I launched two weeks ago. Payments work, people can create accounts, everything is live. And nobody is there.
So yesterday I did the thing everyone tells you to do. I spent a full day listing my product everywhere I could find. Here is what I actually learned, because most of the advice I read skipped this part.
BetaList — paid listings start at $39 and go up to $299. The audience is founders and early adopters, so the fit is fine, but the whole site does around 11K visits a month. The only thing I think is worth paying for there is the DR 76 dofollow backlink. If you go in expecting customers, you will be disappointed.
Betabound — completely free, and I skipped it anyway. Their testers are consumer tech hobbyists who want to keep gadgets and collect gift cards. Nothing wrong with that, but they cannot evaluate a B2B tool because they have no pipeline to test it on. Free is not the same as worth your time.
Indie Hackers — the best audience fit for me, but engagement has clearly cooled. I looked at their Build Board and the number one post of the day had 30 votes, while number four was IPTV streaming spam. Low bar to get noticed, but that also tells you something about who is voting.
Peerlist — you need 100% profile completion before you can launch on their Launchpad. Nobody mentions this anywhere. Budget an hour.
dev.to — you are reading it. The one thing I would definitely do again here is cross-post with a canonical URL back to my own blog, so the SEO stays on my domain.
Total result so far: a few visits, no signups. Which is fine, two weeks is nothing. But it made me realise I am doing motion, not marketing.
So here is my honest question to this community.
Where did your first 10 real users come from? Not the theory. The actual thing that happened.
And more specifically, because this is where I think I am weakest:
- What signals do you use to find people who have the problem right now, instead of people who might have it someday?
- Does anyone have a search, a filter, a saved query that reliably surfaces those people? A GitHub search, a specific subreddit, a job posting pattern, a changelog you watch. Anything concrete.
- If you sold a dev tool or a B2B SaaS as a solo founder or a small team, what was the first channel that produced something you could repeat?
I would rather hear one boring thing that worked than ten clever things that might.
And the self-serving part, which I would rather say out loud than hide at the bottom in small text.
The thing I built is called kōdlo. It is a sales workspace for people who build B2B SaaS and then have to sell it themselves, which is exactly the problem I am describing above. It is live, with a free 7-day trial.
If you feel like helping a founder who is visibly struggling, go and break it. Anyone who reports a real bug gets 50% off their first three months. Product bugs and broken flows please, not security testing — we are a small team and I cannot run a proper bounty program right now. Report through the in-app button or just reply here.
No pressure. The questions above are the real reason I am posting.
