Day 3 of marketing with zero audience. Here's what's actually working (and what isn't).
I launched Fenly - a Chrome extension for AI-powered translation that works inline on any website - and now I'm in the part nobody prepares you for: getting anyone to notice.
No email list. No Twitter following. No budget for ads.
Here's what I'm doing and what I'm seeing after 3 days:
What's working:
- Reddit comments in r/languagelearning and r/digitalnomad genuine answers to real questions, no pitching. Profile clicks are real.
- LinkedIn "build in public" posts - small engagement but consistent.
- Indie Hackers comments - best conversations, slowest growth.
What's not working:
- Any comment where I pitch the product directly. Instant ignore or downvote.
- Posting in broad subreddits without established karma. Got blocked.
- Expecting results in days. This is clearly a weeks/months game.
Honest numbers:
- CWS installs: still single digits
- Daily time spent on marketing: ~2 hours
- Comments written per day: 10-15 across platforms
The uncomfortable truth: building the product took mass effort, but distribution is harder. At least with code, you get error messages. With marketing, you just get silence.
Anyone else grinding through this phase? What moved the needle for you?
Trending on Indie Hackers
You’re doing a lot right — especially the “no pitching, just helping” approach.
What you’re feeling is normal: distribution feels like silence until it suddenly doesn’t.
The key shift now isn’t more comments – it's higher intent exposure:
Instead of broad communities, go where people are actively trying to translate something right now
Turn your best comments into mini demos (“here’s how I solved this in 10 sec…”)
Double down on what’s already working (Indie Hackers conversations → deeper, not wider)
Also, single-digit installs after 3 days isn’t a bad signal — it just means you haven’t hit the right context + timing yet.
The "IH comments — best conversations, slowest growth" line matches my data exactly. I run a small indie iOS memo app solo (a Captio replacement) and tracked which comment style actually pulled people through to my profile: short helpful replies got skimmed, but anything around 80–150 words that named a specific number from the OP's post produced almost all of the profile clicks. The slow-conversation thing turned out to be a feature: those people read your bio first. Question — when you say Reddit profile clicks are "real," are you tracking them with UTMs on a link in your bio or just inferring from referrer spikes? I haven't found a clean way to attribute Reddit traffic and it's been my biggest measurement gap so far.
"with code, you get error messages. with marketing, you just get silence." hit hard.
i'm in the exact same spot. reddit seems to be driving some traffic, twitter too, but single digit movements to really say any of it is really "moving the needle"
Think thats why we are all here, my first time on this site, so many great Ideas going around at the moment but the quality ones will always find a way to shine
this hits so hard. We're running the same playbook with Kintsu.ai - an AI platform for editing WordPress sites through natural chat. same silent grind, same "marketing gives no error messages" feeling.
Two things that moved the needle for us after weeks of the same approach:
focus on existing sites vs new builds. Most AI website tools only work for new sites. We found our sweet spot helping people who already have WordPress sites but struggle with updates. Way less competition in that specific angle.
the "middleman strategy" someone mentioned below is gold. instead of targeting end users, we started reaching WordPress agencies and freelancers. One agency adoption = 20+ client sites getting our tool recommended. Much better leverage than individual conversions.
Your Reddit strategy is spot on. those comments have serious shelf life. Still getting clicks from helpful replies we made 3 weeks ago. IH is slower but the conversations here are way higher quality than anywhere else.
keep grinding. The compound effect starts hitting around week 3-4.
"At least with code, you get error messages. With marketing, you just get silence." That line is painfully accurate.
I'm further along the same path. Months of building, 95K lines of code, zero paying customers. Here's what I've found after trying everything:
Your instinct about not pitching directly is right. I sent 80+ cold DMs to potential customers, zero replies. The moment I stopped pitching and started just being genuinely useful in conversations, things shifted. Not revenue, but real engagement. One Twitter reply on an exploit analysis thread got 1,764 views from 13 follower account. No pitch, just useful analysis in a thread where attention was already concentrated.
The multi-channel approach you're running is the right one. I'm doing the same across Twitter, Indie Hackers, Dev.to, and Discord communities. None of them are converting to revenue yet but the name recognition is compounding. People start remembering you from three different places and suddenly you're not a stranger anymore.
One things I'd add from my experience. First, target the middlemen not the end users. In my case that meant pitching community management agencies instead of protocol founders. One agency serves 10-50 clients, so one conversation opens multiple doors. For a translation tool maybe that's language schools, relocation agencies, or remote work communities that could recommend you to their members.
