Built a free WordPress menu plugin. Zero installs. What am I missing?

Hi everyone 👋

I'm a solo dev and I've spent the last year building a WordPress navigation plugin. It's live, it's free, and almost nobody is using it — so I'm here partly to show it off and partly to ask for advice.

What it does: build fully custom navigation menus — mega menus, WooCommerce cart, mobile modes, per-item visibility rules — and drop them anywhere via a native Gutenberg block or a shortcode. No pro tier, no upsells, nothing locked.

The part I'm happiest with: a themes panel with 50 ready-made designs split into 10 style categories (Dark, Minimal, Vibrant, Retro, Glass…). You filter by category with chip buttons and apply any theme in one click.

The part I haven't cracked: distribution. It's live on WordPress.org but sits at near-zero installs, and I'm stuck in the classic cold-start loop — no installs means no search ranking, no ranking means no installs.

So, two honest questions for this community:

• If you've launched a dev tool or plugin: what actually moved the needle in the first few months?

• Does "completely free, no upsells" make people trust a product more — or less?

Plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/giuliomax-menu-builder/