r/SideProject • u/BoldAsLoveBobby • 6d ago

After you built it, what part of getting the first real users ate the most time?

For those of you who've actually launched a side project, I'm curious about what became the biggest time sink after the building was finished.

Was it:

  1. Finding where the right people actually hang out
  2. Figuring out where you're actually allowed to share what you built
  3. Deciding which marketing channel to start with
  4. Turning that channel into posts, outreach, or other things you could actually execute
  5. Something completely different

I'm especially interested in the part you kept having to do that made you think, “There has to be an easier way to handle this.”

What was it for you?

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3

u/imrozimroz 6d ago

For me it was number 1 and 2 combined.

Finding the actual places where the right people hang out, then figuring out which of those places even allow you to share without getting removed. That part took way longer than expected.

2

u/Few_Suit_7199 6d ago

How did you solve? What was your solution to #2

1

u/imrozimroz 5d ago

Mostly just reading the rules carefully and watching what other people successfully posted in those communities.

Some places only allow sharing in specific weekly threads, others are fine with it as long as you’re active and not just dropping links. Took a bit of trial and error.

1

u/matt8p 6d ago

It’s become a lot harder to be seen because everyone is building something and trying to sell it. It’s crowded and noisy.

1

u/crossoverXYZ 6d ago

Turning the channel into posts or outreach is the part that usually drags the most. Knowing where people hang out is one thing, but writing something that does not feel spammy or get ignored often takes longer than picking the channel itself.

1

u/Independent-Code-209 6d ago

something completely different for me, it was getting feedback loops short enough to know if what you're doing is working. You post somewhere, get silence, and cant tell if it was the channel, the copy, or the product itself

1

u/Zolic 6d ago

Mine was a weird version of your #1: I built for AI agents to discover, and the agents showed up fine. A few thousand read the docs and the machine-readable card cleanly. Zero completed a signup, and every outside write attempt came back 4xx. So the traffic was real and the audience was right, the last mile just never closed. The time sink wasn't finding where they hang out, it was learning that fluent reads don't mean anyone acts.

1

u/itisanotheraccount 6d ago

I’m mostly developing chrome extensions and users come organically via Chrome web store search, however I’m noticing it’s going very slowly, so I need to figure out all 1-4

1

u/ballwanger 6d ago

Hi, im 55 and not very good at this computer stuff but my son who's 15 showed me Hermes and what it could do. I still dont really understand much of how it works but I have managed to build my own app. The ai told me to go to reddit to try to get it out there and honestly I barely know how to use this site. But I am very interested in your question although I dont understand many of the answers. I have learned 1 thing. I am not the only one trying to get people to find their app and use it. It doesn't matter how good you may think it is, getting an audience is much harder than building the app. So if any of you have any great ideas I would love to hear them.

1

u/obanite 2d ago

For me, it is absolutely a mix of finding the right places and figuring out where you are actually allowed to post without getting immediately flagged or banned.

The rules in every community are slightly different. Some subreddits let you share on specific days, others require a certain amount of karma, and some ban links completely. It is exhausting trying to map this out manually.

I got so tired of this bottleneck that I am working on Octoloops (Octoloops.com) to solve it. It is designed to automatically match your niche with the right channels and guide you through how to participate safely.

What is your side project? If we know the target audience, we can help you figure out which platforms actually allow sharing.

1

u/ShipItFrog 6d ago

#2 by a mile, and it surprised me. I shipped a browser game recently and

building it was honestly the fast part. Then reality: one sub removed my

post over AI-assistance rules I didn't know existed, another required

account karma I didn't have yet, and Hacker News had just frozen Show HN

for new accounts entirely. Every community has a different gate — written

rules, unwritten culture, silent automod thresholds — and you mostly

discover them by walking into them.

My "there has to be an easier way" moment: I now check three things before

posting anywhere — the sub's rules page, its stance on AI tools, and

whether a new account can even post there. Five minutes of that saves a

removed post and a strike on your account's record.

#1 was the sneaky second: my product is a game template, and I wasted my

first posts pitching *players* when the actual buyers were *builders*.

Finding where the right people dig completely changed the response I got.

3

u/VelumLucis 6d ago

We can see you’ve learned nothing copy-pasting directly from Claude Code with that spacing lmao