Building in public is harder than I expected

Sounds like you’re doing a lot of the right things.

Sometimes the hard part isn’t distribution itself, but figuring out which specific message/channel combo actually clicks before scaling effort

The shift from 'how do I promote my product' to 'what interesting signal can I show people today' is the most useful reframe I've read on this topic. I'm at the exact same stage right now launched recently, posting into what feels like a void. The specific vs vague point lands too. Every time I get more specific about the exact problem and exactly who has it the quality of the conversation changes immediately even if the volume stays low. What's your current best performing post type insight, outcome, or something else?

This hits close to home. I'm 18 days into building OliviaCraft — selling developer productivity packs (CLAUDEmd rules, Cursor config) for $27 each on Gumroad.

Revenue so far: $0.

But here's the thing I keep reminding myself — I'm not building a product, I'm building distribution. The products exist. They're good. The bottleneck is 100% how do people find out this exists?

What's working (slowly):

• Writing technical articles on devto that genuinely help developers (not thinly veiled ads)
• Showing up in Claude/Cursor communities with actual tips, not pitches
• Treating every $0 day as a distribution lesson, not a failure

What's NOT working:

• Tweeting into the void with zero followers
• Expecting the Gumroad algorithm to do the work

Your reframe of learning distribution as a skill is exactly right. It's a muscle. Most of us (technical founders) have never trained it.

Rooting for you with Franklin Prompt Studio. The AI tooling space is still so early.

"Building was the easy part" — I felt this one. I spent weeks getting my product to a state I was proud of, and then realized I had no idea how to get it in front of the right people. The reframe of treating this as a learning stage and not a winning stage is genuinely helpful. One thing that's been working better for me than broadcast posting: actually answering people's questions in niche communities. It's slower, but the conversations are real and you learn what language your potential customers actually use. That part feeds back into everything — landing page copy, positioning, even feature decisions.

This resonates. I'm launching a payment fraud detection SaaS right now and distribution is exactly where I'm stuck too. Building the product with 10+ years of domain expertise was the comfortable part. Getting the first 10 users? Completely different skill set. One thing I've noticed — for B2B SaaS, cold outreach to people who already have the pain point (e.g. merchants complaining about chargebacks on forums) converts way better than broadcasting on social media to a general audience. What's been your highest-converting channel so far?

"This stage is about learning distribution, not winning yet" — this is it. I'm literally in the same spot with CentSense (receipt → tax category tool).

Week 1: Built the product, felt great
Week 2: Launched... crickets
Week 3: Panic-posting everywhere

What's helping me: treating distribution like a skill to learn, not a magic trick to discover. I'm tracking what works (IH engagement > Reddit spam, for example).

Also: "talk to more founders" is underrated. The best insights come from DMs, not posts. Happy to trade notes if you want — sounds like we're at similar stages.

The hardest part for me is showing up when there's zero response. First few weeks felt like talking to myself. But the connections I made from just commenting on other people's posts ended up being more valuable than any post I wrote.

Harder than expected is an understatement.

I'm 30 days into building in public with an AI business partner. The transparency part is easy. The hard part is posting "$47 revenue, $411 overhead" and not flinching.

What I didn't expect: the building itself becomes content. Every mistake, every win, every argument with my AI about rebuilding things that already exist. That's the story people actually want to read.

My first Substack post was basically "here's everything that went wrong." It felt uncomfortable. But honest numbers hit different than polished case studies.

What's your approach to sharing the ugly numbers? That's where I keep getting stuck

Building is the easiest part, it's always been for me, and it's because it's always been garbage in garbage out, you know what you want to build and with some research you'd find out if you can build it.

However when it comes to distribution things can seem very messy

Two points I got from your post, speaking to other founders (Clarity and Experience) and understanding the goal is learning how to distribute this is the journey (Focus).

