From 0 to 60+ Users in 15 Countries With Zero Ad Spend
April 17, 2026 · Dominik Sikora
Typeform charges $708/year for the features I needed. ScoreApp starts at $588/year. I was tired of paying for tools that did too much of what I did not need and too little of what I did. So I built FluoTest in 3 days and launched with zero budget. Two months later: 65+ users in 15 countries, zero ad spend, and one user in Indonesia running paid Instagram ads to their FluoTest quiz.
The Distribution Strategy
I deliberately copied Calendly's early model. Calendly grew largely because every meeting invite said "Powered by Calendly" with a link back to their site. Every embed, every shared link was free advertising. I built the same mechanic into FluoTest from day one.
Every quiz has a "Powered by FluoTest" badge at the bottom. Every embed generates a backlink. Users share their quizzes — often publicly, sometimes with paid traffic — and FluoTest gets organic exposure it never paid for. No ads, no cold outreach, no content marketing team.
What Actually Worked
ChatGPT started recommending FluoTest organically for queries like "free ScoreApp alternatives" and "score-based quiz tool". I did not engineer this — it happened because the product exists and is indexed.
Users arrived from countries I never marketed in: Indonesia, Philippines, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Colombia. The badge virality was real. One user in Indonesia is running paid Instagram ads to their FluoTest quiz, which means they are paying to advertise FluoTest for free.
The 15-country reach came from zero outreach. The tool just spread.
The Unexpected Use Cases
I built FluoTest for lead qualification. That is what I needed. But users built something different.
A physiotherapist in Poland built a shoulder injury assessment quiz. A veterinarian in the UK built a dog joint disease diagnostic. A workplace safety consultant in South Africa built a compliance readiness checker. A media literacy educator in Colombia built a fake news detector. A startup advisor in the Netherlands built a fundability scanner.
Score-based decision making turns out to be a bigger category than lead qualification. The underlying mechanic — answer questions, get a score, see a result — applies anywhere people need to assess a situation and route themselves to the right outcome.
Activation Lessons
The first version had roughly 10% activation: people signed up and never created a quiz. I shipped three things to fix this: a promotion modal that appears when you first publish, a promotion checklist showing exactly how to share the quiz, and a zero-submissions nudge email sent 48 hours after publishing.
Activation went from 10% to 65%. The nudge email was the thing that actually worked. People genuinely forgot they had built something. A single email with the direct link to their quiz and one sentence saying "you haven't had any submissions yet — here's how to share it" got them back.
The checklist helped users who were unsure where to share. The modal helped users who needed a nudge immediately after publishing. But the email reached the ones who had already drifted.
What Is Next
Product Hunt launch in May 2026. WebSummit Lisbon in November 2026.
The goal is simple: keep building in public, keep the product free for the core use case, and let the badge do the distribution work.
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