BrainTube

I built BrainTube's first version in a few days.

Not a mockup — a working product. The first feature was pulling in YouTube videos and transcribing them, and it grew from there into a knowledge base that captures what you read and watch, links it into a graph automatically, and stays queryable from whatever AI you use.

A few days. For something a team of fifty would have struggled to ship in a year under legacy conditions. That wasn't possible twelve months ago, and I don't think enough people have sat with how strange that is.

Here's what I realized once it was working: building was never going to be the hard part.

AI has leveled the playing field for shipping. Anyone can get an MVP — or a genuinely full product — out the door now. But it closes exactly one gap. It does nothing for the next one: getting real people to see it, use it, and tell you what's wrong with it. Customer feedback still has to be gathered and understood the old way, and no model does that for you.

I knew distribution would be the hard part. I've lived on the internet for twenty years and I've always paid attention to how attention actually compiles into a trend. I still underestimated the friction.

In one day trying to share this: one platform's filter removed my post before a human saw it, another removed it outright, a third wouldn't let me post at all until I'd earned standing, and a fourth flagged it within three minutes. Every one of those was working as designed. New account, no history, own product — that's the exact profile the gates exist to stop. I don't think they're wrong to exist. But it's a strange thing to build a full product in days and then spend a day unable to get twenty people to look at it.

For context on why this is a shift for me: most of my career has been a novel B2B business (VR Express) in an economically challenged region. In B2B you have a known path to a buyer — relationships, direct conversations, a room to be in. Losing that and facing an anonymous internet audience instead is a completely different skill, and it's the one I'm now deliberately trying to build.

I do believe distribution is achievable. It's just the tedious part, and there's no shortcut being sold that's real.

Which is the other reason I'm posting this here. I've watched the influencer economy fill the internet with courses about how to get rich, and I have no interest in joining it. The most I'll do is a Substack where people can see the actual projects and workflows firsthand — what worked, what didn't, in real time. Not a course. Just the build, in the open.

So, my genuine ask for this community: for those of you who got past this stage — what actually worked for distribution? Not the "post everywhere" advice. The specific thing that got your first real users when you had no audience and no standing anywhere.

I'll share everything I learn on the way through.