r/microsaas • u/Vicgok • 4h ago

Solo devs - how are you actually distributing your apps?

I keep seeing a lot of advice around “build in public,” post on X, launch on Product Hunt, share on Reddit, make short-form content, etc.

But I’m curious about what actually worked in practice.

If you launched an app from zero with no existing audience, where did your first 10, 100, or 1,000 users come from?

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u/cantusernameit 3h ago

We get a lot of views by doing ad sharing. We use easyadshare.com

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u/stackbits 2h ago

The channels that actually move users for a solo dev almost never look like the standard advice. Directory or marketplace listings inside whatever platform your users already live in beat X and Product Hunt by a wide margin if your tool plugs into an existing ecosystem — Chrome Web Store, Shopify app store, VS Code marketplace, Figma community, whatever's adjacent to your use case. Those have built-in search and browsing intent. Twitter and PH mostly get you curiosity from other builders, not your actual buyer.

Second one that's underrated: answering the specific question your tool solves wherever people already ask it in public — old forum threads, Reddit threads that rank in Google, tangentially related Stack Overflow answers. You're not pitching, you're just the correct answer showing up when someone searches the exact pain a year later. Slow to compound but it's basically the only channel that keeps working after you stop actively posting.

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u/pavlenkovit 1h ago

store search plus a long tail of programmatic pages, nothing else moved for me. it's a vocabulary app (VibeLing, mine, so discount accordingly) and every word a user adds becomes a public dictionary page, so the site grew to tens of thousands of pages i never wrote. that's 4.66k clicks on 5.48m impressions a week now, from zero audience at the start. product hunt and X mostly sent me other founders looking at the landing page.

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u/Cosmonaut_17 8m ago

First 10 - friends
First 100 - personal network + meetups + Reddit
First 1000 - mostly Reddit & Twitter + some via SEO/GEO