I had built a product with a couple of beta customers (known friends and family) after realizing it would be "nice" to check if a given link was malicious before clicking on it.
Soon enough, it became clear it was burdensome to copy a link and paste it somewhere else to verify it. Ideally, this check would happen at the platform level (even OS on things like iOS/Android), so I pivoted.
After believing there was some interest online in other communities, and investigating competitors, eventually I ended up with a product which works well for analyzing malicious links, emails, messages, and images. It has a really simple API, no-subscription pricing (you buy a bunch of credits and use them until you run out and top it off again), and I don't even have accounts or store emails. I also built a bunch of simple SDKs for Python, JavaScript, Go, and CLI.
But no one wants it.
Big platforms are invested in much larger competitors (which also do "is this AI?" checks), and smaller platforms don't really have a content moderation problem until they become bigger.
Was this a bad bet? Is there really no interest for this, or am I just not finding the right people or the right way to communicate what problem this solves?
I don't want to share the link here to avoid people thinking I'm just trying to get visits. I'm genuinely trying to understand if this is a problem or not, to either drop it, or invest more time in it.
Thank you so much for your time!