Mindset Share real numbers; honesty earns trust and feedback
Makes sure your email lands in the inbox
Valentin will tell you Dr. Ursula has about 50 paying users on top of roughly 620 free ones, the exact ratio most founders hide. Sharing real numbers, including the ones that are not impressive yet, earns a kind of trust and a quality of feedback that polished vanity metrics never will. People can only help you with the real situation, and an audience that watches you build honestly becomes the audience that roots for you. Round numbers up in your head, not on the slide.
Related advice
Valentin Bora Translate an invisible technical problem into plain English
doesmyemail.work could have reported "SPF: softfail, DKIM: none" like every other tool and helped no one. Instead it says "does your domain say yes, I sent this." Turning opaque jargon into a sentence a non-expert understands is not decoration, it is the product, because the user's real problem is that they cannot tell what is wrong. When your tool surfaces a technical diagnosis, spend the effort to say it in the user's language. The translation is often worth more than the diagnosis itself.
Valentin Bora For a free tool, the answer screen is the whole product
A free, no-signup tool has exactly one moment that matters: the screen where the user gets their result. Everything before it is setup and everything after it is upsell, but that one screen is where the user decides whether the tool was worth their time. For doesmyemail.work, the diagnosis screen is the product. Pour disproportionate care into that single moment (speed, clarity, zero friction) because a lead magnet that fumbles its activation screen never gets to the lead part.
Valentin Bora Never make a mobile user switch apps and come back
doesmyemail.work asked mobile users to copy an address, switch to their mail app, paste, and send, and that hand-off is exactly where people abandoned the flow. The fix was a single mailto link that pre-fills everything, turning four steps into one tap. Every time you ask a user to leave your app, do something elsewhere, and return, you are betting they make it back, and on mobile many do not. Collapse cross-app hand-offs into one action wherever you can. The smoothest flow is the one that never leaves the screen.
Valentin Bora Reuse one top-of-funnel playbook across products
Valentin runs the same move twice: a free diagnostic tool fronts a business email product, and free short-form video fronts a consumer psychology app. Both start with something genuinely useful and free that earns attention, then attach the paid layer behind it. A distribution playbook that works is not single-use; once you have one that reliably earns attention, it transfers across very different products. Find your repeatable top-of-funnel motion, then apply it again instead of reinventing distribution for every launch.
Extracted from
doesmyemail.work: A Free Tool as the Top of the Funnel