Day 3 of marketing with zero audience. Here's what's actually working (and what isn't).

There’s a lot of strong tactical advice in this thread, but I think there’s a small shift that might change how you’re reading all of this.

Right now you’re categorizing things as “working” based on activity:
comments, profile clicks, engagement, consistency.

That tells you you’re visible.

But visibility isn’t the same as progress.

Progress is when someone moves toward a decision:
installing, signing up, coming back, or asking something that shows real intent.

That’s why it feels like things are “working” on one side and still single-digit installs on the other. You’re seeing activity, but you don’t yet know if it’s leading anywhere.

Most early-stage marketing ends up optimizing for what’s easiest to see, not what actually moves someone forward. So you reinforce behaviors that feel productive without knowing if they’re directional.

The tricky part is that genuine answers, helpful comments, and consistency are all correct moves. They just don’t tell you if someone is getting closer to a decision, only that they noticed you exist.

Those are two very different signals.

So the question isn’t just “what’s working vs not working” yet.

It’s “which of these signals actually represent progress?”

Until that line is clear, everything will feel like partial movement with no real outcome.

The "what isn't working" half of these posts is almost always more useful than the "what is" half. Few things from my own zero-audience launch this week that I'll add to your "isn't working" pile so others save the time:

Reddit posts in big general subs (r/SaaS, r/SideProject) get drive-by hostility, not engagement. The audience doesn't want to evaluate, they want to gotcha. Niche subs that match your customer (for me r/ContractorUK) actually engage but drop off the front page in 6 hours so you have to be there in real time.

Hacker News auto-killed my Show HN today because the account had zero karma. Standard new-account filter. Recoverable by emailing the moderators but you cannot just submit cold and hope. Build the karma first or accept that the first attempt is a coin flip.

Email capture without a paid offer behind it is theatre. I built a beautiful HVCO funnel before I had any traffic. The funnel works fine, the problem is putting water into it. Distribution genuinely is harder than the build, and I underestimated it by an order of magnitude.

What's the conversion rate from your HN/Reddit traffic to email capture? That is the only number I have started to trust.

Running the same zero-paid-acquisition experiment with invoiceHUB (iOS invoicing app for freelancers) and your observation about the 2-week minimum per channel is spot on.

The thing that surprised me most: ASO updates (subtitle rewrites, keyword field changes) take 7–10 days to propagate through Apple's index before you see any impression delta. People judge ASO at day 3 and declare it dead — same mistake you're describing for Reddit.

One pattern worth adding to your list: outbound comments on platforms where your exact target user is complaining about a pain you solve (e.g., r/freelance threads about invoice tracking) convert much better than general startup threads. The intent gap is smaller.

Keep posting the daily updates — this is one of the more honest build-in-public threads I've seen.

I'm running the same experiment from a different angle (selling Claude Skills, not a Chrome extension) and your what's-working / what's-not map is almost identical to mine after Day 1. Two add-ons from my side, no pitch:

The thing I underestimated: comment-driven distribution has a delay between effort and signal that's longer than the platforms suggest. A genuinely useful Reddit comment in r/SaaS doesn't show up in your traffic until ~48 hours later — the click happens when someone re-reads the thread two days on, not when you post. So judging "what's working" at Day 3 will mislead you. Run each channel for two weeks before triaging, otherwise you'll kill the ones that compound slowest.

The thing that compounded fastest for me so far: writing one substantive answer (not a comment, an answer) on a question the OP literally asked. If a thread has 80 generic comments and one full-paragraph answer, the answer is what gets bookmarked and shared. Effort ratio looks bad in the moment, payoff is asymmetric.

On "expecting results in days" — agreed. The mental model that helped me: each compounding channel (IH karma, GitHub stars, repo SEO) is a tree planted, not a faucet turned on. Yields in months, not days. The faucet channels (paid ads, big launches) are different. Don't mix them up in the same dashboard or you'll kill the trees prematurely.

Good luck with Fenly.

Day 3 is early but the fact that you're tracking what works vs. what doesn't already puts you ahead of most founders who just "do marketing" without measuring.

One channel that's worked well for me with zero audience: Reddit keyword monitoring. Instead of posting content and hoping people see it, I track phrases like "looking for a tool," "alternative to," and "I wish there was" across niche subreddits. When someone posts about a problem my product solves, I reply with a helpful answer.

437 matches in 2 weeks across 6 subreddits. The conversion rate on "person actively searching for a solution" is way higher than any content marketing.

The zero audience problem goes away when you stop trying to build an audience and start intercepting existing demand instead.

Three days in and you've already figured out what takes most people three months - that pitching kills the comment and genuine answers are the only thing that lands. That's not nothing.

The silence is the worst part honestly. With a bug you at least know something's broken. With marketing you're just throwing things into a void and trying to read meaning into single-digit install counts.

For what it's worth, the thing that actually moved the needle for me wasn't volume of comments but finding the one thread where the problem your product solves is the exact thing being discussed and being the most useful person in that thread. Not mentioning the product, just being the person who clearly gets the problem. The profile clicks come from that.

