What I posted on Reddit while Ancestorii failed

I wanted to come back and share an update after my last post here.

Over the past 7 days I've spent about £210 running ads and trying to get people to the site.

Roughly 15,000 people have visited.

I haven't had a single paying customer yet.

That part hurts to write, but it's the truth.

Using google analytics, what surprised me is that people didn't just leave straight away. Around 20 percent scrolled past halfway down the page and many stayed for 30 seconds or more. So there is interest. The problem is what happens next.

And I think I see the mistake. There's a part of me that feels sad that it took spending that money just to realise what now feels obvious.

I was asking people to sign up and pay before they had actually felt anything. Before they'd created anything. Before they trusted it.

I've been so close to this project that I forgot what it feels like to land on something new as a stranger.

So the next step is simple, but scary.

I'm changing the flow so people can start for free. No card. No pressure. They can create something meaningful first and only then decide if it's worth paying for.

I want the product to earn the subscription, not the other way around.

Right now I'm rebuilding the onboarding and the landing page to feel more human. Less sales focused. More honest. More about trust and emotion than features and pricing.

I'm still bootstrapping. Still learning as I go. Still very early.

I'm not posting this to promote anything. I just found a lot of value in reading honest posts from other founders here and wanted to give an honest update of my own.

If this next version doesn't work, I'll say that too.

Thanks to everyone who shared advice and tough feedback on the last post. It genuinely helped.

I'm a first-time founder and could really use some perspective.

I've bootstrapped everything so far and recently listed my startup on Angel Investment Network. The problem is the monthly cost is high, and after my first week I've had very little traction. Only one angel has downloaded my business plan.

I don't come from money, I don't have family who can back me, and my circle of friends is small and not in a position to invest.

I'm not here to pitch or promote anything, genuinely just trying to understand what actually works at this stage.

For founders who've been here before:

How did you raise your first bit of external funding?

Was it angels, grants, accelerators, revenue first, or something else?

Would you keep paying for platforms like this early on, or cut it and redirect effort?

Any honest advice (even if it's brutal) would be appreciated

I posted here last week about spending £210 on ads, getting about 15,000 visitors, and not a single paying customer.

A few people commented (and a few DM'd) saying the same thing in different ways:

"You're asking for trust before people have felt anything."

They were right.

So I changed one thing that honestly scared me a bit:

I removed the paywall and let people start for free. No card. No pressure.

I relaunched ads today at 7am.

After 3 hours and £2.80 spent on meta, someone signed up and completed registration.

It's just one person.

They haven't paid.

But it's the first time a stranger chose to step inside and create something.

That felt different.

What this reminded me is that momentum doesn't arrive in big dramatic moments.

Sometimes it starts with one person quietly saying "okay, I'll try this."

It's a small win, but it feels like a real one, the first sign that the change was the right call.

Still early. Still a long way to go.

But today felt worth celebrating.

If nothing else, it's a reminder to keep going.

I've been building this for 6 months.

The product lets families create private timelines, albums, and record voices while people are still alive. It's about preserving memories before they're gone.

It's been live for 2 months now.

Up to today I've spent close to £500 on Meta ads.

£76 on Reddit ads.

£70 sponsoring a family history podcast (they charge £35 per 1k downloads, so I paid for 2k).

£120 on a Facebook post through Family Tree magazine.

I have even started my own podcast on Spotify talking about family memories, photos, and recording voices, believe it or not.

I've created multiple SEO pages and got them indexed on Google.

I've cold messaged genealogy content creators and niche accounts, around 5 messages a day, asking if they'd like to connect or collaborate.

Replies so far: 0.

After all that effort, all that money, all that time…

4 signups.

Not 40.

Not 400.

Four.

And what I've realised is this might not be a traffic problem.

It feels like a "this is nice" problem.

People say it's meaningful.

People say it's important.

People say it's beautiful.

But it's not a "I need this right now" product.

It's more like "this is good, I'll come back to it later."

And later never converts.

That's the part I still haven't solved.

I don't know if I'm targeting the wrong audience.

I don't know if the positioning is too broad.

I don't know if I'm just bad at marketing.

Or if the core issue is that preserving memories is something people emotionally agree with but practically postpone.

Right now, if I'm honest, I feel like I'm just throwing things at the wall.

Ads.

SEO.

Podcast sponsorships.

Cold outreach.

Content.

And none of it is translating into real traction.

At this point I'm asking myself:

Is this a distribution failure?

A positioning failure?

Or is it a demand problem?

If anyone here has built something that people liked but didn't urgently need, how did you solve that gap?

Because right now I'm not quitting.

But I am confused.

And I'd rather face the truth than keep pretending I know what I'm doing.

Edited:

Several people have asked to see it visually, so here's the link: https://www.ancestorii.com/

Happy for honest feedback on the actual product and flow.

I avoided linking originally because I didn't want this to feel like an ad, but feedback without context probably isn't helpful either.

Some of you might remember my earlier posts here. The one where I spent £210 on ads and got zero paying customers. The one where I was asking about funding and had nothing but a half built product and a lot of stubbornness.

A lot has changed since then.

The platform has 125 signups now. Still zero paying customers, I am not going to sugar coat it, it is what it is. But the platform is unrecognisable from what it was.

It started when I tried to sign up to my competitors. StoryWorth, Remento, Heirlooms, StoryKeeper, Meminto, Keepsake, My Life in a Book. I could not sign up unless I paid first. I also realised their entire goal was to get you to buy a book. That was it. Buy the book and their business ends there. So I went back to the drawing board and started from scratch. I wanted to build something unique that stood out from the masses. I became focused on overtaking my competitors and changing the whole Memory Preservation business.

Ancestorii was basically a single user tool. One person uploading photos and building timelines alone. That is not how families work. Nobody preserves memories by themselves. So I ripped the backend apart and rebuilt it around families. A family that can invite other members to contribute, thus becoming a shared library with multiple people contributing to the same timelines, albums, voice notes, and capsules. Signups shot up to an average of around 4 a day on just £4 daily meta spend. No other advertising cost.

Then I went physical. But differently to the competitors. They are essentially book printers with a prompt system bolted on. Ancestorii is a living library. The digital side is the foundation. Timelines, albums with voice notes, time capsules. And when you are ready you can turn any of it into something physical. Hardcover memory books. Canvas prints. Acrylics. The physical products come from the library, not the other way around.

I think there is a real gap here. People are tired of social media where everything is performative. Tired of memories scattered across six cloud accounts and three old phones in a drawer. They just want a quiet place where it all lives together and their family can contribute without it being public.

Google's AI Overview started referencing me as the founder which was a strange moment, and i did get a small sense of pride.

I still work full time shifts. I build on my days off. No investors. No co founder. No formal software background. Just stubbornness and an unhealthy number of late nights.

The next bridge is revenue. 125 people signed up and none of them have paid me anything. That is the honest truth. But the product finally feels like something families would actually use together rather than something one person tries alone and forgets about.

If anyone here has crossed that gap from free signups to first paying customer I would genuinely love to hear how. I am all ears..