The timeline is real though. Weeks to months, not days. Keep going.
The middlemen angle is something I haven't considered at all. For my case that could be remote team leads who manage multilingual Slack/Discord servers - one person adopts it, the whole team follows. That's way more leverage than converting one freelancer at a time.
1700 views from a 13 follower account is proof that the platform rewards useful replies over follower count. Seeing the same on Reddit - my best-performing comment had zero self-promotion and still drove profile clicks for days.
Going to look into language school communities and remote work Slack groups this week. Thanks for the concrete suggestion.
Exactly right, remote team leads managing multilingual servers is your middleman. One adoption decision, whole team follows. That's the same math that made me switch from pitching individual protocols to targeting agencies. The leverage is completely different.
The Reddit observation matches what I'm seeing too. The replies that perform best are the ones where you forget you have a product and just answer the question properly. The profile clicks come naturally because people think "this person actually knows what they're talking about, what else do they do?"
Language school communities and remote work Slack groups sound like strong channels for you. Let me know how it goes, genuinely curious whether the middleman approach works as well for translation tools as it seems to for support tools. We're running the same experiment in different niches.
hmm, for me barely anything works. except social media - i do have an account that has some traction (~35k followers) and reels there generate some traffic. two paid users on my newly launched app in 2 weeks. not great, but some traction
35K followers and 2 paid users in 2 weeks is actually useful data - it tells you the conversion funnel from follower to paid has a specific bottleneck you can find and fix. Most people with zero audience would kill for that starting point. What's the app about? Curious if the reels are product-focused or more general content.
reddit clicks fast - IH's more of a slow burn. DMs usually start showing up after 2-3 weeks, once people start recognizing the name. worth it though.
Day 8 of a similar arc here, different mechanism: pre-launch demand gate with $25 refundable deposits on the LP. 0 conversions, 4 cold emails sent, Substack/Medium/X/Threads live, two ICP-relevant Shopify community threads engaged.
What's working: verbatim mining (51 pain quotes pulled from negative reviews of incumbent apps + forum threads, fed into LP copy as social proof), and the fixed-window structure (21-day gate creates a deadline that distribution decisions key off of).
What's not: the deposit ask itself. Asking for $25 before there's a product is much harder than I assumed, even with named ICP brands. People who'd convert at "give me your email" aren't converting at "give me $25 refundable" — which is the filter, but it's brutal.
Have you found anything that actually broke through on Day 1-3 — or has it been more about laying scaffolding for a Day 7-14 inflection?
The verbatim mining from negative reviews is a smart move - I should be doing that with google translate and deepL 1-star reviews for my own positioning.
To answer your question: nothing broke through on day 1-3 in terms of installs. But the scaffolding is already paying off on day 4 - the comments I left on day 1-2 are still getting profile clicks because people search the same threads weeks later. Reddit comments especially have long shelf life compared to social posts that die in 24 hours.
The one thing that actually converted: a genuine answer in a niche subreddit where someone was asking about the exact problem I solve. No pitch, just a useful reply with my tool mentioned at the end. That got me my first real user today.
The $25 deposit filter is brutal but probably saving you months of building for ghosts. 0 conversions on 4 cold emails is too small a sample though - I'd send 40 before reading into it.
Thanks! this is the most useful reply I've gotten this week. The shelf-life point is exactly the calculus I was missing; I've been weighing comment effort against "die in 24h" social posts and underestimating the long tail.
The "tool mentioned at the end" pattern is interesting and contradicts the wisdom I was operating on (mods will flag, plant the flag in profile only). What's the niche-subreddit signal you look for in sub size, "asking about the exact problem" phrasing, or something else? Trying to figure out where the line is between value-add disclosure and self-promo.
And on the 40 number is a useful anchor. Currently at 6 cold emails sent, 34 more to go. Bottleneck honestly isn't drafting; it's that the verbatim dataset I mined for personalization is thinning on strict ICP fit.
Same boat. Day 2 of distribution for me. Open source
blockchain project, zero audience before yesterday.
Your point about pitching directly being instant death
matches what I'm seeing. The comments where I just talk
about my experience building something without linking
anything get way more profile clicks than the ones
where I drop a link.
The "at least with code you get error messages" line is
painfully accurate. I spent months writing 65,000 lines
of Rust and that felt easier than the last two days of
trying to get people to look at it.
