Anyone else find marketing harder than actually building the product?
We've been building Dots, a macOS app that turns the notch into a customizable workspace.
And honestly, building the app has been the fun part haha.
We've spent countless hours working on features, fixing bugs, and improving the experience. But once we started putting Dots out there, we realized something.
Getting people to discover your product is a completely different challenge.
Some days we get a handful of downloads, other days we hit 54 in a single day. We've even welcomed our first paying user!
It's exciting, but we're still figuring out what actually works when it comes to reaching the right audience.
One thing I've learned is that shipping a product doesn't automatically mean people will find it, no matter how much effort you've put into building it.
For other makers here, what was harder for you: building your product or getting your first users?
And what actually helped you get past that stage?
Replies
I don’t think one is necessarily harder than the other. They’re just two very different kinds of work. Some products are naturally easier to market, while others are much harder to get noticed.
I launched a product last month, and the feedback on the user experience has been pretty positive, but downloads are still really low. 😮💨 Definitely learning that building something people like and getting people to discover it are two very different challenges.
Getting the first users, no contest — building has an honest feedback loop. A notch bug either reproduces or it doesn't. Marketing Dots is harder because the product is the interaction: a static screenshot can't show what it feels like when the notch opens into a workspace, so you're really selling a two-second moment. And that handful-of-downloads one day, 54 the next swing makes it almost impossible to tell what actually worked. What's helped me as a solo dev is showing that moment in short clips, inside a real workflow, instead of listing features. People get it instantly or they don't, and both answers are useful data.
It's hard for a non marketing guy to run marketing, in the same way is hard for a non technical guy to run a software.
The marketing has been the toughest part of the journey for me too, I am pretty sure that a healthy marketing budget would help with that ;) but until then, I have been focusing on my SEO as I think the source of my users will come from searching for answers on how to keep their WhatsApp messages and voice notes as keepsake memories, but there is also the element of people who don't know that they want it until they know that its possible and thats where the marketing play is for me.
first users, in every startup I've worked at. what helped most was talking to people one by one, in the communities where they already hang out, long before any launch. I did 150+ of those interviews over the years, and the people from those talks were usually the first to try things and tell us what was broken.
For me, getting people to the product has been harder than shipping it. I’m trying to stick to a few places where the problem already comes up instead of posting the link everywhere. It’s slower, but the conversations are giving me better feedback than a quick spike in traffic. Still figuring it out though.
that's true, Empathy, sometimes, is not about your work being bad, but about no one seeing it. With the popularity of AI vibe coding, there is now a serious imbalance between supply and demand, and natural traffic has almost disappeared...
Jakob, getting people to find it was the harder bit for me too, and I'm building a sales tool so I've got no excuse. what worked best was finding people who'd already shown they want the thing rather than broadcasting. for Dots I'd look up the other notch apps that launched here or got posted on reddit, read who commented asking for stuff those apps don't do, and reply to them directly. 54 in a day is a good sign btw, did you work out what drove that day?
Yep it's been quite easy making different pieces of software, especially now with AI the speed is tremendous. But very hard to market them. Usually it's quite demotivating when the work you've put effort into goes unnoticed.