I stopped building features. I started building distribution. Here’s why.
Hi IH,
Like many founders, I fell in love with the product.
I’m not even a developer — but I built a SaaS (Linkeme) with almost full automation: it generates, illustrates, and schedules posts across social media platforms, fully AI-driven.
No code. No manual steps. I was proud.
I kept shipping features.
I refined the UX.
I made the engine smarter.
I even added a CTA tone optimizer and LLM-powered visual generation.
It worked beautifully.
But… no one came.
We had beta testers, mostly local in Luxembourg. Some early adopters. Great feedback.
Yet no organic growth.
No traffic from Google.
No viral loop.
No Product Hunt launch (yet).
I realized something:
I was building a perfect engine in an empty stadium.
So I stopped coding.
Instead, I started:
Publishing on Dev.to, Indie Hackers, and Hashnode
Telling our story (the real one — the personal one)
Engaging in comments, not just posting and ghosting
Building backlinks (slow, painful, but working)
Testing Reddit + SEO posts
Planning Product Hunt + paid push properly
Talking to 10 users per week
It’s early, but it’s working.
So here’s my question to you:
What’s been your best free distribution hack so far?
I’d love to hear stories from others in the same phase.
Because if you build it… they won’t come.
Unless you tell them.
Wow — this hit home hard. I’ve been in the exact same loop.
I’m a dev and just launched QuickStartCommerce , an eCommerce SaaS starter kit I spent months polishing. Authentication, Stripe, admin dashboard — everything works great. But just like you said… if no one knows, it doesn’t matter.
Lately, I’ve shifted focus to distribution too — especially Indie Hackers, Reddit, and slow SEO. Early days, but traffic is finally trickling in.
Really appreciate you sharing the mindset shift here. It’s a reminder that perfect products don’t sell themselves — but honest stories and conversations can.
Would love to hear how your PH launch goes when it’s live!
Totally get you. It’s wild how much time we spend obsessing over product quality — and then realize silence is the only thing waiting on the other side of launch 😅
Your stack sounds rock-solid, and I 100% relate to that moment when you shift your mindset from “build more” to “talk more.” For me, once I started sharing the why behind Linkeme (not just the what), people actually started caring. It’s uncomfortable, but it works.
We’re aiming for our PH launch in the next couple of weeks. I’ll definitely ping you when it’s live — and I’d love to keep each other in the loop on what works and what flops 🙌
Rooting for your journey too — sounds like you’re right at the edge of the breakthrough. Let’s keep pushing.
Wow, this hit home. That silence after launch can feel brutal — especially after pouring so much into building something great.
Totally agree: the shift from “perfecting features” to “telling the story” is uncomfortable but powerful. Once I started sharing the pain points that led me to build our eCommerce starter kit, the response changed completely.
Would love to stay connected — cheering you on for your PH launch! Let’s definitely keep each other posted on what’s working, and what’s not. Rooting for Linkeme and your journey ahead 🚀
And an amazing update, I have got my first sale on codester :) Would you like to view the codester link?
For those who’ve scaled a niche SaaS from a local market to broader adoption — what was the single most effective channel (or tactic) that helped you break out of your initial circle ?
Great question. We’re still early at Linkeme, but here’s what gave us our first real push beyond our local Luxembourg market:
We stopped building in silence and started sharing our story.
Not just the product — the why, the struggles, the personal journey behind it. That post on Indie Hackers brought over 200 visits in 24h, and it wasn’t about features, it was about people.
That visibility created warm intros, feedback, reposts, and a few early adopters from outside our usual network. More than any paid ad ever did at this stage.
So my answer?
Honest storytelling, told consistently, in places where your people hang out.
It won’t scale forever, but it breaks the first wall better than anything else we tried.
Love this post, Julien. “Perfect engine in an empty stadium” — that metaphor will stay with me.
One underrated growth tactic I’ve seen work: turning early users into evangelists with mini case studies or “spotlight” posts. Makes them feel seen and creates social proof.
Curious how your Reddit + SEO combo is going — did you find any specific subreddit format that worked best?
Hey Julien,
I really appreciate you sharing your story!
It truly resonates with me as a Growth marketer; I often see people create something amazing but hesitate to reach out for growth marketing help, thinking that their product will naturally attract customers. Unfortunately, that’s just not the case in 99% of instances.
