The biggest lie we tell ourselves about indie hacking is that building the product is the hard part

I talk to so many indie hackers who fall into the exact same trap. They treat marketing like an afterthought. They spend ninety percent of their energy perfecting features that users might not even care about, and then they spend ten percent of a Tuesday dropping a quick link on Twitter and hoping for a miracle.

The truth is that distribution beats a great product every single day of the week.

A mediocre product with smart distribution will almost always outperform a masterpiece that nobody knows exists. We need to stop treating marketing like a dirty word or something we will figure out "later" after the code is done.

This exact frustration is actually why I started building LaunchOnIt. I realized that indie makers needed a platform that does not just give you a 24-hour spike and leave you stranded, but actually bakes long-term discovery and SEO into the core process.

Distribution has to be built into the product loops from day one. Whether that means building organic SEO mechanisms, automated directory pipelines, or community hooks, marketing is just another engineering problem waiting to be solved.

How do you guys split your time right now? Are you still building first and marketing later, or has distribution become your primary focus?