One thing that's working for me so far is replying to
technical posts on forums and communities with genuine experience from
my own project. People check your profile if your
comment is actually useful. That's been better than any
direct post.
Keep going. The silence is brutal but 3 days is nothing.
65K lines of Rust vs 2 days of marketing - and marketing feels harder. That's the most relatable thing I've read all week. Same experience here: the comments where I just share what I'm dealing with technically get way more traction than anything with a link. What's the blockchain project about? Curious what community you're targeting for open source distribution.
It's called NOVAI. An AI-native Layer 1 blockchain
built from scratch in Rust. The idea is that AI agents
are protocol primitives instead of smart contracts. They
have their own keys, balance, and on-chain memory built
into the chain itself.
For distribution I'm targeting Rust developers and
blockchain engineers on dev.to, Hacker News, and here.
The crypto Twitter crowd is a different audience that
I'll hit later once the public testnet is live.
Honestly the hardest part is that the project is
genuinely novel so there aren't obvious communities
where people are already talking about this exact thing.
Most blockchain communities are about existing chains
and most AI communities are about LLMs. Building
something in between means you're explaining what the
category even is before you can talk about your project.
novai.network if you're curious.
yeah the gap is real. what I found: IH threads compound weirdly - one good conversation resurfaces in DMs weeks later. different signal than Reddit clicks, but it stacks up.
That's good to hear - I'm seeing the reddit side of this already (comments from day 1 still getting clicks on day 4) but haven't experienced the IH DM effect yet. Will keep showing up and see how it compounds. Thanks for sharing that.
"With code you get error messages, with marketing you get silence" — that line is brutally accurate and should probably be pinned somewhere for every new founder.
The pattern you're seeing (genuine answers > direct pitches) is one we've hit repeatedly with our API gateway. The Reddit threads where someone asks "how do I reduce my OpenAI bill" and I just share what we learned about multi-turn context replay and model routing get profile clicks for weeks. The threads where I mention the product name explicitly get flagged or ignored.
One thing that helped us shift from "silence" to at least "low signal": narrow the ICP until the intercept point is obvious. Instead of "developers" we started focusing on "devs building AI apps who've hit their first token bill shock." That specific pain is searchable, discussable, and the thread where it shows up is the exact thread where a helpful answer lands.
The timeline point is real. We're 2 months in and still single-digit paying users. But the karma from early helpful comments is starting to compound into DMs and genuine conversations. The silence phase is just the tax you pay for not having a built-in audience. Keep going.
The icp narrowing advice is gold. I've been targeting "people who need translation" which is way too broad. Your framework makes me think I should focus on something like "freelancers on Upwork who lose clients because replies in english take too long" - that's a specific pain, a specific place to find them, and a specific thread where my answer actually helps. Going to rethink my subreddit targeting based on this. thanks.
What’s working is not “content.”
It’s intent proximity.
The Reddit comments work because you’re already inside the moment someone feels the problem.
The pitch fails because now you’re adding context instead of removing friction.
That’s the real pattern.
Early distribution usually moves when the product shows up inside existing behavior, not when the founder tries to create attention from scratch.
For Fenly, the shortest path is probably less “marketing” and more embedding yourself where translation friction already happens. Chrome Store SEO, ESL workflows, expat communities, multilingual hiring, language-learning tools.
Right now you’re not fighting reach.
You’re fighting placement.
"You're not fighting reach, you're fighting placement" - that reframes everything. I've been thinking about this as a content problem when it's actually a positioning problem.
Chrome Store SEO is something I've barely touched. And expat communities are a great call - those are people dealing with translation friction daily, not once a month. Going to look into ESL teacher forums and digital nomad Slack groups where the need is constant, not theoretical.
Thanks for the sharp framing.
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.
This is the sharpest comment in the thread. I've been treating profile clicks as a win when they're actually just awareness, not intent. The real metric I should be watching is installs per comment, not engagement per comment.
Today I got my first actual user - someone who signed up and used the product. That's the signal. But I don't even know which channel they came from, which kind of proves your point. I'm tracking activity, not the path from conversation to decision.
Need to set up proper attribution from community touchpoint to install to first translation so I can see which conversations drive decisions, not just visibility.
Thanks for the reframe.
Exactly.
Once placement is right, the next bottleneck is whether the product gets understood fast enough in-context.
That’s usually where tools like this still leak.