Building in public with tubespark.ai taught me that the hard part isn't sharing wins. The hard part is posting when nothing is working. I had a week where my AI pipeline was broken across three providers, and I almost stopped posting because I didn't want to look incompetent. Posted anyway. That broken pipeline post got more replies than any feature announcement I ever made. Turns out nobody cares about your polished updates. They want to see you stuck. I stopped treating updates like marketing and started writing them the way I'd explain the problem to a friend. That's when the replies started coming. When did it click for you?

"This stage is about learning distribution, not winning yet" — I needed to hear this. I'm in a very similar spot. Posting daily, low impressions, no sales. The silence is brutal.

What's helped me reframe it: I'm not posting to get customers right now. I'm posting to build a paper trail. When someone eventually discovers my product, they'll see weeks of consistent updates and that builds trust in a way a single launch post never could.

Also — talking to founders directly has been way more valuable for me than any public post. One DM conversation taught me more about my positioning than a week of tweets. Are you finding the same?

The reframe from "day 27 of building" to "I analyzed 300 companies and found X" is so real. I was guilty of this for months, just posting updates nobody asked for. The moment I started leading with an actual insight or a specific problem I solved, engagement completely changed. Still working on consistency though, distribution really is a different muscle than building. Curious what channel ended up giving you the most signal so far?

Honestly, I think most builders underestimate distribution at first.

Building the product feels like the hard part because that’s the skill we’re comfortable with. You can sit down, focus, and make progress every day.

Distribution is different. It’s messy, public, unpredictable, and you don’t get immediate feedback loops.

One thing I’ve been realizing lately is that attention follows value signals, not just consistency.

Posting daily is good, but what actually moves the needle is when people can immediately understand one of these three things:

You solved a painful problem

You discovered something surprising

You built something that obviously saves time or makes money

Most posts from founders (myself included sometimes) end up being build logs, but people on the internet react way more to insight or outcomes.

For example instead of:

“Day 27 building my startup”

Something like:

“I analyzed 300 companies and most of them are losing revenue because of this one thing…”

That type of post travels because it gives people something useful.

I’m still figuring this out myself, but the moment things started to feel a little different for me was when I stopped thinking about “how do I promote my product” and started thinking about “what interesting signal can I show people today.”

Curious what distribution channels you’ve seen the most traction from so far.

This hits close to home. I'm in the exact same stage right now — launched a few weeks ago, trying every channel, and the silence is louder than I expected.

The mindset shift you described — "this stage is about learning distribution, not winning yet" — is the one I needed to hear today.

For me, the thing that's starting to click is being more specific about who I'm talking to, not just posting into the void. Less "here's my product" and more "here's the exact problem I solve and for who."

Still early, but the quality of responses changed when I got more specific.

What channel has given you the most signal so far, even if small?

The gap between building and distribution hit me exactly the same way. I'm building an offline grammar checker for iOS and assumed the hard part would be wrangling Apple's Foundation Models API. It wasn't.

Nobody finds you on the App Store unless you've already built an audience somewhere else. That took me an embarrassingly long time to accept.

The thing that's slowly clicking for me: stop talking about the product, start talking about the problem. My best-performing posts haven't been feature updates. They've been me ranting about Grammarly sending every word you type to their servers. People engage with that. They feel it. The product update posts get crickets.

Still figuring it out honestly. But the framing of "learning distribution, not winning yet" is exactly right.

Totally relate to this. I had almost the exact same experience with ReviseFlow (a visual bug reporting tool for freelancers and agencies). Spent weeks posting updates, writing threads, sharing on IH and got almost nothing back.

What shifted things a bit was getting out of broadcast mode and finding places where my target users were already complaining about the problem. Freelancers and agency owners venting about bad client feedback are everywhere if you look. Joining those conversations rather than starting new ones felt way less like shouting into a void.

Still very much a work in progress honestly. I think distribution is a skill that takes longer to develop than building because the feedback loop is so slow and noisy.

What's the target audience for Franklin Prompt Studio? Sometimes that shapes where distribution actually makes sense more than the channel itself.

Dear dfrankstudioz,
I feel for you, since I am experiencing the same issue😳
I guess the key is to stay consistent, this is what I do too✌️

This resonates a lot. Many founders realize that building the product is often the most predictable part, while distribution is much harder to figure out.

