My launch date is not mine. Two corporations own it.

PostSider is done. The backend works, the scheduler works, the OAuth flows work. I cannot launch it.

I am waiting on API review from Meta and TikTok. Until a reviewer at each company clicks approve, my product technically exists and practically does not. That is the whole post. I want to talk about what that feels like when you are solo and what I am actually doing with the wait.

What I underestimated

I thought platform risk meant "they might ban me later." It does not. It starts before you have a single user.

Every social platform gates its publishing API behind a review process, and the review is not about your code. It is about your paperwork. Privacy policy live at a real URL. Terms of service. A demo video showing exactly the permission scopes you asked for. Business verification. A use case description that matches, word for word, what your app actually does.

TikTok rejected me once. The reason was the Website URL field in the developer portal. Not the scopes, not the use case, not the video. One wrong field, back of the queue.

LinkedIn is worse in a different way. The Community Management API needs its own application, separate from whatever you already have approved. So the work I did for LinkedIn access does not carry over. Fresh app, fresh review.

That is three separate bureaucracies, each with its own timeline, and my launch is the intersection of all three.

The part nobody warns you about

When you are solo, waiting is not neutral. It is expensive.

I work a full time night shift job that has nothing to do with software. My build time is the hours around it. Every week PostSider sits in review is a week I spent building something I cannot sell, while my energy budget stays exactly the same size.

There is also a motivation tax. Shipping gives you a feedback loop. No launch means no signups, no churn, no support tickets, nothing to react to. You are building in a vacuum and telling yourself the reviewer will come through. Some mornings I believe it more than others.

What I am doing instead of refreshing the dashboard

Building the parts that do not need approval. The scheduler, the queue logic, the media handling, the multi account model. None of that cares whether Meta said yes. When approval lands I want zero days between "approved" and "live."

Going deep on the platform that already works. Not every integration is gated the same way. I would rather ship a tool that does one platform properly than a tool that does five platforms in theory.

Betting on a niche the gatekeepers do not control. PostSider is aimed at agencies and at AI agent workflows, meaning the publishing step at the end of an automated content pipeline. That positioning matters here, because agent-driven publishing is a use case that barely existed when these API review processes were designed. It is also the reason I open sourced it under AGPL-3.0. If a platform decides my hosted product is a problem, the code does not disappear.

Keeping a second product alive. I also sell a desktop app, one time purchase, no platform review, no API gatekeeper. Around 400 trials, 3 sales, which is a humbling number but it is a number I control. Two products with completely different risk profiles was not a strategy at first. It is now.

The plan B I actually have

Self hosting. AGPL means anyone can run PostSider on their own infrastructure with their own API credentials. If my app never gets blessed by Meta, users who already have their own developer access can still use the product. That is a smaller business than the SaaS, but it is not zero, and it turns platform rejection from an extinction event into a bad quarter.

The honest version: plan B is worse than plan A. I am not going to pretend otherwise. It just is not nothing, and having it is why I can keep working on this instead of quietly abandoning it.

What I would tell past me

Start the API review process on day one, before the product is finished. The review is the long pole, not the code. I built first and applied second, and that ordering cost me 8 weeks