I spent 4 months building a SaaS that got 0 signups on launch day — here's what actually worked

I woke up on launch day expecting at least a trickle of signups. I'd spent 4 months building, polished the landing page until it looked clean, wrote a launch tweet, and posted in a couple of Slack groups.

The result: 0 signups. Not one. Even my mom didn't sign up.

I'd fallen into the classic builder trap: assuming if you build it, they will come. They don't. Indie Hackers knows this better than anyone. The product can be solid, but distribution is the actual differentiator.

Here's what I did next.

Step one: I stopped building features nobody was seeing. Cold. No new features for 30 days.

Step two: I went where my target users already hang out — Reddit. I spent a week just reading subreddits related to my niche, not promoting anything. I noted the recurring questions, the frustrations people kept posting, the threads where someone asked "is there a tool that does X?" and the answer was always "not really."

Step three: I started answering those questions genuinely. When someone asked a problem my SaaS solved, I'd write a detailed, helpful reply and only mention my tool at the end as an option. No linkspam, no "check out my startup!" — just real value first.

The shift was night and day. From 0 signups on launch day to 47 paying users in 6 weeks. Reddit became my primary acquisition channel because the conversations were already happening — I just needed to show up.

This is actually the exact problem I built reddbot.ai (https://reddbot.ai) to solve — finding the right conversations on Reddit at scale without spending hours manually scrolling. It monitors subreddits for relevant discussions, surfaces high-intent threads, and helps you engage authentically without being spammy. Because the worst feeling isn't a buggy product — it's a working product that nobody knows exists.

The lesson that stuck with me: distribution beats product every time. You can have the best tool in the world, but if you're invisible, it doesn't matter.

What's been your biggest distribution channel as an indie founder? I'm genuinely curious where people are seeing the best return right now, because the landscape changes fast.