Why AskSami exists

Who I am

I work long shifts, and I build around them. I have never worked in marketing. I have never had a job in software. I have never had a cofounder, an investor, a mentor or a team.

I do not come from money and I have never had family who could back me. When I said that on Reddit once, someone with twenty years of experience told me that this is exactly why you hire someone like him. I could not afford to. So I learned the expensive way instead, and this page is what that cost.

For about four years I have built products on my own, on days off and after long shifts, with nobody checking my thinking. Everything below was paid for out of my own pocket and one bank loan. Every product runs through my own small company, which is named after the biggest failure on this page.

Before the products

Before anything worth writing about, I tried most of the things anyone with no money and a laptop tries. Trading. A clothing brand. A YouTube channel. Copywriting. Dropshipping. None of it went anywhere and none of it taught me much beyond the fact that I would keep going.

Later, in August 2026, while Prep66 was already live, I pitched websites to four local businesses, about $320 up front and about $38 a month for hosting. Not one replied. Not one paid. I mention it because people think the failures stop once something works. They do not.

AquaPaws, the shop that sold and still died

My first real attempt at a business was AquaPaws, a Shopify dropshipping store for cat owners. This was before AI coding tools. I built it by hand over months. I drew the logo myself.

I paid someone on Fiverr to study the cat videos that were going viral at the time and cut a fresh one in the same style, and I ran that video as a paid ad on social media.

It worked. Around ten strangers bought. People I had never met saw the video, clicked, and paid. For a first attempt that felt like everything.

The problem was the maths. The ads cost me about $40 to $65 a day, more than I ever spent per day on anything after. One sale did not cover a day's ad spend. Because it was dropshipping, none of my money went on stock. It all went on ads and tools, and I did not have enough of it to keep buying customers at a loss while I worked out how to make the numbers turn.

I want to be exact about what killed it, because I got it wrong at the time and only understood it later. It was not the product. The product sold. It was not distribution. The ads brought buyers. It was cashflow. A physical product needs money up front and I did not have it. That is a different kind of death from the one that came next, and knowing the difference is the whole job.

Ancestorii, six months of building and about $5,000 of hope

This is the one that taught me almost everything AskSami now says. If you read one section, read this one.

Building it

Ancestorii is a private family memories platform. Timelines, albums, voice recordings, time capsules, a quiet place for a family to keep everything together away from social media, before the people who remember are gone.

I loved the idea. I still do. I spent six months building it with ChatGPT writing the code, in the evenings and on days off, and I funded it with a loan of about $13,000. I did not validate it first. I did not run a survey, I did not pre sell it, I did not sit down with a single stranger and ask whether they would pay for it. I built first because I love building, and I told myself I would work out distribution afterwards. I have since read that sentence in hundreds of posts by other founders. It is the most common mistake in the world and I made it with borrowed money.

On launch day I felt like I had accomplished something and nothing at the same time. I thought the product was perfect and that sales would come straight away.

Nobody came.

The first week

In the first seven days I spent about $270 on ads. Roughly 15,000 people visited the site. Not one paid.

Google Analytics showed that about a fifth of visitors scrolled past halfway down the page and stayed longer than 30 seconds, so I told myself the interest was there. That is the first excuse in a long list. What I had actually done was ask strangers to sign up and pay before they had felt anything, created anything, or trusted anything. I had been so close to the product for so long that I had forgotten what it feels like to land on something new as a stranger.

I wrote all of this on a startups subreddit and 16,000 people read it. The comments told me the same thing in different words: you are asking for trust before people have felt anything.

So I removed the paywall. I let people start free, no card, no pressure, and I relaunched the ads at 7am. Three hours and about $3.50 later, someone signed up and completed registration. One person. Not paying.

I celebrated it like a real win. I posted about it and 81,000 people read that post and congratulated me. It felt like momentum. Looking back, it was the wrong kind of win. It proved a stranger would click a free button. It proved nothing about whether anyone would pay. And one comment under that post said the thing I did not want to hear: I will never understand why people sink hundreds into ads before they have even tried to get a user and talk to them. He was right and I ignored him.

Trying to raise money

Around the same time I listed the company on a paid angel investment platform, because I did not have friends or family who could invest and I thought that was how it was done. The monthly fee was high. After a week one angel had downloaded the business plan and nobody had replied. Founders in the comments told me not to pay to raise money, that those platforms are full of time wasters, and that with no traction no investor would look at me anyway. I cut it. Nothing came of it and the money was gone.

Every channel at once

Then I did what almost every first time founder does. I tried everything.

Google Ads, both search and YouTube. Meta ads. Reddit ads. About $90 to sponsor a family history podcast, about $45 per thousand downloads, so I bought two thousand. About $150 for a post through a family history magazine's Facebook page. Paid creators making videos about the product. I started my own podcast on Spotify about family memories and recording voices. I wrote SEO pages and got them indexed on Google. I cold messaged genealogy content creators, five a day, asking if they would like to collaborate. Replies to those messages: zero.

Two months after launch, with more than $600 gone on Meta alone and everything else on top, I had four signups.

Not forty. Not four hundred. Four.