Not reach.
Not placement.
The first 3 seconds of “what is this and why do I need it here?”
That’s a good layer to add.
Once the audience is closer to a decision, the next bottleneck is exactly that translation.
The first few seconds determine whether someone recognizes themselves in what they’re seeing.
If they don’t, they default back to browsing.
So it stacks like this:
Input decides who arrives.
Translation decides whether they stay in evaluation mode.
Then the product decides whether they convert.
If any one of those is off, it looks like things are “working” but nothing moves.
That’s why it can feel like you’re fixing the right things and still not seeing results.
Exactly.
And that “translation” layer is usually where naming starts doing quiet damage.
If the name already gives people the right mental model, the product has less work to do in those first 3 seconds.
If the name feels generic or abstract, every placement has to re-explain the product from scratch.
That’s where good acquisition still leaks.
Curious what the product is called right now?
Funny enough, that question is doing exactly what you're describing.
You're trying to build a mental model before even seeing it.
Right now it's called GrowthDriver.
Whether that name gives you a usable frame in the first few seconds, or forces a follow-up like this, is the signal.
If the context lands, the conversation moves.
If it doesn't, everything has to be re-explained every time it shows up.
That's where most things quietly break.
Exactly.
And the fact that “what is it called?” immediately turned into “what does that mean here?” is basically the test.
GrowthDriver is directionally right.
It signals outcome.
But it still reads broad enough that the product has to spend those first seconds narrowing the frame.
That is usually the leak.
A strong name should not need the next sentence to become legible.
It should make the next sentence feel more specific, not more necessary.
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.
The niche sub timing point is real - I've been focusing on r/languagelearning and r/digitalnomad instead of broad subs and the reception is completely different. But you're right that posts disappear fast, which is why I've shifted mostly to commenting on existing threads rather than posting. Comments on active threads stay visible longer than new posts that drop off in 6 hours.
Haven't set up email capture yet honestly - right now the funnel is community comment -> profile/site click -> Chrome Web Store install. No email step. Conversion rate from reddit to actual install is impossible to track without proper attribution, which I'm learning the hard way is something I should have built before starting distribution.
The HN karma gate is good to know - going to lurk and comment there for a while before attempting a Show HN.
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.
The ASO propagation delay is good to know - I'm on Chrome web store and haven't touched my listing keywords yet, probably the same indexing lag applies there. Will update and give it 2 weeks before judging.
Already seeing the pattern you're describing with outbound comments. My best-performing Reddit replies have been in r/languagelearning where someone asks about reading foreign content, not in r/SideProject where everyone's a founder and nobody's a customer. The closer you are to the moment someone feels the pain, the less convincing you need to do. Planning to expand into r/freelance and r/Upwork threads next week for the same reason.
Appreciate the feedback on the thread - will keep the daily updates going.
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.
The tree vs faucet mental model is going straight into my notes. I've been checking stats daily and getting discouraged when there's no spike - but that's exactly the mistake you're describing. Trees don't spike, they just slowly grow until one day they're undeniable.
The "one substantive answer" tactic is something I'm testing now. Instead of dropping short comments on 10 threads, spending 10 minutes writing one real answer with actual experience. Today's best-performing reply was exactly that - a detailed breakdown in r/languagelearning that naturally mentioned what I'm building. Will report back on whether the 48-hour delay pattern holds.
Thanks for the framework and good luck with Claude Skills - curious to see how that space evolves.
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.
437 matches in 2 weeks is solid. I'm using F5Bot too - currently tracking about 15 keywords like "translation extension", "google translate alternative", "translate discord", "language barrier", "deepl alternative" and similar. Getting matches but mostly broad mentions, not always high-intent.
The intent-phrase filter you're describing makes sense as the next step - adding things like "looking for a tool" or "I wish there was" would cut through the noise and surface the posts where someone is actually ready to try something.
Today I caught a post in r/languagelearning where someone was asking for exactly what I built. That single reply drove more value than any LinkedIn post this week. Intercepting demand beats creating it, especially at zero audience.
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.
Language teachers is a great angle I haven't explored. They're multipliers - one recommendation from a teacher reaches an entire class without me doing anything. Going to look into r/teachers, r/TEFL, and ESL communities this week.
The "one thread, most useful person" approach is what's been working on day 4 too. Found a post in r/languagelearning today where someone needed exactly what I built. Spent 10 minutes writing a real answer instead of dropping 10 short comments elsewhere. Different ROI entirely.
