What I learned after 2 weeks of reading most posts on Indie Hackers

Hello! I'm Thomas, pretty new to this community, but already learned a lot reading posts everyday!

Context: spent months silently building a SaaS. Started thinking about distribution only a few days ago. Now I'm currently learning by:

Reading posts everyday on IndieHackers
Watching videos of youtube channel Starter Story
Reading posts on Reddit (r/sideproject r/microsaas)
Asking Clauds's advice

Wanted to summarize my learnings so far. Hoping to be useful to other people in my situation

Common pattern I see here on IndieHackers: build for a long time, think a good product will sell itself, then try to sell. Realize selling is super hard. I unfortunately followed this pattern too but realized pretty late.

Advice I often read to avoid this: validate early. If validation fails, don't spend time building

Most important advice I read:

be where your users are
validate early
try several times (launching 1 product with 1 distribution strategy will probably fail. Trying 10 of each will probably have at least 1 success)
talk to your users

Reality checks:

When I was still focused on building I though "when I'm ready i'll just create a ProductHunt account and launch". Fortunately I read posts here before launching, now I know if I randomly launch with a fresh ProductHunt account I would probably get nowhere
Selling is scary and more difficult than building. Going live with a landing page isn't a first victory, it's the start of the difficult step
Doing all the things right doesn't guarantee success (saw several examples of founders that: spent thousands in ads, post quality content everyday, have a product with strong added value, have good SEO, outreach, but still end up with 0 paying users, 0 votes on Product Hunt)

About Product Hunt, getting on top of the launch for one day drives a lot of attention, but it seems the most deciding factor to end up on top isn't the product itself, but who is supporting you soon after the launch.

Contributing to the community drives more attention than just selling a product. Spamming self-promotion is actually counter productive as most platforms will ban you for that, especially Reddit

Most useful posts I found on IndieHackers (especially the discussions):

My current stage:

building an employee happiness platform, targeting companies willing to improve employee well-being consistently, not just measure statistics to end up on the best workplaces list or to use as perk when hiring
very basic landing page online for 2 weeks - about 100 visits, 0 button clicks. Suspecting most visits are bots/scrapers
social media accounts created, empty for now, 0 followers
content in preparation (blog and social media posts)
still learning a lot everyday