One year solo, Picki at ~600 DAU — the lesson that surprised me

Picki is the fastest-growing of the 5 apps I've built solo over the past year. It's at ~600 daily users now.

But the honest lesson from year one: building was the easy part. I'm an engineer, I can ship. Distribution, pricing, getting it in front of the right people — that's what I'm bad at, and learning from zero. My paid conversion is low enough to be embarrassing.

I wrote up the whole messy first year — the apps, the wins, and the parts I'm still bad at:

https://orcakobo.com/blog/solo-app-builder-first-year/

For those further along: what was the single thing that unlocked distribution for you?