Day 5 update: first external user confirmed it works
Yesterday roshhellwett — someone who found PRDraft through a GitHub Discussion — installed the app, opened a PR, and got an auto-generated description within seconds.
His feedback: "Works as expected. The structure is solid and actually saves time. Groq is noticeably fast."
That's the first real external validation. Not a friend, not a test account — a stranger who found it, installed it, and came back with specific feedback.
Also shipped two things yesterday:
Fixed a free tier cap bug where pr_count was incrementing before the cap check ran. Capped users were still getting descriptions generated — wasted Groq calls and wrong behavior. Now the check runs first.
Added install/uninstall webhook handlers. Before this, I had zero visibility into installs until someone opened a PR. Now every install and uninstall writes to Supabase immediately.
Both PRs were described automatically by PRDraft itself. Dogfooding works.
Current status:
1 confirmed working external user
0 paid users
Reddit karma: 2 (new account, blocked until ~Day 8)
HN karma: -8 (grinding daily)
The distribution channels are the bottleneck right now, not the product.
The "first stranger who found it themselves" moment is genuinely different from any friend/test install, and it's one of those milestones you only appreciate in hindsight. The thing I wasn't prepared for: instead of pure elation I got this weird mix of relief + "oh wait, now I have to actually support them." It's the moment the project stops being a toy in your head. Also — the fact that they came through a GitHub Discussion is worth paying attention to, because that's a reproducible channel, not a fluke. Scale what brought them in before scaling anything else.
"Oh wait, now I have to actually support them" — yes, exactly that. The mental shift from builder to operator happened in about 30 seconds.
The GitHub Discussion point is something I've been thinking about too. It wasn't a post in a big community or a Reddit thread — it was a niche corner of GitHub where the right person happened to be looking. That feels more signal than noise. Going to double down on that channel before chasing Reddit/HN traffic.
Thanks for the perspective. Good to hear this feeling is a rite of passage and not just me.