Every founder here has an audience that could help another founder. We just never ask.

Why do we treat other founders like competitors for attention instead of the easiest audience-sharing deal available to us?

Think about it. You're building alone (or with one cofounder), you have zero users, and the hardest part isn't the product — it's finding the first 20 people who'll actually look at it. Meanwhile there's a founder three posts down in this exact subreddit with the same problem, the same tiny audience, the same "I don't want to be annoying by self-promoting" anxiety.
We just never talk to each other about it directly. We post our own thing, we scroll past everyone else's thing, and we all stay stuck at the same 12 signups.
Founder isolation isn't just an emotional problem (though it is one — building alone messes with your head more than people admit). It's a distribution problem too. You're isolated from the one group of people who'd actually understand what you're going through AND have an audience that could plausibly convert for you.

So here's the actual question: do you think other founders could genuinely help each other at the early stage? Not mentorship, not "networking" in the LinkedIn-panel sense — I mean literally trading audiences. You post about my thing to your 200 followers, I post about yours to mine. You beta test my product, I beta test yours. Blunt, mutual, no pretending it's charity.
Has anyone actually done this and had it work? Or does it always devolve into everyone just self-promoting past each other without any real exchange?
Drop what you're building below if you want — let's see if this turns into something other than another ignored comment section.