No Signal for Choosing an Audience That Will Actually Pay — Founders Build for Broke Users, Then Blame 'Marketing' for $0 MRR

Summary

Solo founders and indie hackers repeatedly build for audiences with zero disposable income (other broke makers, indie musicians, job seekers) and then misdiagnose the failure as a 'marketing' or traffic problem, keeping them stuck at $0 MRR for months or years. The blunt evidence: a reviewer who roasted 30+ micro-SaaS products on r/micro_saas found the same fatal pattern again and again — 'Picking an audience with zero disposable income... Broke people stay broke. Check your ICP's bank account before you check their pain points,' and 'nobody's landing page said here's the $30k/year companies are actively bleeding without this.' Another founder built 8 products over 3 years and only the two that made money 'solved a problem people were already paying to solve badly... existing spend on the problem was the whole signal.' Critically, this is treated as a fundamental, unsolved GTM gap: founders have no system to evaluate whether a chosen ICP actually has budget and willingness to pay BEFORE they build, so they burn weeks/months shipping for the wrong people. Existing tools offer analytics, launch checklists and 'talk to users' platitudes — none force a willingness-to-pay/ICP test as the first GTM bet. This is distinct from general launch or feedback-loop pains because the failure happens upstream of marketing, in the choice of who to sell to.