Zarmeen Zehra

I spent the week trying to post every day on LinkedIn and X because people say you have to build in public to get users. I made myself write updates even when nothing interesting happened in the code.

By Friday I just felt completely worn out.

I checked my analytics. There were two new signups. It honestly made me want to close my laptop and take a week off. Putting your work out there for strangers to judge is just so hard on your mind.

Then I saw someone else post about making thousands of dollars in a weekend. It is so easy to feel like you are failing when you compare your backend to someone Highlight reel.

Mazedur Rahaman recently brought up a good point about how AI changes the way we price small client fixes. I do freelance development and a bug that used to take me an hour to track down can now be found in ten minutes with AI.. The careful parts like testing, on a staging server and making sure nothing else broke still take the same amount of time. So if I keep charging by the hour I m basically getting paid less for being more efficient. For those of you doing client work do you still charge based on the time it took or are you shifting to charging for the risk and the final result the client receives?

I launched my side project yesterday. Received only four upvotes.

I spent the week preparing the launch video and writing what I thought was the perfect first comment. Then there was silence. I kept refreshing the page while other apps received, over three hundred votes in one hour.

It really drained my motivation to open the codebase today.

If you have experienced a launch that failed how do you overcome the embarrassment. Keep moving forward? Have you found users elsewhere?