Dan Willoughby deliberately did the opposite of his earlier failed-product pattern. Instead of building first and marketing later, he picked a problem he had seen at three jobs: Slack support channels get noisy, and nobody is sure who should respond. Then he made a landing page for Tellspin before the product existed.

The landing page had an Add to Slack button, but the button only threw an error. For months, Tellspin sat mostly untouched while Dan worked on another idea. The only public exposure was an Indie Hackers post asking for landing-page feedback.

Validation arrived because users pushed through the friction. On December 7, 2020, Rob emailed Dan saying he was excited to try Tellspin but the Slack install failed. Dan knew the real reason: the app did not exist. Because he had built similar internal tools before, he made a crude MVP in about five hours, told Rob the issue was fixed, and immediately started receiving product feedback. A week later, a second interested user found him through the support email for one of his old projects. Two people had gone out of their way to contact him even though Tellspin had no obvious contact path.

That was enough signal to keep going. Over the next year Dan built around actual support emails and feature requests rather than guesses. He counted 410 emails with users. In September 2021, a Slack feature plus price changes and a stronger landing page added roughly $600 MRR in a month, pushing Tellspin over $1,000 MRR. On December 1, 2021, it crossed $2,000 MRR. At the one-year mark he reported $2,033.13 MRR and 100 customers.

Tellspin's lesson is unusually practical: validation does not have to be a polished survey or waitlist. A user willing to debug a broken install button and hunt down your email is a stronger signal than a casual upvote. Dan turned that signal into a SaaS by staying close to the tiny group of users who already proved the pain was real.