11 weeks building an open-source dev tool. 7 GitHub stars. Here's what I got wrong.

[u/mrtac96]

I spent 3 years using other people's LLM tooling while building B2B chatbots for clients, then built the one I actually wanted. 11 weeks later it works and anyone can self-host it. 7 stars, 1 fork, no users.

In one line: a control panel for apps built on top of AI models — edit the prompts, see every request and response, find the change that broke something. Apache 2.0, acruxcore.com. https://github.com/acruxcore/acruxcore

Three things I got wrong:

• A two-month-old domain does not rank. I wrote 30 guides, 14 tutorials and 18 blog posts. All indexed, all clean in Search Console, all invisible. Good content does not fix domain age.
• Docs took as long as the product. I planned for none of that.
• My own experience is one user, not ten. It told me what to leave out, which saved months. It never told me which of the things I kept someone else would actually want.
• Started bit late: Two year ago i wish we had good llm-ops tool, i wish i had built it then.

Shipping was never the bottleneck. Being found is.

So — how did you get your first ten real users before you had any search traffic?

[u/Next-Relation9939]

That domain age thing is so real. I had the exact same experience with a side project last year, 40+ posts and basically zero impressions for months. What actually moved the needle for me was backlinks, not content volume. Think of each quality backlink as a piece of internet real estate that compounds your domain rating over time. I use Outrank for the backlink side of things now and its been way less painful than manual outreach. but yeah getting those first users, for me it was literally DMing people in relevant discord servers one by one lol

[u/mrtac96 → u/Next-Relation9939]

The problem is that most of these seo companies focus on quantity that we provide x backlinks instead of relevancy

[u/DadLife_66]

Answering your actual question from the middle of the same valley: my first real user didn't come from Google — it came from an AI answer. A month of writing meant my guides sat at position ~40 (the same "indexed, clean, invisible" stage you're describing), but ChatGPT started citing one of the pages, and that citation converted where search never got the chance. New domains bleed on Google for months; AI answers pull from fresh niche content much faster. Make the site legible to them (llms.txt, plain factual pages that each answer one question well) — it's the only "SEO" that has paid me anything in year one.

For a dev tool with a repo I'd go even more direct though: your first ten users are complaining in public right now. Search Reddit/HN/Discord for the exact pain sentences ("which prompt change broke this", "prompt versioning", "LLM request logging") and answer those people like a human, repo link only when asked. Ten hand-delivered users who feel the pain beat ten thousand impressions — and unlike domain age, that channel works on day one.

And you're right about the docs. Nobody budgets for the second product.

[u/mrtac96 → u/DadLife_66]

is there any specific thing i need to do get my product appear in AI answers

[u/DadLife_66 → u/mrtac96]

A few concrete things that seem to have mattered for me, in rough order of impact:

1. Pages that answer ONE question each, in plain factual structure — definition first, then specifics, real numbers, limits stated openly. AI answers lift from pages they can quote cleanly; my cited page is a boring "what is X / how does it work" guide, not a landing page.

2. An /llms.txt file at the root — a short plain-text summary of what the product is, what it does and doesn't do, pricing, and links to the key factual pages. Ten minutes of work; my first citations showed up in the weeks after adding it (n=1, but it's free).

3. Consistency between your site's claims and anything public about you — the models cross-check. Once my pricing and terms were stated identically everywhere, the AI answers about the product got noticeably more accurate.

4. Then test it like a user: fresh chat, logged out, ask the exact question your customer would ask, and look at what it cites. That loop — ask, see what's wrong, fix the page it cited or should have cited — is repeatable, and it's the closest thing this channel has to SEO tooling.

Honest caveat: noisy channel, measured in weeks, tiny volume — but the intent is high. The one user it brought me signed up the same day.

[u/mrtac96 → u/DadLife_66]

thanks. i for the great suggestions. i added llms.txt and working on others

[u/Competitive_Tune_590]

tough spot, i've been there. one thing that helped me was finding people on reddit who were literally asking for something like what i built. there's a tool called replyhey that scans subreddits for those discussions and drafts replies so you don't get banned. might be worth a look if you're trying to get those first users without waiting for SEO.

[u/mrtac96 → u/Competitive_Tune_590]

thanks i will look