Getting demand for your product
How I did it
Hey there! I’m Robert. Welcome to a free edition of my newsletter. Every week, I share my story of bootstrapping my AI startup focused on AI Personalization and Alignment. I’m documenting my journey building my AI startup in public to help others.These newsletters include my reflections on the journey, and topics such as entrepreneurship, startups, growth, leadership, communication, product, and more. Subscribe today to follow along.
Before Spanx was a billion-dollar brand, Sara Blakely was cutting the feet off pantyhose, using them successfully, then making prototypes and inviting friends over to try them on.
There was no launch plan,
no pitch deck,
just a real problem and a felt transformation.
The magic wasn’t the product.
It was the moment women looked in the mirror and said, “Oh… I needed this.”
That was the magic moment.
Word spread not because of marketing, but because trusted friends became proof.
Word of mouth marketing followed.
This is a great story that showcases a classic entrepreneurial lesson: find your true fans first.
Listen to them.
Create for them.
Listen to them more.
Iterate.
I read this story recently and it really resonated.
In the last week after I announced going full time to build Clarity, I got a few messages from people who signed up for the waitlist.
One person said: “Would love the app you created to help support goals.”
Another said: “I love everything about this. I signed up for the waitlist.”
Another said: “AI for human consciousness advancement. Rare. And I’m here for it.”
One was an Olympian. (highly validating for my ICP of high performers conscious about mental performance)
None of them asked for a deck.
None of them asked for pricing.
They asked when they could try it.
That’s demand.
And it reminded me of something simple: demand is created by understanding the problem so well that people feel seen the moment they hear you describe it.
So today’s newsletter is about how I did that for Clarity—getting my first users and figuring out my acquisition loop.
Let’s get into it.
Background
July 2025
The startup was struggling.
We were getting leads for our B2B Epistemic Me SDK (AI Personalization SDK) but we weren’t closing. People understood the problem of quantifying subjectivity in individual tastes and preferences, and the challenges around personalization.
Some even took interest in our differentiated neuroscientific approach grounded in real academic literature (such as work by Karl Friston and Michael Levin).
But none of the leads that we got on calls could see how to integrate the technology into their stack. They didn’t understand it.
Then it clicked.
Duh.
We needed an application built on our platform to demonstrate the strength of the platform.
The answer was staring at me in the face. Silly me.
How might we demonstrate our approach to solving personalization? What would make for a great demo?
I started brainstorming the problems I deal with daily in my own personal growth, which I figured would be a subjective use case with high emotional sensitivity.
My strategy was to intentionally dogfood as I build the product, and I wanted to use it for navigating some tough personal choices.
I wanted to solve my own personalization sensitive problem to improve my speed to market for a quality demo.
Using AI tools these days, rapid prototyping can get you going quickly if you know what you’re doing.
Clarity didn’t start with a market.
It started with me.
I built the first version to solve my own problems:
Personality tests felt static, while I was changing constantly.
Journaling was scattered across apps and notebooks.
Therapy helped, but the space between sessions felt empty.
AI tools felt powerful but untrustworthy with sensitive data.
I got to work.
Day 1 of Clarity
Features I had:
The name—Clarity always felt right
AI chat
Different philosophical lenses for the AI chat to respond in
Belief Deep Dive to examine your beliefs
Pretty generic UI
Unthoughtful UX
It was pretty trash but I forced myself to use it.
At this point, I was properly dogfooding as I was trying to use this to as a decision support for navigating some tough family choices. I had to thoughtfully reflect on what was helpful/not in real time.
Because I was using this multiple times a day for a real use case, the feedback loops were very quick.
Day 7 Clarity
By day 7, I came up with additional solutions very quickly to my very real needs.
The need to manage and update my belief systems.
The Belief Garden concept was born, as I loved the idea of tending to your most personal possessions, beliefs, as a gardener tends to their garden.
Beliefs are the curated fruit of your discernment of knowledge and truth, constantly changing. Most people have never seen their beliefs written down.
It was a magic moment for me, and I made it. 😂
The need to have AI reflect my values, so I know I’m not being biased by it.
The need to see the AI access my Belief Garden so I know it’s personalizing its answers to me.
Even though I know (because I built it), that the AI always accesses the user’s personal Belief Garden when formulating a response, I also found in using it myself that I wanted to actually see that visually.
And many more things.
