Dispatch
All Your Webhooks. One Place.
Today I launched the first demo video for the project I've been building for ~6 months — Dispatch, a webhook management tool.
I had a whole launch plan. Twitter thread. LinkedIn post. Show HN. r/SideProject. Indie Hackers. I figured I'd hit them all in the first 24 hours and ride whatever wave came out of it.
Here's what actually happened in the first 4 hours:
Show HN: Flagged within 5 minutes. 1 point. Dead.
r/SideProject: Auto-removed. Probably the YouTube link in the body. Still figuring out the exact trigger.
Twitter: 600 impressions on the opening tweet of the thread. 2 likes. One of them was me.
LinkedIn: Pending. Honestly afraid to look.
I'm writing this post partly to vent, partly because if anyone else is about to launch their first video / first product / first anything, you should know the launch day fantasy and the launch day reality are very different things.
What I think went wrong:
1. I treated "launch day" like a single event instead of a 30-day campaign. Every channel I hit was getting my best polished pitch, when most of these audiences want the story — the messy, building-in-public version.
2. I underestimated platform-specific automod. HN's algorithm clearly thinks anything from a low-karma indie account is spam by default in 2026. r/SideProject is even worse.
3. I had no warm audience. No newsletter, no Twitter followers who care, no Discord community. Cold launches into algorithmic feeds in 2026 are basically impossible without an existing distribution surface.
What I'm going to do differently:
- Spend the next 30 days commenting on HN / Reddit / Twitter threads in my space, building actual account reputation before posting again.
- Write a technical deep-dive blog post about the part of Dispatch I'm most proud of (a localhost webhook tunnel that replaces ngrok for dev workflows). Submit that to HN in a few weeks instead of another Show HN.
- Stop trying to launch everywhere at once. Pick one channel per week, do it really well, learn from the data.
Where I'd love your advice:
1. For those of you who've done a "second launch" — at what point did you actually have an audience that responded? Was there a single thing that flipped it?
2. Anyone here had luck with newsletter submissions (TLDR, Console, Bytes) as a first-launch channel for a dev tool? Curious if it's worth the effort vs. social.
3. Is the "I built a tool because I kept rewriting the same code" framing tired at this point? It feels honest to me, but I see a version of it in every IH post and I'm starting to wonder.
For context — Dispatch is a webhook management layer. You give services like GitHub, Stripe, Linear, etc. one URL. It verifies signatures per provider, filters/transforms the payload, renders per-platform message templates for Discord/Slack/Telegram, and delivers with retries and replay. The CLI tunnel forwards live production webhooks to your localhost during dev so you don't need ngrok.
Happy to share the (currently humbling) numbers, the demo video, or the architecture if anyone's curious. Mostly here for the advice and the commiseration.
— Ari
I've been building integrations for years, and the webhook story is always the same: stand up an endpoint, parse the payload, hope nothing breaks, build retry logic from scratch, repeat for every service.
Dispatch fixes that. It's a single platform to receive, filter, transform, and deliver webhooks from any source to Discord, Slack, Telegram, or any HTTP endpoint — with automatic retries, delivery tracking, and a real-time event feed.
What it does:
Connect sources like GitHub, GitLab, Stripe, Jira, Linear, Sentry, PayPal, and more — or any generic webhook
Route events with filters (match on headers or body fields) and routing rules
Transform payloads with JSONata before delivery
Customize messages per platform with templates
Monitor every delivery attempt with full visibility into failures and retries
Forward webhooks to localhost with the CLI tunnel for local development
Stack: Go API, Next.js dashboard, Supabase (Postgres + Auth), Redis (asynq workers)
It's live at https://dispatch.tech — would love feedback from the community. What webhook pain points do you deal with?
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