On the Importance of Launching *Something*

A little less than three months ago, I started the process of soft-launching waggledance.ai. To start, I published the source code, published the demo version (check it out- https://waggledance.ai) ... and then... not much else. About a month after that, pretty much the only other "marketing" work I have started to do is to post links to the code and/or demo on some niche Discord channels, and related Hacker News comment threads.

This has created a trickle of traffic, and has served as an important motivator to improve, gauge interest, collect basic usage analytics, and start making product development decisions.

Over the past three months, I have gotten about 1500 unique visitors, (probably about a third of whom are undetected Bots, or do not engage meaningfully). I have also gotten 105 Github stars.

So, about the numbers that a moderately unpopular middle school tiktoker would be pulling. Which, as a 34-year-old solo recluse founder-engineer, I am counting as a massive success!

So, what haveI learned?

• Always be launching.
• Despite my well-meaning intentions of not capturing emails/user accounts... yeah, there is a reason every single SaaS makes you sign up. I can't in good conscience drive traffic to my site knowing that most people will bounce, leaving me with only a few registered users, most others bouncing, and I will have to put in the exact same level of effort to get more the next N users.
• All early feedback is as valuable as gold. I have learned that my site can appear as "obviously made by an engineer", "overwhelming", or, "I am not sure what to do", as well as "I checked out waggledance.ai - looks awesome what it can do and really interesting to me!
  My question would be what does waggledance do that a GPT4 reply would not provide besides the (really well done) UI?
  In my experience the way the tasks are generated and broken down is pretty much what I get when I ask ChatGPT."

So, that last bit of feedback has become my guiding star for now. I need to demonstrate why and how waggledance.ai will outperform ChatGPT, which is easier said than done. So instead of saying it, come watch me!
Discord: https://discord.gg/9A8QGjUwfD
Github: https://github.com/agi-merge/waggle-dance