I wrote that on Reddit too, and 68,000 people read it and 145 of them commented. It is still the most useful thing that ever happened to Ancestorii, and it cost me nothing, and I should have done it before I spent anything.

What Reddit told me that I should have heard sooner

I am going to list these because every one of them is now a rule inside AskSami.

It is a vitamin, not a painkiller. People said it was meaningful. People said it was important. People said it was beautiful. Nobody said I need this right now. It was a this is nice, I will come back to it later product, and later never converts.

There was no pricing on the site. People would not sign up just to find out what it costs. Better to scare some people off with a price than everyone off with no price.

Trust and longevity. Why would anyone put their family's memories on a website they have never heard of, run by one person, that might not exist next year, when Google Photos is free and already on their phone? One commenter said it plainly: at this point it is as likely to be lost on your site as anywhere else.

I never validated it. When someone asked how I had researched the idea before building, the honest answer was that I had not. I built what I believed in and never tested whether strangers felt any urgency about it.

My posts and my replies sounded like ChatGPT wrote them, and people said so in the comments. On a product about something as human as family memories, that alone cost me trust.

The name did nothing for anyone. The strapline read like a funeral service. The homepage had too much text and no hook. The screenshots showed generic timelines instead of the one thing that was different, the voices.

There were two buyers, the person leaving the memories and the adult child organising them, and I had never separated those two journeys.

The rebuild, and the signups that fooled me

I took all of it and went back to the drawing board. I signed up to every competitor I could find, StoryWorth, Remento, Heirlooms, StoryKeeper, Meminto, Keepsake, My Life in a Book. I could not get into any of them without paying first, and I realised their entire business was selling a printed book. So I decided to be different.

Ancestorii had been a single user tool, one person uploading photos alone. That is not how families work. I ripped the backend apart and rebuilt it around families, shared timelines, invites, multiple people contributing to the same albums and voice notes. Signups went up to about four a day on about $5 a day of Meta spend.

And that is where the second excuse lived. Every time someone signed up I kept spending, because a signup felt like progress. It reached 125 signups. Still zero paying customers. I called that momentum. It was 125 people who had cost me money and paid me nothing, and I was proud of the number.

Then I went physical, because everyone in the comments kept mentioning a keepsake. Hardcover memory books. Canvas prints. Acrylics. I built a nine tier reward ladder around it. I was printing memory books while not one stranger had uploaded a single memory to the site. That is the mistake I regret most, out of all of them. If even one stranger had started filling in their family's memories, that would have been a signal to build on. It was not there, and I built anyway, because building is the part I enjoy and it feels like work.

Google's AI Overview started naming me as the founder of Ancestorii, which gave me a strange small feeling of pride and no customers.

A founder of Meminto, a real company in the same niche with tens of thousands of users, replied to my last post and told me the truth from the inside. The gift angle is everything. Market to the adult child who pays, not the parent who uses it. Give the emotional aha away free. Paid acquisition barely works in this niche because the intent is too diffuse. SEO and word of mouth compound slowly, then fast, and most founders run out of patience before it kicks in. Nobody googles for a memoir app on a Tuesday. The trigger is a death, a milestone birthday, a reunion. Being present at that moment matters more than any feature.

He was describing a business I did not have the money or the time to run.

How long I kept going

I noticed within the first week that signups were not turning into customers. I carried on for months. I kept finding some reason why next week would be different. A new landing page. A new feature. A new channel. A rebuild. The books.

Nobody ever sat me down and said: stop. Do not build another feature. Do not spend another dollar. Let us look at your product and the market and find out whether this can make money at all, and if it cannot, kill it and move on with your life. I had people telling me not to overbuild. I never had anyone tell me it was time to move on. I had to work that out on my own, and it took far longer than it should have.

I stopped all ad spend in May 2026. In total Ancestorii cost about $5,000 in marketing and printing, on top of six months of building and a loan of about $13,000 of which about $650 is left. Today it has 177 signups. It has never had a paying customer. It still runs, because I would not take a family's memories down, but I fix bugs and keep it tidy and that is all. No new features. No spend.

The pattern across AquaPaws and Ancestorii, when I finally wrote it down, was one line. Spending money on ads. Spending before I knew whether a stranger would take the thing for free. Spending before I knew what one customer cost. Spending to buy hope instead of buying a signal. And spending for weeks after the signal had already said no.

Prep66, one post and about $30

In August 2026 I built something for people with a problem nobody had to explain.

Prep66 is an exam prep site for a set of exams. I knew exactly what drove the people sitting them up the wall about the options: stupidly expensive courses, question banks that had not been touched since 2015, scanned PDFs handed out in class. Everyone sitting those exams already hated it. I did not have to explain the problem to a single person.

I built it in weeks, not months, using AI coding tools. And this time I did not spend money to find out whether anyone wanted it.

The launch post

On 14 August 2026 I wrote one post in the subreddit where people sitting those exams talk to each other. It was not a pitch. It was me, as a person and not a brand, saying what was wrong with the prep options, saying I had built something about it, and asking for honest feedback. If it is no good, tell me, that is worth more. I offered 25 free accounts and ended up giving away well over 40. There was no link in the post. I put the link in the comments only when people asked.

