Why can't your target customers always find your product? - Experience sharing

The messaging point hits home. When I first started building tools, I described what the software did. Technical accuracy, feature lists, the works. Barely anyone cared.

What changed things was describing the situation before and after. Not "we automate X" but "you know that Friday afternoon feeling when numbers don't match and you can't figure out why? This makes that go away."

The weird thing is that specific frustrations actually land better than polished positioning. Messy, raw problems like "I keep forgetting to chase invoices" or "my books are always three weeks behind" get more head-nods than professional-sounding benefit statements.

I think developers (myself included) resist this because it feels less impressive to talk about mundane problems. But mundane is what people actually experience.

Here’s the uncomfortable take most people in that thread are dodging:

If your product needs a “one-click growth tool” to tell you where your users are, you are not doing growth. You are outsourcing thinking.

The three problems listed are real. The conclusion is lazy.

“Developers can’t market” is a comforting lie. The real issue is this: most founders would rather buy certainty than confront rejection. A dashboard feels safer than actually talking to users in places that can ignore you, mock you, or expose that your product is unclear.

A tool cannot tell you where your users hang out if you don’t already know who your users are.
A plan cannot fix messaging if you are afraid to commit to a narrow, opinionated positioning.
Metrics do not create memorability. Repetition and embarrassment do.

Professional marketers do not solve this with tools. They solve it with taste, judgment, and ruthless focus. Tools come after.

Selling “complete marketing plans” for $20 a month is not leverage. It’s telling developers exactly what they want to hear: that growth can be abstracted away without emotional discomfort.

Here’s the truth nobody markets:
If you are early stage, growth is not scalable, not clean, and not automatable.
It is manual outreach.
It is saying the same thing 100 times.
It is being ignored 90 times.
It is learning to sound stupid less often.

If a product truly solves a painful problem for a specific group, distribution looks less like strategy and more like persistence.

If it doesn’t, no plan fixes that.

The controversial part isn’t that tools like this exist.
It’s that founders keep buying them instead of doing the hard, identity-threatening work of becoming interesting to a very small group of people first.

You're hitting on something I haven't tried yet - I've been focused mostly
on inbound (SEO, content) and honestly just hoping people find us.

The "research, not marketing" framing is a perspective shift. PMHNPs are
definitely skeptical of anything that feels salesy - they get bombarded
by recruiters constantly.

I haven't done any direct 1-to-1 outreach to candidates. A few questions
if you don't mind:

1. Where would you even find PMHNPs to reach out to? LinkedIn feels
   saturated with recruiter spam.

2. What would that outreach look like without feeling like... well,
   another recruiter?

3. Have you seen this work for other niche job boards? Would love any
   examples to study.

Appreciate the insight - this might be the unlock I'm missing.

Great breakdown. The idea that “being findable is half product, half distribution” feels like a simple truth we often forget. Thanks for the insights!

agree with #1 especially. spent months posting content nobody saw until i shifted to showing up in conversations people were already having. youtube comments, relevant reddit threads, quora questions - the intent is already there, you just have to be helpful first.

the hard part is being consistent without being spammy. what i found works is treating it like actual research - you learn what language people use to describe problems, which helps with messaging too.

organic reddit and niche discords still work in 2026 but you have to earn it. drop value for weeks before you ever mention your thing. conversion rate is way higher when people already saw you being useful.

Early on, I underestimated how much positioning matters. People didn’t “not want” the product — they just didn’t immediately understand who it was for and why now.

Once we simplified the story and focused on one clear use-case instead of many, discovery improved even before we changed channels.

I agree with the first two points a lot, especially the messaging part.
In my experience, even when you are showing up in the right places, people still miss the product because the wording doesn’t match how they describe the problem in their own head.

One thing I’ve personally struggled with is assuming users understand the context as well as I do.
What feels “obvious” to the builder often isn’t obvious at all to someone skimming a feed for 3 seconds.

On memorability, I’d add that consistency matters more than reach.
Seeing the same problem framed the same way a few times tends to stick more than one big launch spike.

Curious — when you worked with indie products, which of the three was usually the hardest to fix in practice?

This resonates. As a developer, figuring out where users actually are has been much harder for me than building the product itself.