For Fenly specifically - have you tried language teacher communities? Not just learners but actual tutors and teachers. They're always looking for tools to recommend to students and they have audiences you don't have to build yourself. One teacher with 500 students is worth more than 500 random Reddit upvotes.

Keep going. The single digits phase is just the tax you pay.

This is honestly one of the most accurate descriptions of early-stage marketing I’ve seen.
The silence part hits hard — you can ship features all day, but distribution is a completely different skill set.
I’ve also noticed the same thing: genuine comments → slow but real traction, any hint of pitching → dead on arrival.

I’m in this phase too, and it’s comforting to see someone else sharing real numbers instead of pretending everything is blowing up overnight.
Curious — out of everything you’ve tried so far, which channel feels like it could scale once you keep going for a few more weeks?

Keep going — this stage is painful but it compounds.

This is useful, especially for founders starting with no audience.

I’m doing research this week on how early-stage founders choose their marketing/growth tools. How did you decide which tools to use for marketing, outreach, or content? Was it trial and error, recommendations, Reddit, Google, or something else?

I'm in the same boat. I was really hoping there would be a silver lining at the end of your post, but I appreciate the honesty. I've spent the last 4 months building my personal finance app, but I have no G2M strategy yet. It's a very difficult vertical to get signal on because of the founder proximity / privacy concerns. There's not much I can do about that, so I have to do cold outreach for my initial users. All I need is just 5-10 aligned, interested users to give some initial feedback, but I'm stuck.

I haven't been active on Reddit in a long time, any other tips on how to engage people and softly intro a product?

Day 1 sister. Launched my first iOS app this morning, also no email list, no Twitter following, also no budget.

Same exact pattern I saw today on Reddit: real answers in niche subs (r/SideProject, r/womenintech for me) get profile clicks. Anything that smells like a pitch dies fast. r/workingmoms killed me on rule 8 before I even posted.

One thing I learned the hard way: Reddit notices simultaneous cross-posting from a single new account. I waited 21 minutes between r/SideProject and r/womenintech and r/SideProject still got auto-removed an hour later (for unrelated reasons, but the timing scared me). 45-60 min between submissions is real.

Also +1 on the "with code you get error messages, with marketing you get silence." That's the line of the week.

Some good insight for me to think about I am just starting to try to get wheels turning on the marketing part beyond consistent blogs! I always felt the stress of building a 6app saas ecosystem was going to be my biggest hurdle! I am realizing that might have been the easy part of the journey!

"With code you get error messages, with marketing you get silence" is the most accurate sentence about distribution I've read this month — that asymmetry is the whole reason the loop feels harder than building. On my own solo iOS side project, the move that finally helped wasn't volume, it was narrowness: one tightly-worded reply on a 1,200-member niche subreddit drove more profile clicks than a full week of broader productivity-thread commenting. Three small additions: (1) earn karma in the subreddit for a week before your first build-in-public post, (2) lead with the felt problem in the reply, not your handle, (3) treat IH comments as drafts for your future landing page hero — the lines that get replies usually convert. Curious — among your 10–15 daily comments, do answer-first replies ever beat your build-in-public posts on profile clicks?

grinding through this exact phase too. ~2 weeks in, planner saas, similar single-digit signup pattern.

the thing that's moved the needle most isn't even content i've made, it's a single substantive comment from a stranger on a reddit post i wrote yesterday. asked one tight question, got back a full 6-part playbook from someone who built in social media for 10 years. that one reply has reshaped my entire next 2 weeks more than 20 hours of solo grinding did.

not a strategy you can plan for, but it makes me think early-stage marketing leverage comes from the quality of the question you ask publicly more than from reach. genuine narrow questions surface experts who'd never reply to a generic "thoughts?" post.

what subreddits have been working for you outside r/languagelearning and r/digitalnomad? curious which niches are actually replying for cold-start saas.

this is super real.
one thing I’ve seen though at this stage its often not distribution that breaks things but what happens after people try it. Even with small traffic if users don’t hit a clear oh this is actually useful moment fast enough, they wont come back or share it. Curious what the first experience looks like right now after install?

This is encouraging because it shows that starting with no audience doesn’t mean starting with no options.

I’m learning that early marketing is really about finding where people are already talking about the problem you solve and joining those conversations in a useful way.

I'm almost at the same stage as you
Landing page online, zero visits, social media accounts created, contributing to the community, slowly gaining reputation without directly selling my product
At least taking time to read posts on IndieHackers before trying anything is giving me valuable knowledge, thanks for sharing your experience!

You're actually doing the right things.

The part that’s hard to see early on is that distribution isn’t just about getting attention, it’s about what happens right after.

A lot of products get a few clicks, maybe even installs, but the real drop happens silently after the first use.

Everything feels like it “worked” from the outside, but the user doesn’t come back.

That’s usually not a traffic problem, it’s a feedback problem.

If you don’t know what someone experiences in the first few minutes, it’s really hard to improve retention.

From what you’re describing, you’re already past the “visibility” phase and into the “what actually happens after” phase.

That’s where most of the real work is.