TL;DR: Spent a year building a platform. No native AI integration. Is anything without AI in it going to be ignored even if it makes no sense to put AI in it and increase operational and ownership costs?
I spent a year, yes you read that right, 12+ months behind perfecting a product to platform. It started last July,2025 when I grew tired of form builders and started creating my own. I used the tool as a SaaS for the next 2-3 months internally to create conditional, conversational forms on WordPress builds for clients. I didn't notice but i was sharing my chat data with chatgpt for training for other users while I was building the forms platform. I turned it off by January, 2026.
Eventually, two clients found it helpful and instead of selling it as a tool, I used to package the pricing into my service deliverables, creating the forms on their behalf too.
Fast forward to November, 2025, I picked up a domain and started turning it into a platform with a full-fledged builder to turn the forms into custom pages with user roles and restrictions. The whole build took a longer duration (coupled with my depression and anxiety attacks) than I had anticipated. Technically, I spent about 2 months actually building it, while the rest of the time I spent overthinking in my head and being anxious about it, since I work alone without any external help or support of any kind.
A few months down the line, by December '25-February '26, I found a dozen more SaaS had come out as being form builders and all seemed to be getting users. I hoped my offering of the platform would be a better stance and I could maybe get some free users for feedback and validation.
I finally put the site on Google this July, 2026. Since then, all I have are viewers to my blog pages which i have shared on some SM platforms. Besides that, it's just crickets. No sign ups, no intent either.
For comparison, I put up a landing page with the same content and context but without any actual product, just added AI in the landing page a few times. It got 27+ signups from verified emails without any marketing.
My current SaaS platform doesn't have any AI abilities yet. I have it built but i don't have the resources to spend money on testing the AI workflow generator. I was hoping for some users to atleast try the platform, so I could start spending money on AI solutions for it.
Do you think I am cooked launching a SaaS without any AI functionality in it? Or, should I just market like others with fake AI intents in the copy to get users to sign up?