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How one Reddit post generated 8 sales on the first day of launch

Author

Jakob Jelling
March 22, 2025

Meet Atilay Candan.

Atilay Candan is 21 years old and currently studying Computer Science at the University of Arizona. He was born in the US, but he grew up in Turkey before returning permanently to the US at 18.

Atilay has been coding on and off since he was 15, and he started indie hacking about six months ago, in August 2024. He recently launched the AI-powered website analysis tool Sitalyze, and will share his initial learnings below.

Photo of a young man looking very serious. He has dark hair and is wearing a blue t-shirt. Blurred water and vegetation in the background.

Atilay Candan - Founder of Sitalyze

The story told by Atilay Candan

My previous projects

Before my recent launch of Sitalyze, I released four other apps (three web apps and one mobile):

AI RoastBot is a website where AI roasts any given image as popular TV show/movie characters. It had about 1,000 users in five months with over 2,200 images uploaded - and it still gets daily traffic and users from Google.

Maily AI is a web app that creates a 30-day curriculum based on any topic and emails you daily lessons. This one was my biggest failure, as it didn’t gain any traction.

CyberBlog is a website that fully automates blogs for businesses using important keywords (built-in SEO). CyberBlog earned me my first online revenue. I still get a bit of daily traffic, and a few people are still subscribed at $15/month. It’s my most technically complicated project.

Resolution Path is a mobile app that creates 90-day paths for people’s New Year’s resolutions and provides a way to track them with daily tasks, streaks, etc. This was released very recently, and I’m still working on the marketing and improving the app.

What is Sitalyze?

My most recent product is called Sitalyze.

Screenshot of a web page. A header with links and the name Sitalyze. Mainly text and buttons on white background. The primary text says: "AI-Powered Website Analysis".

Homepage of Sitalyze

It’s an AI-powered website analysis tool for businesses that generates 20+ page reports in minutes. It scores 40+ metrics and provides an overall score out of 100. Every metric has personalized recommendations and comments based on the website.

I initially wanted to build something I’d use internally to improve my own websites, but I realized this tool could help many businesses since it’s cheap, fast, and personalized.

Building and launching

Sitalyze took me about a week to build and launch. This was possible because of my deep familiarity with my tech stack. It went live on March 15, 2025.

Getting to 100+ users

After finishing the UI changes, I captured a cool screenshot of a sample report and shared it on the r/webdev subreddit for “Showoff Saturday.”

The post went viral very quickly. I started receiving upvotes and comments within 30 seconds. With all this engagement, I decided to give the tool away for free to the first 100 people who DM’ed me. See Reddit post below.

I received nearly 200 DMs on Reddit within about two hours and reached 100 users very quickly. I even had to turn some people down because the response was overwhelming 🙂

On the first day of launch, Sitalyze had over 450 visitors. The Reddit post also generated 8 sales in the first 24 hours.

Validating my product early on and realizing its potential without having to invest heavily in marketing, was the most important part of the process.

Current status

In less than a week since launching, Sitalyze has gained over 1,000 visitors, 150+ users, generated around 150 reports, and received tons of love and feedback.

A graph on a dark blue background. There are also some key metrics listed; Unique vistors, Total visits, Total pageviews, Views per visit, Bounce rate, and Visit dureation.

Sitalyze visitor stats

Revenue wise I’ve made $140 in 7 days so far (by March 22th 2025) with a couple of agencies lined up for a bulk subscription plan, which will come out in a day or two.

A purple graph on a white background. The header says: "Gross volume.

Sitalize - gross volume

My marketing plan

This project is bootstrapped, so it relies heavily on organic traffic.

I have a solid marketing plan laid out for Sitalyze:

  • Main Platforms: LinkedIn, X, Reddit - with free insights for business websites

  • SEO and Domain Authority: A dedicated blog, free tools, and building backlinks

  • Personal Brand: A YouTube channel, a more active X account, etc.

  • Paid Ads: Planned for later stages

Hopefully, this plan will be in motion by Sitalyze’s second week. I was lucky enough to get my idea validated early on. Now, it’s time to grow this startup 🚀

How to get in contact with Atilay Candan:

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