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.
Reddit comments feel like they have the most scale potential. They stay searchable for months, and the subreddits I'm targeting (r/languagelearning, r/digitalnomad, r/chrome_extensions) have high-intent users who are already looking for solutions. One good answer keeps driving profile clicks long after I wrote it.
IH is slower but the conversations are deeper - this thread alone gave me more actionable ideas than a week of Reddit scrolling.
LinkedIn is good for building the founder narrative but I haven't seen it convert to installs yet. Twitter is too early to tell.
If I had to bet on one channel to compound over the next month, Reddit. What are you building?
Building a document analytics tool focused on deal intelligence — not just who opened your proposal, but where they hesitated, what they re-read, and when a deal starts going cold before the prospect ghosts you. Still early but the problem feels very real. Curious what signals you've found most reliable for knowing when someone is genuinely interested versus just browsing?
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?
Honestly, no tools at all right now. Zero budget means zero tooling - just manual work across platforms.
The "stack" is: Reddit (manual commenting + F5Bot for keyword alerts), LinkedIn (daily posts), Indie Hackers (threads like this one), X (just started), and Threads. All free, all manual.
The decision wasn't really a decision - I just went where founders in similar posts said they got traction from. IH threads and Reddit comments kept coming up, so I started there. Trial and error from day 1, adjusting based on what gets engagement vs what gets ignored.
If I had budget, I'd probably add proper attribution tracking before any paid tool. Right now my biggest gap is not knowing which channel actually drives installs.
This is super helpful, especially the part about “zero budget means zero tooling” and choosing channels based on where other founders said they got traction.
The attribution gap is interesting too, not knowing which channel actually drives installs seems like a painful problem when you’re testing manually.
I’m doing 10 short founder interviews this week for Tradi about how early stage founders choose tools, channels, and what advice they trust when starting from zero.
Would you be open to a quick 15-minute chat this week? Not selling anything, just learning from builders in this exact stage.
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?
For finance specifically, I'd skip Reddit cold posts and go straight to r/personalfinance or r/ynab - find threads where people are frustrated with existing tools and reply with genuine help. Don't mention your app, just be the person who clearly understands the problem. Profile clicks follow.
The "soft intro" that's worked for me: answer the question first, then at the end add one line like "I'm actually building something in this space" with a link. No pitch, no feature list. People who care will click.
For your first 5-10 users though, IH and Twitter might be faster than Reddit. Post what you posted here - "4 months building, need 5-10 people to try it" - and you'll get founders who understand early-stage feedback. They're more forgiving than random Reddit users and they'll actually tell you what's broken.
The privacy concern is real for finance, but that's also your positioning angle - if you lead with "privacy-first" in every thread, you attract exactly the users who care about it.
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.
The cross-posting timing is useful to know - I've been spacing mine out but didn't realize the threshold was that strict. 45-60 min minimum, noted.
Day 1 with zero everything is the hardest part. The one thing I'd suggest from 4 days ahead of you: start with comments, not posts. Posts on a new account get filtered or ignored, but a helpful comment on someone else's thread is almost never flagged. Build some karma and history first, then start posting.
What's the app? Congrats on shipping.
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!
6 apps is an ambitious ecosystem. The build being the easy part is something every technical founder discovers the hard way - including me.
One thing I'd add to blogging: try commenting in communities where your target users already hang out. Blog posts need SEO to compound and that takes months. A comment in the right thread gets in front of the right person today. Both are worth doing, but comments give faster signal on whether your messaging resonates.
What's the ecosystem about?
"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?
The IH comments as landing page drafts is a perspective I haven't thought about - but looking back at this thread, the lines that get the most engagement are exactly the ones I'd want on a homepage. Going to start saving the best ones.
To answer your question: yes, answer-first replies outperform build-in-public posts for profile clicks. Not even close. My LinkedIn/Twitter posts reach people who are interested in the founder journey, but they're rarely my target users. A reply in r/languagelearning where someone is struggling with reading foreign content reaches someone who might actually install the extension today.
Different audiences, different intent. Build-in-public builds the network. Answer-first comments find the customer.
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.
The narrow question -> expert reply dynamic is exactly what happened in this IH thread too. The comments here reshaped my entire approach to channel selection.
