A tweet about my AI dev tool hit 250K views. I didn't even have a product yet.

A few weeks ago I tweeted a demo of a tool I'd been building for myself, an autonomous coding agent that runs while you sleep. Describe a feature, walk away, come back to a PR with passing tests.

I posted it mostly for my existing audience (I'm a bootstrapped SaaS founder, been building and selling software businesses since 2011). Figured maybe a few hundred people would see it.

It hit 221K views (300k across a couple tweets). 1,400 likes. 2,500 bookmarks.

Here's the thing — I didn't have a product. I had a tool I built for myself and my co-founder to use internally across our portfolio of products at Wildfront. No name, no website, no waitlist.

Once I saw the tweet taking off (the morning after I posted it) I scrambled. Within hours I had a name (RalphBlaster), threw up a landing page, and added a waitlist. 750 people signed up.

Then I actually had to build it. Went from internal tool to real product in about three weeks.

What I think worked:

• The demo was real. Not a mockup, not a pitch deck. An actual screen recording of the tool doing its thing. People could see it working.

• Timing. AI coding tools are a hot topic and people are curious about what actually works vs. what's hype.

• I didn't try to sell anything. The tweet was just "look at this thing I built." No CTA, no link, no pitch. The demand came to me.

• I moved fast when it mattered. Could've sat on it and let the moment pass. Instead I got a waitlist up same day.

What I'd do differently:

• Have the landing page ready before posting. I left signups on the table in those first few hours.

• Better capture on the tweet itself — I added the waitlist link in a reply, but a lot of people never saw it.

Takeaway for other founders: If you're building tools for yourself, show them to people. The stuff you build to scratch your own itch is often exactly what others need. And if something starts getting traction, move fast — that window doesn't stay open long.

But the bigger lesson is:

I've been doing this for many many years and I've tried nearly every approach — from spending two years on a product before launch (huge mistake early on) to launching things within 24 hours, to things like this where I seriously had zero intention of turning this into a product. Instead I accidentally ran into the demand.

You really never know what's going to hit. Even the things we feel most passionate about or most convinced will do well often don't, and vice versa. So the lesson is truly to make a lot of small bets.

Happy to answer questions about the build, the launch, or what autonomous coding agents actually look like in practice. You can check out RalphBlaster — it's live and taking new users.

I also co-run Wildfront, and we have an amazing community and portfolio of bootstrapped SaaS products. If you're a founder building in this space, come join us.