That post got about 3,200 views, 14 upvotes and 18 comments, and it brought the first real users. A follow up post a week later got 1,900 views and far less engagement, which taught me that the first honest post is the one that counts.

My replies were short, lowercase, how I actually type. Offer is long gone, it is full price now. When the free spots ran out I said so and gave the early crowd a half price code instead. When someone asked for a version for a different set of exams I said yes, give me two weeks, and then I built it.

The first payment

On about 23 August, nine days after the post, a stranger paid full price. No discount code. The next two did the same over the following days. All three paid within minutes of landing on the page, before they had touched the product.

They did not need convincing. They had an exam booked. A deadline, a costly failure if they got it wrong, and a problem nobody had to explain to them. Those three things did more selling than about $5,000 of ads ever did for Ancestorii.

The one ad, and how fast I killed it

I tried one paid channel, because I wanted to know. A Reddit ad at about $6 a day, from 27 August, aimed at the two subreddits where the people sitting those exams talk. I killed it on 1 September. About $30 spent, one signup, no sale, and in the same five days the free channels had brought more people and a paying customer. No ads since.

That is the difference between the two products in one decision. On Ancestorii I noticed in the first week and kept going for months. On Prep66 I noticed in five days and stopped. Same person. The difference was that this time I had written the rule down before the ad went live: one week, one conversion, or it dies.

Where the users actually came from

On 27 August I started recording where every signup came from. The first pull, on 1 September, showed something I had not planned for. Of nine tracked signups, five had arrived from ChatGPT recommending the site, two from Google search, one direct, one from the paid ad. By 3 September it was six from ChatGPT and five from Google out of thirteen.

The site had zero backlinks. Nobody was linking to it. What it had was a set of plain reference pages that answered what the people sitting those exams search for, submitted to Bing and Google with the plumbing done properly. ChatGPT reads Bing. Once those pages were indexed, ChatGPT started naming Prep66 when people asked it to recommend a study platform, and in one fresh chat ranked it first, pulled the real prices and subject counts off the site, and sent the person down my exact funnel. Gemini appeared as a signup source about a week later.

The free tier

Then I did the thing I had never done on Ancestorii. I looked at what the free users actually did, instead of how many there were.

Thirty one free accounts. Not one had ever gone from using the free tier to the checkout page. The daily limit had never once led to a purchase, it just ended the session. Both paying customers had bought within an hour of signing up, before using anything.

So on 5 September 2026 I removed the free tier completely. You can still sign up and look inside, but nothing works until you pay. I split it into two plans, one subject for about $13 a month or every subject for about $25, and I sent one plain email to every account explaining why. Eight hours later someone who had abandoned checkout that morning came back and paid.

Today Prep66 has 78 users and 8 paying subscribers. Total marketing spend: about $30, and that was the ad I killed.

PrepAMT

People in the Prep66 comments kept asking for a version for a different set of exams, so I built PrepAMT, an exam prep site for the people sitting them. I have read the official study material, and the site says plainly who built it and what it rests on, because pretending to be something you are not is the kind of thing that costs you the only thing that matters in a forum full of the people you sell to.

It has 6 users and no paying customer yet.

It has already taught me one thing. I wrote the whole site around the words I picked myself. Nobody searches for those words. They search for the name of the exam. When I asked ChatGPT to list prep sites for that exam it named 29 of them, tiny ones included, and PrepAMT was not there. Every page, every heading and every machine readable field had to be rewritten, and a whole section of the site renamed, because if the words your buyers type are not on the page, the search engines do nothing and the AI mentions never come.

What the difference was

Put the two side by side.

Ancestorii: six months of building, about $5,000 of marketing, a loan of about $13,000, every channel at once, 177 signups, zero paying customers, and a founder who kept going for months after the signal said no.

Prep66: a few weeks of building, one honest post, about $30, one channel, 8 paying subscribers, and an ad killed in five days.

It was not effort. I worked harder on Ancestorii than on anything in my life. It was not money. The one that worked spent almost none. It was not even the quality of the code.

It was whether strangers had a problem they needed solved now. Whether I spoke to the people I was selling to as a person, so the post read as one and not as a pitch. Whether I spent to buy a signal or to buy hope. And whether I had decided, before the money went out, what result would make me stop.

I only know those four things because I paid about $5,000 and a year of my life to learn them. Nobody told me at the time. Not the AI I was using to write the code, which happily built every feature I asked for. Not the ad platforms, which happily took the money. Not the signup counter, which happily went up.

Why AskSami

AskSami is the hand on the shoulder I did not have.

It reads your actual code, your live site and the money you have already spent, and then it tells you, plainly, which of these two products you are building. If the people arriving do not have the problem, it says so. If your page does not say what the thing does, who it is for and what it costs, it says so. If you are about to print the memory books before one stranger has uploaded a memory, it says stop. And if fair tests keep coming back empty, it is willing to say the sentence nobody said to me: it is time to move on with your life.

It never posts for you and it never spends your money, because posting and spending were never the problem. Knowing when to, and when not to, was.

Everything it knows, it knows because it happened to me first. That is the whole reason it exists.

Dante