I posted in English for 2 weeks. 90% of my views came from the one country I'm not targeting.

Follow-up to my last post (solo founder, 3D travel globe, 0 users in week one, then two strangers who proved the product works but didn't move the needle). This one is about what I found when I finally stopped blaming my content and went looking for why nobody was seeing it.

It turned out to be the most useful — and most demoralizing — thing I've learned so far. If you're building from outside the US/EU, I think it'll be worth your five minutes.

First, I did everything you're supposed to do

I'm a motion designer, so I made genuinely nice videos of the globe. Then I posted them everywhere, for about two weeks, on everything: Threads, Facebook Reels, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Reddit, X.

Two walls, immediately:

Travel groups wouldn't let me post. Two-million-member groups full of exactly my users — and "no self-promotion" applies even when the product is free and you're not selling anything. A few posts slipped through; mods removed them within the hour.
My own accounts had no audience. Zero followers isn't a small reach. It's a sealed room.

The numbers, for the curious: Threads gave a few hundred views that evaporated by morning. FB Reels pushed to a few hundred strangers with no followers — the closest thing to hope. Instagram, about the same. X, single digits, never a reply.

I told myself what we all tell ourselves: marketing is hard, keep going, it compounds. True, and not the actual problem.

The thing I finally noticed

One night, instead of refreshing the view count, I opened the tab that shows where viewers are.

Almost every dot was in Vietnam.

Every video I post is in English. The product is built and priced for travelers in the US and Europe. I had made, as far as I could tell, zero content a Vietnamese scroller would stop on. And yet nearly everyone who saw my work was sitting a few hundred kilometers from me.

Why this happens (my best reconstruction)

When you have no followers, the platform has no graph to distribute through, so it guesses who to show your video to. The only signals it has are your account and device — locale, language setting, and above all your IP address. Mine all say Vietnam.

So it does the cheapest thing: it tests your brand-new video on a small local audience first. Vietnamese viewers scroll past an English video about visiting 88 countries → the platform reads that as low engagement → decides the video isn't worth pushing → and it never escapes the local test pool to reach the people it was made for.

It wasn't a quality problem or a volume problem. It was a routing problem. And the algorithm routes by where you are, not what language you write in.

The part that stung

Two ironies, stacked:

I wrote everything in English specifically to reach the West. Irrelevant. Location beats language in that first decision.
The one audience I did reach — my own country — is the worst possible demographic fit for this product. The rough figure I found: only about 1% of Vietnamese have been to more than 10 countries. A product that asks how much of the world have you seen, delivered over and over to the audience least likely to have an answer yet.

Every ounce of reach I earned was routed to the one room least likely to need what I built. The system worked perfectly. It just worked perfectly against me.

What I'm taking from it

The playbook everyone shares — make good content, go where your users are, post consistently — is quietly written by people posting from inside the audience they're targeting. For them, the algorithm's local-first instinct is a tailwind they never feel. For me, it's a wall.

I can't out-post a routing problem (more videos = more content fed to the wrong room). I can't change where I live, and I won't build a strategy on faking it. So the conclusion is uncomfortable but clear: if the machine won't carry my work to the right people, I have to carry it there myself — by hand, one person at a time.

Which is exactly where I'm headed next, and it's brutal in its own way.

Question for the international builders here: if you're launching from outside the US/EU, how did you break out of the local-distribution trap? Paid ads to force geo-targeting? Fully manual outreach? A cofounder/audience in the target market? Genuinely trying to figure out where to spend the hours.

*Full write-up, with the 3 a.m. exports and the exact moment the floor tilted: https://medium.com/@odyssa.hq/i-was-invisible-because-of-where-i-live-d1cf24a6262f