For subreddits beyond the obvious two: r/chrome_extensions has lower volume but high-intent users who are specifically looking for tools. r/freelance and r/Upwork surface people dealing with language barriers when communicating with international clients. r/discordapp has threads about translating messages in multilingual servers. r/TEFL and r/teachers are on my list to explore this week - teachers are multipliers who recommend tools to entire classes.
The pattern: skip the broad subs (r/SaaS, r/startups) and find where your user is complaining about the problem, not where founders are talking about building. What niches are replying for your planner?
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?
Good question. After install and a quick google sign in, there are three core modes:
Select and translate - highlight text on any page, get an instant popup translation
Type and translate - type in your language inside any input field on any website, it auto-translates your text before sending
Chat and feeds translation - translate messages directly inside Discord, Slack, LinkedIn, X, YouTube, Reddit, Upwork, and Gmail. Free users get a translate button on each message, paid users get full auto-translate
On the free plan you also get the Normal translation style. Slang and Business styles with adjustable intensity unlock on Pro.
The fastest "aha moment" is probably the Type and translate - you start typing in your native language inside a discord chat and the translated text just appears. But honestly, I haven't set up tracking on time-to-first-translation yet, so I'm guessing where the real drop-off is.
Yeah this makes a lot of sense especially the type and translate moment, that does sound like a strong aha. I think the interesting part is that you might have multiple aha moments, but users only experience one depending on how they start. And if that first path doesn’t trigger the right moment, they might never get to the one that actually clicks. The fact that you’re not tracking time to first translation yet is probably where most of the hidden drop-off is. I’d be happy to take a quick look at the flow and point out where users might be missing that first value moment usually there are 2-3 small things that make a big difference here.
That's a really good point - users only experience one aha moment depending on how they enter, and if that first path is wrong, they never discover the others. I haven't thought about it that way.
Would genuinely appreciate you taking a look. The extension is at fenly.me. Curious which path you land on first and whether the value is obvious or if you have to go looking for it.
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.
That framing - "finding where people are already talking about the problem" - is exactly what clicked for me on day 2. Before that I was posting into the void hoping someone would care. Much better to join existing conversations.
Exactly this. We're in the same grind with iLoquio — an all-in-one platform for online educators and coaches. The "with code you get error messages, with marketing you get silence" line hit so hard I saved it.
One thing that's moved the needle for us: going hyper-specific with community targeting. Instead of broad "creator" or "edtech" communities, we focused on Facebook groups for coaches and Telegram groups where course creators are actively discussing monetization. The intent gap is much smaller when someone is already in "I need a platform" mode vs just browsing.
Your observation about Reddit comments having a long shelf life is spot-on. A well-placed helpful reply in a relevant subreddit keeps sending traffic weeks later — no LinkedIn post has that kind of compounding.
The other thing I'd add: IH is slow for clicks but strong for quality conversations. This thread reshapes your thinking more than 50 Reddit upvotes.
3 days is genuinely nothing. Keep going.
The last part hits home. The building part is easy, but then you have to from getting immediate results to a slower grind with less instant results and feedback.
Also as an engineer, the part after the building phase was harder. Cold outreach especially, very much out if my comfort zone. But for me that gave the best results (B2B), and after a while I went from hating it and feeling nervous to enjoying it. But it’s a different mindset.
Feels like distribution is only half the problem.
Even if someone installs, if they don't hit a clear "this is useful" moment quickly, they won't come back.
Early stage feels more like fixing that first experience than just getting more traffic.
This phase is brutally underrated. What you’re describing is basically the “silent grind” stage where effort ≠ visible results.
A couple of observations from your approach:
You’re doing the right thing by not pitching directly. Most people fail here because they treat every platform like a billboard instead of a conversation.
Reddit + genuine help is probably your highest-leverage move right now. Profile curiosity scales better than forced clicks.
Your volume (10–15 comments/day) is solid, but the key shift is going from many comments → a few high-signal comments that actually stand out.
What usually moves the needle at this stage:
Writing one deeply useful comment that gets upvoted heavily instead of 10 average ones
Sharing specific use cases or micro-stories (people connect with outcomes, not features)
Doubling down on where conversations already exist, not where you’re trying to create them
Also, your point about “code gives errors, marketing gives silence” is painfully accurate. The feedback loop is just slower and noisier.
You’re still early—3 days is basically zero in distribution terms. If you stay consistent for a few weeks, you’ll start seeing compounding from the same platforms you’re already using.