I like the website a lot - and absolutely right that coders and developers are a different mindset. The phrase "Build it and they will come" is the financial graveyard of many start ups and infrastructure projects because unless you know marketing as well as coding, very often, people just don't show up. The AI analysis of the website was very quick but left out some key products and features of my admittedly not easy to navigate platform. I would like to be able to add urls from the same website for different products. At the moment, it's just picking up from the homepage submission which only captures 10%.

I like how you broke this down, especially the distinction between discovery and memorability. That’s something I see founders underestimate a lot — showing up once in the right place isn’t enough if the message doesn’t stick.

One thing I’ve noticed is that when teams jump straight to tools before validating messaging, they often end up automating confusion. Once the “this is for me” moment is clear, even very simple outreach or content loops start compounding.

Curious how you’re thinking about helping users validate positioning before execution, especially for early-stage products.

Really insightful post. Regarding the point about 'Manual Outreach' for B2B niches: do you have any tips on how to transition that 1-1 conversation into a sale without feeling too 'salesy'? I find that many developers struggle with the bridge between 'researching the customer' and 'asking for the credit card.' Would love to hear your thoughts on that transition!

I agree with a lot of this, especially the point about messaging not matching how users actually think.
One thing I’ve run into a few times is founders focusing a lot on where to promote, but less on whether someone scrolling instantly recognizes “this is my problem”. Even if you’re technically in the right place, it’s easy to sound like you’re describing the product from the inside out.
I’ve seen better engagement when the language shifts away from features and toward very concrete moments or frustrations users already have. Stuff like “I don’t trust my numbers” or “I keep breaking my own rules” tends to land more than polished positioning.
So yeah, distribution matters, but I think being instantly understandable matters just as much.
Out of curiosity, how have you usually tested or validated messaging before pushing on distribution?

This is actually what I'm struggling with. I need high-intent users, as I think what I'm working on will naturally lead to high conversion, but how to attract those communities without SEO, where self promotion is typically hated? It feels like a Catch 22. Does this product solve for that?

You nailed the three reasons — especially #1.

I just started working with small SaaS founders on automation, and the biggest issue I see is exactly what you described: they're marketing on platforms they like (Twitter, PH), but their actual users are in niche Slack communities, industry-specific forums, or random subreddits.

The "memorability" part is brutal too. I've seen founders nail a single Product Hunt launch, get 50 upvotes, then... nothing. Because they showed up once and disappeared.

One thing I've been testing: instead of trying to "launch everywhere," pick ONE community where your users actually hang out, and just be genuinely helpful there for 2-3 weeks before ever mentioning your product. Feels slower, but the conversion rate is way higher.

Question: for founders with zero marketing budget, what's been the most effective free channel you've seen? I'm curious if organic Reddit or niche Discord communities still work in 2026.

You nailed the three reasons — especially #1.

I just launched a niche job board today (for psychiatric nurse practitioners). My target users aren't on X or Product Hunt — they're in nursing subreddits, Facebook groups, and LinkedIn.

But here's the tension: those communities hate self-promotion. So you can't just show up and drop links. You have to provide value first, build trust, then maybe mention your product when it's genuinely relevant.

The "memorability" point is real too. One launch post = forgotten tomorrow. Consistent presence = actually remembered.

Question: For niche B2B products where the audience is small but specific, what's been the most effective channel you've seen? Paid ads feel wasteful when the audience is <50K people total.

This resonates a lot, especially the part about showing up where users actually are.

One thing I’ve noticed while building SoloLaunches https://sololaunches.com is that many devs do have a decent product, but it’s invisible because it never gets early distribution in the right places. That’s why we focused on helping founders launch in communities, directories, and spaces where early adopters already hang out — not just blasting on X or hoping for organic discovery.

Similarly, with ListMy.site, we’ve seen how structured directory submissions + consistent visibility can help with both memorability and initial traction (even if SEO doesn’t kick in immediately).

Totally agree that this is easy for marketers but overwhelming for devs. Tools and workflows that turn “what should I do next?” into clear steps are really valuable at this stage.

Curious to see how Amplift evolves — early-stage founders definitely need more practical, execution-focused growth help like this.