Building in public is harder than I expected
When I first released Franklin Prompt Studio, I thought the hardest part would be building the product.
I was wrong.
Building was actually the easy part.
The real challenge has been distribution.
Over the last few weeks I’ve been trying everything:
Posting on Twitter daily
Writing on LinkedIn
Launching on Hacker News
Sharing updates here on Indie Hackers
Improving the landing page
Tracking metrics with a small marketing engine I’m building
The reality so far:
• Low impressions
• Few followers
• No sales yet
And honestly… it can feel discouraging.
But I'm starting to understand something important:
This stage is about learning distribution, not winning yet.
Right now I'm focusing on:
Talking to more founders
Posting consistently every day
Improving the product little by little
Tracking what content actually brings visitors
My goal isn't overnight success.
My goal is to learn the process of turning ideas into products people actually find and use.
If you’ve launched something before:
What was the moment when things finally started to click for you?
The distribution struggle is real — and the patience to keep going before the signal appears is genuinely hard.
One thing that helped me: separate "acquisition" problems from "retention" problems. When you're early, most of the focus goes to getting users in the door. But once you start getting paying customers, a second silent problem starts: involuntary churn from payment failures.
Cards expire. Banks decline. Customers lose access without ever deciding to leave. If you're not sending recovery emails when a payment fails, those early hard-won users just quietly disappear.
It's a small thing to set up compared to distribution, and the ROI is immediate — you're recapturing customers you already did the hard work to acquire.
Distribution gets them in. Recovery emails keep them there. Both matter.
Just joined IH, and your post is the first one I've read. I can relate a lot to what you're saying. I come from Framer templates, so the Framer marketplace did a lot of the heavy lifting for me.
I personally love building and developing, but marketing is really hard. I've tried build in public on Twitter without much success. I can't really answer your last question yet, since my current project is my first proper one that I will launch. But im curious, what's Franklin Prompt Studio?
Just saw this — welcome to IH!
I can definitely relate to the marketing side being harder than the building. I'm a builder first too, and learning distribution has been a completely different skill set.
My current project is Franklin Prompt Studio. The idea came from running into the same problem over and over when using AI: you ask a question, get a long answer, but it’s hard to tell if the answer is actually good, complete, or missing something important.
So the tool is designed to help with decision-quality prompts. It helps you:
• structure a problem or decision
• generate a stronger prompt automatically
• analyze the AI response
• score the clarity and risk of the answer
The goal is basically:
turn AI answers into something closer to decision support instead of just text.
Right now I’m still in the early launch phase and learning the whole marketing/distribution side of things. IH has been a good place to learn how other founders approach that.
Curious about your Framer templates though — were you selling them on the marketplace or using them for your own projects?