Curious: have you tried positioning Fenly around a very specific user scenario instead of general translation? That usually sharpens traction early on.
I also experienced "community > cold message".
Plus, it was better to start off from a "small community to a bigger one".
I first tried linkedin cold messages, but turns out only 2 out of 30 replies, and none of them replied for the second time (Of course, each message was manual and personalized)
Then I monitored the most relevant community and became active there, communicating with the members not only by text but also by calling. I started from a small community (300+ members) and gradually moved to the bigger community, which let me build up my own community with 5000+ members. That community became my source of insights and I was able to do subscription business.
That last line is painfully accurate. With code you get feedback immediately. With distribution, silence is the feedback and it’s much harder to interpret. The shift usually happens when the effort compounds, not when any single post works.
I am in the same situation with my revenue churn app. I suspected it would take time and effort to gain attention but was not prepared for how small a fish one can feel like in this large pond we call the internet.
I’m in the same “silence is the feedback” phase with a tiny no-signup browser utility, and the only thing I’d add is: separate traffic tests from positioning tests.
For me the cleanest next experiment is one narrow audience + one specific ask, e.g. not “check out my thing,” but “does the first 30 seconds make sense, and what would make you share it?” Then I can treat 5 blunt replies as more valuable than 50 vague visits.
Your note about direct pitching getting ignored matches what I’m seeing too. The comments that seem to compound are the ones where the product is almost incidental to a useful take.
The outreach is by far the hardest part. I'm in that same phase and it's sometimes hard not to give up.
The middlemen point is the move. We sell managed AI agents to non-technical operators (plumbers, yoga studios, bakeries) and direct outreach to them was a graveyard. What worked: messaging the people who already serve them. POS resellers, accounting firms, local marketing agencies. One yes there is 5 to 15 referrals.
One small thing on the Reddit angle: be careful with "useful comment" pacing. If a mod sees you only show up in threads where someone could plausibly want your product, you get shadowbanned without notice. Mix in 3 or 4 comments per week that have nothing to do with your space. We learned the hard way.
Day 3 is the right time to be running this experiment. Keep doing it visibly here. The compounding is real, just slower than the build.
The thing I'd watch in this phase is not installs first, but which comments create second-order signals: profile clicks, replies with specifics, DMs, and people repeating the problem in their own words. Those are the breadcrumbs that tell you which audience is worth another week.
For a translation tool, the highest-signal comments are probably not broad "I built this" posts, but answers to moments where someone already has urgency: moving countries, studying with untranslated PDFs, working in multilingual teams, or debugging browser auto-translate pain. If one of those contexts creates replies, double down there before widening channels.
pattern many early founders hit.
Content platforms reward helpful context, not tools.
If someone posts:
“How do I translate websites while traveling?”
and the answer happens to involve your extension, it works.
If the comment starts with:
“I built a tool…”
engagement drops instantly.
It’s interesting how problem-first conversations work way better than product-first ones.
Distribution is the real bottleneck.
Product is the easy part in comparison
Continue to participate in Reddit and add value and I think you will gradually get more customers as you help your target audience.
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!
Same here - the lurking phase taught me more than any marketing guide. You start noticing what gets traction and what gets ignored, and it saves you from making the same mistakes. Drop your landing page if you want, happy to take a look.
nobullshithappiness.com
It's still a bit empty and super early, more content is in preparation! I'll write a proper post on IndieHackers when this project will be in a more presentable state
Makes sense - ship when it's ready. Looking forward to the IH post, I'll keep an eye out. Good luck with the build.
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.
The feedback problem is real. Right now I have almost no data on what happens after install because the volume is too low. Once I get past ~50 active users I'm planning to add a simple in-extension feedback prompt after the first 3 translations. Until then it's mostly guesswork, which is uncomfortable but honest.
What stands out is that by the time you try to collect feedback, the moment is already gone.
The user has already moved on, so you get a filtered or incomplete answer.
Catching it right when something breaks or feels off seems more reliable, even if it’s just a quick signal instead of a full explanation.
Good point - a quick thumbs down button right on the translation popup would catch the moment better than a survey 3 translations later. Going to think about how to implement that without adding friction to the flow.
Yeah, capturing feedback at the exact moment is key.
What I’ve noticed is that even a simple “thumbs down” can be misleading if you don’t know why it was bad.
Sometimes it’s not the translation itself, but context, tone, or expectation mismatch.
The tricky part is capturing just enough signal without breaking the flow.