steve at an agency in Doncaster, and it said, in full: "Who are you? This reads like it was written by the software you're selling. Remove me."

He was not wrong. Every phrase in that email could have come from anyone, about anything. "Innovative." "Streamline." "Valuable time." I had hidden behind a logo I didn't even have yet, because a logo can't be rejected. Fifty-nine people had simply looked at it and pressed delete, and honestly, so would I.

The fix took an afternoon and a bit of humility. I stopped sending to the list and started reading agents' actual websites. I picked one listing per agency and rewrote it myself, properly, in their voice. Then I wrote to the person whose name was on the "About us" page:

Hi Deborah, I'm Sushil, I build a small tool for lettings agents in Yorkshire. I noticed your two-bed on Westgate doesn't mention the EPC rating, which I think Trading Standards are fussy about now. I've had a go at rewriting it in your style, attached. If it's useful, the tool does this for every listing. If not, no hard feelings, and feel free to steal the rewrite.

That one was written by a person. It had a name, a street, a small mistake I had spotted, and a gift with no strings on it. I sent twenty of those over two weeks. Eleven people replied. Four booked a call. Two paid.

Deborah's reply arrived at 7:40 the next morning:

"The EPC thing is fair, we missed it. Your rewrite is a bit flowery for us, we're not selling Downton Abbey. But you're the first one of these that's actually looked at our website. What does it cost?"

I printed that one and stuck it on the whiteboard, just above a pricing sum I had got wrong.

Borrowing someone else's crowd

Deborah taught me the lesson of the email. Linda, without meaning to, had taught me something bigger, and it took me another year to notice. I didn't find her. She was already standing in a room full of shop owners, and I had wandered in for ten minutes and then wandered out again.

Your customers already gather somewhere. They gather in small, unglamorous places with names like "Independent Letting Agents UK (Members Only)", a Facebook group I joined in the autumn with about 6,000 members and a pinned post banning anyone who sells anything. That rule frightened me for a fortnight. Then I read the group properly, every day over chai, and saw that the same three questions came up again and again. What has to go in a listing now? Has anyone had a complaint about wording? How do you stop juniors writing "stunning" about a flat above a kebab shop?

I answered the first one, at length, with no link. Then the second. By November, people were tagging me in threads I hadn't seen. A woman in Hull wrote, "Ask Sushil, he's the listings bloke," and that one sentence brought me more trials than the $60 email list ever did. I never once posted my product. Someone else always did it for me, which felt like cheating and wasn't.

In India the room is usually a WhatsApp group. My cousin's freight office belongs to four of them, each one a few hundred forwarders swapping container rates, complaints about customs and good-morning images of sunflowers. Ramesh showed me one on his phone, scrolling with his thumb. "Nobody reads ads here," he said. "If someone we know says a thing works, we try it by lunch." You cannot buy your way into that group. You get added by someone who vouches for you, and you get removed the first time you behave like a brochure.

The other kind of borrowed room belongs to software. Years after Linda, I finally listed the old description tool on the Shopify App Store, something I should have done in week two. It took a weekend to meet their review rules and a further eleven days waiting for approval. In the following six weeks it brought in 31 installs and 9 paying stores, more than my first four months combined, and I hadn't written a single new feature. People searching that marketplace already had a shop, a problem and a card on file. I just had to be on the shelf.

For the lettings tool, the shelf is the property software most small agencies already use. If your product can plug into the thing your customers open every morning, their software company's directory becomes your shop window, and their support team occasionally becomes your sales team without knowing it.

Meera found me one evening grinning at my phone. A stranger in the Facebook group had replied to a newcomer asking about EPC wording.

"Don't bother working it out yourself," it said. "There's a Jaipur guy who does it. Pricey, but he actually reads your website."

The slow pile

Before the Facebook group started working, I tried to buy my way past it. In October I put $400 into search ads for "lettings listing software" and similar phrases. Each click cost about $4, which sounded cheap until I watched what the clicks did.

• $400 spent, roughly 100 clicks
• 6 people started a free trial
• 1 person paid, once, and cancelled after a month
• Cost of that one customer: $400

These were strangers. They clicked, glanced, left. Nobody had vouched for me, and I hadn't looked at their website. Maybe a cleverer advertiser could have halved that cost. I am not that advertiser, and I suspect you aren't either, not yet. Ads work when you already know exactly who buys and how long they stay. In the first year you know neither, so you are paying to find out, at $4 a go. I switched them off on a Thursday and felt oddly relieved, the way you do when you finally stop a gym membership.

What I did instead was slower and duller. I took the three questions from the group and wrote one honest page for each. The first was called "What a UK lettings listing must include in 2025". It was plain, with headings an agent could skim between viewings. For two months it brought in nobody. In month four it brought in nine visitors a day. By the following spring it was the single biggest source of trials I had, and it had cost me one Sunday afternoon and a pot of chai.

Then I built a free thing. A small checker: paste in a listing, and it flags missing details like the EPC rating or council tax band. No sign-up. It took two evenings to make, because code is the cheap part now, and agents started sharing it in the group without my asking. A few hundred people used it every month. Some of them clicked the line at the bottom that said, "Want it rewritten in your voice? That's the paid bit."

Referrals were the quietest compounder of all. Claire mentioned the tool to a friend at a Leeds agency over a drink. Deborah mentioned it to her sister in York. I didn't pay them anything. I just answered their emails quickly and once fixed a bug for Claire at eleven at night, which, I now realise, was the best advertising money I never spent.

By March I had twenty-three paying agencies. Not one had arrived through an ad. I added up the monthly total on the whiteboard, underlined it twice and felt very pleased with myself.

Meera looked at the number, then at the API bill open on my laptop beside it.

"So how much of that is actually ours?" she said.

I opened my mouth to answer, and found I had no idea.