I launched the first version of Escourtly on February 6th, 2026, and by March it was already cooked.
Not "needs more time" cooked. Not "pivot and iterate" cooked. Fully, completely, beautifully cooked, zero users, zero revenue, zero social media interactions, the kind of silence that makes you genuinely check if your internet is working.
It wasn't my internet.
I wasn't ready, and I mean that in every direction you can think of. I'd never built a real SaaS from scratch before, and while I knew I could, what I didn't understand was that building a product and actually running a SaaS are two completely different jobs, and I only showed up prepared for one of them.
So I burned out, ran out of money, and spent weeks posting into a void that had no interest in posting back. If you've ever shared something you were genuinely proud of and watched it get zero engagement, you already know the specific kind of quiet that comes after; now imagine that stretched across five months. It was a lot.
Here's the thing nobody tells you about failing at a startup: the idea itself might not even be the problem. Sometimes you built the right thing for the completely wrong person, and that's exactly what happened with v1.
Escourtly v1 was an "add interactive product guides to your website" tool, and conceptually, it wasn't bad; help users understand your product while they're already inside it, embedded walkthroughs, step-by-step guides, the whole thing. The problem was my target audience: solo founders, indie hackers, small startups. These people spend weeks making their UI as simple as possible so their users never get confused in the first place, which means they have absolutely no use for a tool that helps confused users find their way around.
I was selling umbrellas in the desert; technically a great umbrella, completely useless to everyone within walking distance.
v1 is done, rolled up, filed under "learning experience," never to be spoken of again (except in this post, apparently).
So let me tell you about v2.
Re-introducing Escourtly: the easiest way to show your product to someone before they sign up.
Here's the problem it solves, and I'll keep it honest. You've built something that works and is genuinely good, but getting a stranger to believe that requires either making them sign up and hope they stick around long enough to see the value, or jumping on a call, sharing your screen, and doing the whole "let me walk you through it" performance. Nobody wants option (b), you don't want to, and they really don't want to.
So instead, you record yourself clicking through your actual product, not a slide deck or a screen recording they passively watch, and you get a shareable link. Your prospect clicks it, interacts with your product like it's real, and understands what you've built without creating an account or downloading anything. Then you paste that link in a tweet, a cold DM, an email, whatever feels right, and you go do something else while they go through it at their own pace.
That's it; that's Escourtly.
Am I ready to run this one properly? Honestly, I still don't fully know, but what I do know, which I didn't know in February, is exactly what I'm building and exactly who I'm building it for. Last time I had a tool that was searching for a customer; this time I have a real problem and I built the thing that fixes it.
If I could go back to February with everything I know now, I would skip v1 entirely and build this version instead, because this is the tool I actually needed as a founder trying to get strangers to take my product seriously. Five months, a lot of silence, and at least three genuine "what am I even doing" moments later, Escourtly is back, and this time I came prepared.
Try it at escourtly.com. If you record your first demo and something breaks, just tell me; I am very much still figuring this out, and I'd genuinely love to hear from you.