Now I had a very solid product, that I my self was using every day. I was happy with it.
Picking a problem that I felt myself and dogfooding the solution, was the single most important decision here. It led to many other good decisions around the product later.
And now, it was polished enough to show to people for the next level of feedback.
Three Steps To Getting Initial Users (and hopefully True Fans)
1. Do Things That Don’t Scale
You always hear this advice. It’s because it’s good advice, by some of the best in the game.
So, I took it.
I did the least scalable thing possible.
I showed the product—person by person.
Friends. Colleagues. Acquaintances. Warm intros. Cold DMs.
Strangers who looked “close enough” to my profile: people at bookstores who I qualified on whether they were into mindfulness, performance, self-awareness, or personal growth.
There was no pitch deck. No landing page. No funnel.
Just the Clarity demo and a conversation.
This phase was slow. Time-consuming.
And it was everything.
Because demand doesn’t come from purely from reach.
It mostly comes from resonance.
2. Learn Intimately
Patterns began to repeat after the first ten conversations.
People used the same phrases and words.
I heard the same friction points.
I heard different narratives but with a throughline—the same struggle.
Here’s what I learned by listening closely:
People hate that personality tests freeze them in time. They would say it “puts them in a box”.
They want reflection, but were annoyed by having to go to the 10+ apps and notebooks they’ve journaled in throughout the years to trace the evolution of their thinking.
They want help between therapy sessions, not instead of them.
They wanted to see progress on the things that are hard to see progress on around personal growth. Were they really becoming their best self?
They are curious about AI—but deeply uneasy about who controls their data.
I added a Monthly Life Pillars Assessment feature.
I have traditionally done this myself with my own Google Form, but putting it into the product made sense to track progress on my becoming.
I created a Target Self Narrative feature
Your own personal best self’s story from your data.
None of this came from surveys.
It came from deep listening, eye contact, pauses in conversation, follow up questions, and qualitative research synthesis.
Then design thinking work, then design work, then building.
The product was getting more and more refined every day with this new stream of feedback.
From my high signal users,
I recorded phrases.
I wrote down metaphors.
I paid attention to what people emphasized without realizing it.
Then I iterated.
The validation started feeling real.
There’s something here.
3. Then, try to scale
Only after I understood the problem deeply did I think about demand at scale.
Since we’re intentionally bootstrapped, we’re really cash conscious. So no paid ads yet, just content. I treat content as hypotheses. How well did I reach and resonate with the ICP?
I created a few hypotheses.
I used the exact words people gave me.
Their fears. Their skepticism. Their struggles.
The problems they deal with day to day.
In addition, I made a single hero video that spoke directly to those pain points. That’s on heyclarity.me. That helps people send the waitlist to other people.
Things I did include:
Language from high signal users.
Things I did NOT include:
AI hype
Buzzwords
“This will change everything” type nonsense.
That’s it.
Then I shared it.
Then others shared it.
I didn’t push people to convert, I went and did unscalable work early to mine the hard earned secrets of the problem space. (And in the personal growth domain, I’ve done 9+ years of therapy and pursue self development relentlessly so that’s definitely unscalable work and in someways a moat for us 😂)
That’s how the original waitlist formed. We’re intentionally keeping a small closed beta at this stage.
We’re expanding it soon though, so add yourself to the waitlist here.
What’s even cooler?
Since we launched our closed beta for Clarity in August 2025, we’ve closed 500k+ in booked revenue for Clarity API, rebranded from Epistemic Me SDK, our B2B offering.
Our original hypothesis that building something like Clarity would help with our B2B GTM was proven true.
Prospects can see, touch, feel, and use Clarity to really understand our AI personalization approach.
Getting users wanting to use, pay for, and refer other users to Clarity made that original hypothesis more true. It was an unexpected outcome.
And… I have not begun to scratch the surface of figuring out the content marketing game!
So we’ll only get better from here.
Progress.
Gotta keep getting after it. 💪
I’ll keep sharing our build in public stories as I learn more on the journey.
Let me know what topics you are interested in hearing about! Email me directly, I’d love to hear from you (:
Note to readers:
I’ve shifted this newsletter to be on Sundays now, from our original Thursday schedule. I’m still playing around with the timing on Sunday but the day is locked in. You should expect to receive an issue of Self Aligned every Sunday to your inbox, to get the latest startup and entrepreneurship learnings as well my build in public updates.
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