Since you’re in the B2B SaaS space, here are a few friendly suggestions:
- Consider cold outreach through email and LinkedIn.
- Consider investing in paid media channels such as Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, and Facebook Ads. I suggest consulting with an expert in B2B SaaS. Hiring someone who specializes in e-commerce campaigns would ultimately waste your time and money, believe me.
- Dive into SEO by researching what your competitors are doing. Check out inspiring success stories like Zapier and see how you can apply similar strategies to your product’s SEO. I've helped to use this angle for one of my clients, we grew organic traffic to 500,000 monthly visitors with a 0.4% visitor-to-paid client conversion rate.
I’d love to hear if you find this helpful!
Ihar
I’ve tested both LinkedIn and Facebook ads — honestly, didn’t get great results. The targeting felt off and conversions were super low for the cost. For now, I’m doubling down on SEO instead. It’s slower, but the intent is way stronger and the traffic feels more qualified. Curious if anyone had better luck with Meta or if I just didn’t crack the right combo.
I've come across similar stories from SaaS founders quite often, and I truly understand where you're coming from. It might be really helpful to consult with someone who's managed campaigns with a monthly budget of 500K for SaaS. Have you ever thought about focusing on just one channel until it starts showing results? If you’re new to paid media, I wonder what makes you feel it will work out so well for you? Times have changed since 2000, and the bar has definitely been raised. It could be beneficial to either teach yourself or consider hiring an expert to guide you through the process. LinkedIn Ads bar is far too high right now.
Thanks for your thoughtful input. You’re absolutely right about how much the game has changed and how easily money can vanish in paid media if you’re not extremely calculated.
That’s exactly why I’ve kept the ad budget low for now. I do plan to spend, but only once I’ve fully tapped into the lower-cost growth levers, SEO, community, content, and direct outreach. For a bootstrapped SaaS, survival often means learning to grow lean before you grow fast. Living frugally isn’t a weakness, it’s the strategy.
Appreciate your insights, and always open to feedback from those further down the road ! Have a great day !
I agree with you overall, Julien. Let me phrase this more clearly. I've relied on SEO for a long time, and out of 100 articles, more than 60 made it to the first page of results. However, SEO typically requires at least six months to show results, so it's beneficial to treat it as a back-end project while generating sales through other channels. Without this, you risk losing customers over a year, resulting in only a small amount of organic traffic that doesn't convert. Achieving 100 conversions through SEO overnight is unrealistic. Additionally, organic clicks have dropped by 60% since Google introduced AI responses. As you're just starting out, you might not be aware of this; most SEO content today is created by AI, too.
Love this mindset shift. I’m in the early days of building something tiny around mindset books — and your post made me rethink how I’m spending my time.
Curious: What was the biggest thing that changed once you focused on distribution?
Thanks — and I really like your angle around mindset books, that sounds both valuable and unique.
To answer your question: once I focused on distribution, the biggest change wasn’t just traffic — it was clarity.
Before, I was building in the dark: polishing features, tweaking UI, second-guessing myself constantly. But once I started putting Linkeme out there, getting reactions, questions, and feedback — I started learning what really mattered to users.
Some things I thought were “must-have” didn’t matter at all. And some features I built in 30 minutes ended up being the reason people signed up.
Distribution brought me closer to real people, not personas. That shift — from building for users to building with users — changed everything.
Let me know when you post more about your project, I’d love to follow your journey!
Hello, Yes same story here.
I am developer myself, so I can build and have built products fast, but everytime I stuck at marketing.
So I have started using this platform (so far had a good response), product hunt and reddit, rather than general social media.
Also have created this platform called Next Big Product (https://www.indiehackers.com/product/next-big-product), where we are aiming to provide real solution to this exact problem of marketing. Check it out. (Not writing this comment for just a promotion btw :))
Hey! Totally hear you on that — I come from a non-dev background, so I’ve had the opposite issue: struggled with building at first, but ended up doing all the marketing myself for lack of choice 😅
Glad to hear you’re getting good traction with IH + PH + Reddit — I’ve had mixed results with Reddit, probably need to go deeper into specific subreddits.
I’ll definitely check out Next Big Product — sounds like a very relevant initiative. Honestly, anything that helps solve the “great product, no visibility” paradox is welcome!
