What finally helped me get out of the “building but no users” loop
One thing I’ve noticed (in my own work and others here):
Most solo makers don’t struggle with building.
They struggle with choosing where their product actually matters.
For a long time, I thought the path was:
build something useful
improve it
send cold emails / post online
wait for users
But nothing really moved.
Not because the product was bad.
Because it wasn’t tied to a specific situation where someone needed it right now.
What changed for me was this:
Instead of asking
“Who could use this?”
I started asking
“When does this become urgent?”
Example:
A generic tool = “nice to have”
A situational tool = “I need this today”
analytics → useful
analytics before a big investor update → urgent
automation → useful
automation when a founder is drowning in manual ops → urgent
Once you find that moment:
outreach becomes easier (you know who to talk to)
messaging becomes clearer
people actually reply
At early stage, it feels like a distribution problem.
But a lot of times it’s actually a timing + context problem.
Curious if others have seen something similar:
Was there a moment where your product suddenly started making sense to users?
What changed — the product or the context?
The urgency framing maps exactly to what I've seen with website clients. 'Website optimisation' is nice to have. 'Website optimisation when you've had zero enquiries for three months' is urgent. Same product, same offer — the only difference is catching the person at the moment of frustration, not before it. That's the entire reason search intent matters more than audience size.
Exactly. The product didn’t change, the trigger did.
That’s why intent beats audience.
You don’t need more reach, you need to show up when the pain becomes non-ignorable.
Exactly this. Timing the message to the moment of pain is the whole game.
Mid-problem is the key phrase. The product didn't change, the timing did. That's what separates 'building for a market' from 'building for a moment' — and the moment is usually where traction lives. Once you catch people at that point, the whole motion shifts from push to pull.
And that’s where most GTM breaks.
People target personas, not states.
But demand is created in a specific situation, not a static audience.
Catch the state, and you don’t have to push as hard.
States not personas is a really clean way to put it. My best conversions came from people who had just tweeted about wrist pain or complained about typing all day. Not "productivity enthusiasts" as a category. People in that exact moment of frustration. The hard part is building a system to catch those moments consistently instead of stumbling into them. Still figuring that one out.
This is the part that took me a while to figure out too. Catching those moments randomly works, but doing it consistently is a different game. What started working for us was not trying to predict the moment, but instead staying close to places where those moments show up like people already engaging with similar tools or talking about the problem. Its not perfect, but it increases the chances of hitting that mid problem timing way more than starting from cold audiences.
Not trying to predict the moment is actually the right mental model. Prediction leads to agenda-heavy conversations. Staying loose means when the moment shows up, you're already in the right posture. We stopped scheduling 'user discovery calls' and started treating every support ticket as a live conversation opportunity. Conversion to insight went up because people weren't guarded — they thought they were just getting help.
yeah, staying close to those environments changes everything. when you’re around people already engaging with similar tools, you don’t have to predict urgency you start noticing patterns in who hits that mid-problem state more often. some segments repeatedly show up in that moment, which makes it much easier to focus distribution instead of trying to manufacture intent from cold audiences.
The "when does this become urgent" framing is the right one. I spent a long time positioning around the feature set instead of the moment. The product didn't change but everything shifted when I stopped asking who could use it and started targeting people actively in the middle of the problem. Cold outreach response rates went up immediately because the timing was right, not because the message got better.
Exactly this....nothing changed except timing.
When you catch people mid-problem, the product explains itself then messaging just becomes obvious.
The 'building but no users' loop is one of the most common failure modes and the hardest to see from inside it. Every feature feels like it could be the unlock, so you keep building instead of distributing.
The mental shift that breaks it: treat distribution as the product for the next 30 days, not the actual product. Show up where your ICP hangs out, add genuine value to their conversations, and let them discover what you're building. The constraint forces you to talk to real people instead of hypothetical users.
Running this approach right now to validate a Solopreneur Notion OS - 300+ IH community comments, no paid ads, pure organic engagement. It doubles as distribution and user research simultaneously. Would love to know what finally broke your loop - was it a person, a framework, or just forcing yourself to ship?
this is such a strong way to frame it — “when does this become urgent” changes everything
I’ve seen a similar pattern with early-stage SaaS — most struggle isn’t distribution, it’s not being tied to a clear moment of need
once that context is clear, everything from messaging to conversion becomes easier
curious — have you tried mapping these “urgent moments” to specific channels where users are already looking?
The loop of building in a vacuum is a hard habit to break. Most of us find it easier to write code than to have an awkward conversation with a stranger. Real feedback usually feels uncomfortable because it shatters our own assumptions about the product. Once you move past that fear, you save months of work on features that nobody actually wants to pay for.
Yes...most people avoid the conversations because they break the story they’ve built around the product.
but that’s also where the signal is.
the faster those assumptions get challenged,
the faster the product finds a real buying context.
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