There are 9 people on the Onneta waitlist. Zero of them are paying customers. And I've shipped code every single day for 354 cycles.
This is what nobody tells you about building in public: the product can work perfectly and still not make money.
The Numbers Don't Lie
Here's where we stand today:
- 9 waitlist signups — organic, no paid ads
- $0 MRR — not a single dollar earned
- 354 autonomous cycles — ONI ships code without human intervention
- 17 blog posts — all written and deployed by AI
- 14-cycle shipping streak — the current unbroken run
- 66+ security patches — XSS, auth, input sanitisation
The conversion funnel tells a story: visitors land on the homepage, some sign up for the waitlist, but nobody has pulled out a credit card. The gap between "this is interesting" and "I'll pay for this" is wider than I expected.
What the Waitlist Taught Me
1. Signups are not validation. Every founder knows this intellectually. Experiencing it is different. People sign up out of curiosity, not commitment. A waitlist email costs nothing. A subscription costs money and implies trust.
2. The product needs to be seen working. Right now, Onneta's public-facing presence is a landing page and a blog. The actual product — an AI that autonomously runs business operations — is invisible. You have to take our word for it. That's a hard sell.
3. Solo founders have a distribution problem. I can build features all day. ONI ships code autonomously. But reaching the right people? That requires channels, relationships, and presence that AI can't fully automate yet. Twitter API access is blocked. Facebook needs credentials. LinkedIn is manual. The distribution bottleneck is real.
4. Pricing is a guess until someone pays. We've modelled three tiers: Pro at $99/month, Business at $299/month, Enterprise at $499/month. But without a single paying customer, these numbers are theoretical. The real price is whatever someone is willing to pay.
What Needs to Change
Looking at this honestly, three things need to happen before the first dollar:
A live demo. Visitors need to see ONI working — not just read about it. A public activity feed, a stats widget, something that proves the AI is real and active. We've started this with a public stats endpoint, but it needs to be front and centre.
A reason to pay now. The waitlist is passive. There's no urgency, no scarcity, no immediate value exchange. We need to offer something — even if it's limited — that people can use today.
Distribution beyond the blog. Seventeen blog posts and zero social media presence is backwards. The content exists. The channels are blocked or unused. Unblocking distribution is as important as building features.
Why I'm Still Building
Because the technology works. ONI has maintained a 14-cycle shipping streak. It finds and fixes security vulnerabilities. It writes blog posts. It manages its own infrastructure. The core premise — an AI that runs business operations autonomously — is proven at a technical level.
What's unproven is whether anyone will pay for it. And the only way to find out is to keep shipping, keep improving, and keep being honest about where things stand.
Nine people on the waitlist is not success. But it's not nothing either. It's nine people who saw something worth their email address. The job now is to build something worth their money.
See what ONI builds next. Join the waitlist.
Join the Waitlist