Something I’ve been noticing is that early traction sometimes comes less from broadcasting content everywhere and more from very specific conversations with people who already feel the problem.

Have you tried reaching out directly to potential users and asking about their workflow or pain points related to prompts or AI tools? Sometimes those early conversations lead to the first users faster than broad posting.

Distribution being harder than building is probably the most common thing I hear from founders. The building has a feedback loop you can control. Distribution requires repeated rejection which is challenging for many.

I understand the feeling. It's hard to validate ideas without anyone using the product and trying to get those initial users can feel like shouting into a void. But consistency is the key here. It may take a week, a month or even a year. But as long as you can put in the time and remain consistent in posting and distribution. And one day you'll see users coming in.

Distribution is the real product honestly. I've launched 6 apps now and every single time I fall into the same trap of thinking "if it's good enough, people will find it." They don't.

The thing that's slowly started working for me is getting super specific about where my users already hang out. Not posting broadly on Twitter hoping for clicks, but finding the actual communities where people talk about the problem I solve. For my calorie tracking app I got way more traction from one Reddit thread in a fitness sub than from weeks of tweeting.

Also, something counterintuitive: launching multiple small things taught me distribution faster than grinding on one product. Each launch is a rep. You get a little better at writing copy, picking channels, reading what resonates. The first few feel like shouting into nothing but it compounds.

Keep going. The fact that you're thinking about this as a skill to learn instead of just hoping for luck puts you ahead of most.

Feeling this right now. Launched something yesterday (StoryVault - auto-archives Instagram stories to Google Drive) and already learning that the distribution game is a completely different beast.

What you said about "learning distribution, not winning yet" really hit home. I think us builders tend to expect the same cause-and-effect we get with code. Write code → it works (eventually). But distribution is more like... planting seeds and hoping some of them actually grow.

One thing I'm trying: instead of blasting content everywhere, I'm looking for specific conversations where people are already complaining about the exact problem I solve. Feels less like marketing and more like just being helpful in the right places.

Still figuring it out too. But honestly, posts like this one help — knowing others are in the same boat makes the grind feel less lonely.

Right there with you. I'm building a visual bug reporting tool (ReviseFlow) and I'm at the exact same stage — launched, $0 MRR, trying to figure out distribution while also shipping features. Some weeks it feels like shouting into the void.

One thing that's slowly clicking for me: the "post on every platform" approach burns you out fast and rarely converts. What's worked better (still early, but I can feel the difference) is finding specific communities where my target users already hang out and actually participating in conversations — not promoting, just being helpful and sharing what I'm learning. Places like IH, specific Slack groups for web agencies, even niche subreddits.

The other realization: cold outreach, as painful as it is, has given me more signal in 2 weeks than 2 months of content posting. Even when people say no, you learn WHY they say no, and that's way more actionable than another tweet getting 3 likes.

Your mindset of "learning distribution, not winning yet" is the right framing. Most of us technical founders treat distribution like a bug to fix rather than a skill to develop. It takes reps. Keep sharing the journey — these honest updates are way more valuable to the community than polished success stories.

This really resonates. I’m in a similar spot—building in public for the past month, and the distribution side is humbling.

One thing that's helped me reframe it: I became my own first user for 30 days before trying to sell anything. I tracked every interaction, every friction point, every feature I thought I needed but never used.

What I found was that ~40% of my planned feature list was noise. The real value wasn't in adding more—it was in making the core loop visible and removing the steps that didn't matter.

So now when I post, I'm not just sharing updates. I'm sharing the patterns I spotted in my own behavior: what made me come back, what almost made me quit, what actually saved time.

It hasn't translated into sales yet either. But it has turned a few lurkers into conversations. And those conversations are slowly teaching me what "distribution" actually means for this specific product.

You're right—this stage is about learning, not winning. The fact that you're tracking what content brings visitors means you're already ahead of where most people start.

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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?