I have 8 users and Google Gemini is my Marketing Manager. Week 1 Reality.

Hey Dev.to! 👋

I’m a developer, not a marketer. To be honest, I have no clue what I’m doing when it comes to selling software.

So, last Monday, when I decided to pull the trigger and release the public beta of my new tool (NeoShiftBI), I decided to hire the only marketing manager I could afford: Google Gemini.

I’ve been following its daily posting plans for LinkedIn, Twitter, and TikTok blindly.

The Week 1 Results:

Signups: 8 (mostly from spamming my friends on WhatsApp groups 😅).

Marketing Strategy: "Do what the AI says."

Current Status: Gemini told me to write a #watercooler post on Dev.to today to "build community," so here I am.

Why I actually built this (The Origin Story)

The previous company I worked at (an e-groceries platform) went under.

While we were alive, one of our biggest pain point was data fragmentation. We had our app data in MongoDB, our Warehouse management system used PostgreSQL, and financial projections in Excel/Google Sheets.

Although we had a data team, the requests always fell on us (the tech team) to build fragile ETL pipelines just to get a simple visualization for investors. It cluttered our backlog and killed our velocity.

Now that I have a lot more free time, I decided to fix it.

What I built:

I built NeoShiftBI to automate that "Tech Team" bottleneck. (I actually wrote a technical deep-dive yesterday on how the MongoDB schema inference engine works here, but the short version is below).

It connects to NoSQL/SQL/Sheets: No ETL required.

AI Schema Detection: It scans the data and understands the relationships automatically (no manual joins).

Text-to-SQL: You describe the chart you want ("Show me AOV by city") and the AI writes the query.

The Current Struggles:

Marketing: Clearly, 8 users isn't "Viral," but it's a start.

Payments (The Pivot): I was trying to get approved by Paddle, but they just rejected me because I don't have "transaction history." (The classic chicken-and-egg problem for new SaaS). So, today I am pivoting and applying to Lemon Squeezy instead. Wish me luck with their compliance team! 🍋

I’m giving out free upgrades to the Basic Plan for the beta cohort if anyone wants to roast my onboarding flow.

Link: https://bi.neoshift.ai/#/register

Beta Invite Code: BETA-C6423CDB

Wish me luck (and hopefully Lemon Squeezy approves me soon).