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

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.