Building was easy. Getting users is the hard part.
After months of building, I learned that getting users is 10x harder than building the product.
I built LeadRetain, a SaaS that helps businesses automatically follow up with leads who stop replying. I thought the biggest challenge would be coding.
I was wrong.
Building was the easy part.
Now I'm spending most of my time:
Posting on social media
Reaching out to potential users
Listing on directories
Creating videos
Improving SEO
Talking to founders and sales teams
One lesson I've learned: solving a real problem isn't enough. People also need to feel the pain urgently enough to change their current workflow.
For those who have already reached product-market fit:
What was the turning point?
Was it one marketing channel, one feature, one customer, or simply persistence?
I'd love to hear your experience. Every lesson helps.
"Solving a real problem isn't enough — people
need to feel the pain urgently enough to change
their current workflow" is the line that's
actually reframing how I think about my own
outreach right now.
I built an AI appointment booking system —
technically works well, real user, real
testimonial. But cold outreach to strangers
has been almost silent for weeks, while the one
person who actually used it only did because he
personally knows me and I asked directly.
That's made me start wondering if the actual
unlock isn't marketing volume at all, but finding
people who are already mid-frustration with the
exact problem — not just people who theoretically
have it. Someone who just missed a booking and is
annoyed right now versus someone who's been
losing bookings quietly for months and adapted
to it.
LeadRetain is interesting because "leads who stop
replying" is a very specific, already-felt pain —
not a vague inefficiency. Curious if you've found
that specificity in your positioning was what
finally moved people, or if it was more about
finding the right channel where people are
already venting about that exact problem?
Following this thread closely since I'm
figuring out the same thing in real time.
One thing I've noticed is that "getting users" is often treated as a marketing problem when it's actually a positioning problem.
If people understand the problem but don't change their workflow, it's usually because the perceived cost of staying the same is still lower than the cost of switching. Finding and communicating that inflection point tends to matter more than adding another acquisition channel.