Let’s keep in touch and swap notes — growth is a beast, but it’s better tackled together
Hey, same story here. I have been coding for 1 year and 10 months now, and I am running out of cash. I started out by building an AI voice agent, but did not find a niche so I pivoted towards creating an omni channel customer service bot.
I love coding so much, but when urgency came I stopped (1 month ago). I started doing cold e-mailing, reaching out on Linkedin, posting technical posts, valuable content, videos. I find it so boring and demoralising, because you get so many people that just do not reply.
I came up with a strategy where I send the bot already trained on the lead's website, but that actually cost me a bit, engagement is good but conversions are not.
If someone has any feedback on what I can do to improve my maketing/sales process, I would be so grateful.
I feel you, hard. The emotional shift from “building something you love” to “doing things that drain you just to survive” is brutal — especially when the silence on the other end feels louder than any rejection.
You’re doing the right things: outreach, content, personalized demos — that’s already a huge step most devs skip. The problem is, early-stage marketing feels unfairly inefficient. 100 DMs, 3 replies. It’s not you — it’s the game.
One thing that helped me with Linkeme: I reframed “cold outreach” as “finding the one person who actually gets it.” I stopped trying to convince everyone and focused on the ones who already feel the pain I solve. It made the grind more bearable.
Also — if you’re sending a pre-trained bot (which is a killer idea), maybe test sending a loom walkthrough instead? Lower infra cost, same personalization, easier to scale manually.
You’re clearly talented and resilient — the hardest mix to maintain. Happy to chat or trade notes if it helps. You’re not alone in this.
Love this thank you for answering, I'd love to share useful resources, etc...
Same here — I spent nearly a year building without doing any real marketing. Looking back, I definitely regret not starting earlier.
Related to the question about distribution, I would say for me it was programmatic SEO translated to different languages. My previous product in peak was gaining 5k clicks from google per day completely on autopilot 🙃
Thanks for sharing — and wow, 5k clicks/day on autopilot is impressive!
I can totally relate to that “build first, market never” loop. I think a lot of us dev-first founders fall into it. For Linkeme, I built for months without thinking distribution. Now that we’re finally focusing on it, I realize how much traction I couldhave had earlier.
Programmatic SEO is super intriguing — especially with multilingual reach. Any chance you’d be open to sharing how you structured it (landing pages, content sources, etc.)? I’m considering a similar approach to scale beyond local (we’re based in Luxembourg) and it’s tough to find real case studies like yours.
Appreciate the insight 🙌
Hi Julien,
Sure, I am actually open to show my specific use case and web, that I did. It really depends on the niche you're in, for my use case it was pretty obvious.
If you'll have 30 minutes on weekend, I would be happy to show it to you(no strings attached). Send me your calendly and I'll book a meeting or write to me on X (@danshipit).
Programmatic SEO is great, but when it comes to multilingual reach you should also keep in mind, that sometimes you receive a lot of traffic from "poor" countries and it might be hard to sell to them.
thanks I will contact you on X
Hi Julien,
I found time to write an article about my experience with programmatic SEO. You can check it out here: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-i-used-ai-seo-to-hit-200k-monthly-clicks-from-google-side-project-breakdown-342edb179d
Thanks Dan — just read it and… wow. Honestly, this goes way deeper than I expected. Super clear, super actionable.
You really broke it down in a way that makes it accessible, even for those of us not doing directory-style projects.
Now my mind is spinning on how to adapt some of that to Linkeme. I dropped a longer reply in the main post, but just wanted to say here again: massive thanks for taking the time to share this 🙏
Looking forward to your next deep dive — especially around BlogBowl.
Julien
This hits home. Building a great product is just the start — if no one knows about it, it won’t matter. At Saaslogic, we’ve also shifted focus from just adding features to actively sharing our story and engaging with the community.
We’re publishing content to educate SaaS founders about subscription management, participating in discussions, and slowly building backlinks to grow organic traffic. It’s a long game, but seeing early signs of traction already feels rewarding.
Like you said, it’s not enough to build it — you have to tell the story and connect with users consistently. Would love to hear more distribution hacks from others, too!
This hits. Most early builds stall not because of product quality but because no one’s owning traction.
I work with founders mid-build and “distribution clarity” is often more valuable than another sprint. I really like how you framed the transition.