I'm good at building. Marketing is a different story.
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Hey — I'm James, a software developer from Australia with 20+ years building things professionally.
Most of my career I've been the person behind the scenes — solving hard technical problems, shipping reliable software, making other people's ideas work. Unravl is the first thing I've built entirely for myself, and now I'm figuring out the part they don't teach developers: how to actually get it in front of people who might find it useful.
No funding. No growth team. No playbook. Just me, the product, and a lot of learning in public.
If you've been down this road — builder trying to find an audience — I'd genuinely love to hear what worked for you. And if Unravl sounds like something you'd use, even better.
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This is literally me 6 months ago 😅 What helped me was just launching anyway and figuring out marketing
as I go. Just launched InterviewAI last week still learning. Good luck with Unravl!
Hi @retzero
Welcome to Product Hunt.
The problem you have set out to solve is great!
If you are open to feedback (as stated in your PH launch comment), I have a few direct but useful ones to share with you.
Let me know, I will share the feedback on this thread itself.
@ashok_nayak thank you, I’d appreciate any feedback you have.
@retzero Sure...
What I liked:
It downloads a mobile app while visiting the site, and that's really thoughtful cuz it must remain a mobile app for easy access.
What I suppose can be improved:
I see a rigid pricing module for an early app, 7 days free access for all pricing plans. As a builder, I totally understand you are being fair to your users by giving them something to try out before subscribing. But early stage apps generally offer flexible tiers. The lowest tier remains free for lifetime but with very limited features. But in your case, every pricing plan can eventually seem as a cost burden to your users, even if that's not your intention.
Hope that helps...and again nothing to worry about.
@ashok_nayak thank you, I appreciate your input. very good point on the pricing model. I like the option of a cut-down free plan
I relate to this a lot. Building has always been the easier part for me too. The hard part is figuring out how to get the right people to even notice what you've built.
One thing I'm slowly realizing is that distribution and conversations matter earlier than most of us technical founders expect. Writing code feels productive, but talking to people who might actually use the product often teaches more than another week of building.
Still figuring it out myself while building my own product, but the biggest shift for me has been trying to shorten the loop between building something -> showing it to someone -> seeing how they react.
@pashupathi so true, I might need to do some old fashioned leg work in the coming weeks.
The best thing I've done for marketing is honestly just going out and talking to people.
Go to tech events, introduce yourself, talk about what you're building. The first few times you'll be shaky — stumbling over your own pitch, unsure what to emphasize. But eventually you find a flow. And then something interesting happens: you start noticing how people react to certain words or ideas. That feedback is gold. You take it back and refine.
Get a test audience.
Doesn't need to be huge — 500 to 2,500 people. Start emailing them. Test different messaging. What you hear in person and what you see in the data will start to inform each other.
Getting that audience is the hard part though. You probably won't have one on day one. So you have to build it from whatever you've got. For us, we ran a made-to-order clothing brand with creators before pivoting to tech a fully tech product — so that existing community became our test audience for the new version of the product. You might have a newsletter list, a Discord, early beta users, even just people who signed up and never came back.
Start there.
If you're an engineer and this feels foreign, here's the simple version:
Go talk to people in person. Pay attention to what makes them lean in.
Collect a small audience you can email.
Test different messages.
Track what gets clicks and replies.
Repeat.
There's no playbook that replaces the reps.
@fernando_gabriel_leon_molina I love this. thank you
Same boat here James. I built a site with 90+ free browser tools (beginthings.com) and the building part was the easy part. Getting anyone to notice it has been way harder than any coding challenge. What has been working a little for me is answering questions on Quora and writing articles that mention specific tools rather than trying to market the whole site at once. Still figuring it out honestly. Would love to hear what ends up working for you with Unravl.
@sourav_mahapatra1 thanks for the tips. good luck with beginthings, it's an impressive looking website.
I totally relate. This sales and marketing stuff is hard! I haven't figured out what works yet, but not giving up helps 🤷♂️ I think it takes time and practice to refine the message, to see how it hits different people, to really focus on the value of the product and not just it's features. I'm still learning and in the same struggle for people's attention, haha. Best wishes to you!
@scottruth thanks Scott. I've built an in-house marketing team of agents I use and it seems to be giving me good insights into marketing for someone "not in the game" and you hit the nail on the head, it has mentioned trying different approaches and forming a good idea of what works and what doesn't over time. it's exciting space to be in after hitting a keyboard coding for so many years. good luck with your builds too
@retzero Wow, how exactly did you set up the team of agents? Using Clawdbot?
@scottruth I thought about using claw but ended up building it myself to ensure I have as much control and oversight of the entire process as possible. It's a private repo with an Actions workflow that runs by a cron every few days. it's working for me at the moment, who knows, I may migrate to claw eventually if I find some time. I've kept some things manual such as posting to platforms, purely so I'm across what is being done and what is being communicated. haven't taken the plunge to automatically post for me yet, thats a big one for me. In saying that I haven't actually used it in any posts yet, I'm basically building a rollout calendar at the moment in between my full-time job, kids, sport etc etc. We need more hours in a day!!!
@retzero wow, that's impressive! I share your concerns with handing over the reigns. Cool that you know how to build your own setup.
I feel this. Building the product is the easy part — getting people to notice it is a completely different challenge. I’m going through the same thing right now launching something of my own. Respect for putting it out there and learning in public. Curious to see how Unravl evolves.
@krisnawiyana appreciate you taking the time to post. I would love to hear from you when yours is up and running. I'm finding there's lots of reading trying to understand what works for people and, more importantly., what doesn't. It's an ever evolving learning curve and something I'm excited about.
@retzero Totally agree, there’s so much advice out there and half the challenge is figuring out what actually works vs what just sounds good in theory. I’m still learning as I go as well. Will definitely share when mine is live. Good luck with the launch of Unravl. it’s cool seeing more builders putting their work out there.
I think many builders experience this.
Engineering gives us a very clear feedback loop - code compiles, feature works, bug fixed. Marketing is much fuzzier. You try something, wait, observe reactions, and slowly learn what resonates.
While building WisGrowth, I’ve been realizing that marketing is less about promotion and more about learning how people describe the problem you're solving.
Once that clicks, the messaging gets much easier. Still figuring it out myself, though.
Murror
This resonates a lot. I'm a designer building Murror which is an AI app for loneliness, and the building part felt natural, but telling the story of why it matters to people who don't already feel the problem is genuinely hard.
What I've found helps a bit is finding the specific people who already know they're lonely or isolated and talking to them directly, rather than trying to convince a broad audience. Not a fix for the whole marketing problem but it's at least a place to start.
Unravl looks interesting by the way, speech analysis is an underexplored space. How are people finding it so far?
Hey @retzero
Congrats on shipping Unravl and being so open about the phase you are in. That's the exact moment I'm writing about in my book The Human Layer.
I'm building a framework to help makers like you map the emotional ache your product solves and build narrative tweaks that create real user connection.
I'd love to help for free: quick resonance audit of your landing page and story + concrete before/after suggestions.
In exchange, if it moves the needle, I'd like to feature it as a public case study (with before/after examples, metrics if available) to show the framework in action. Happy to name you and Unravl (or anonymize if you prefer). You get full approval on what/how we share.
Also, no obligation. Could start with just some notes. Let me know if you are up for it.
Cheers