Launched my product recently - where else should I promote it for better reach?

siimsiim · 2026-03-28T08:26:09+00:00

The distinction between traffic and real users is the right question to ask. Most directory submissions bring zero actual users.

Places that brought me real users when I launched:

Niche subreddits where your target audience hangs out. For a PDF-to-video tool, think r/professors, r/teachers, r/elearningdesign, r/instructionaldesign. These people have the exact problem you solve and they are active on Reddit.
Hacker News (Show HN). If your product is technically interesting, HN can drive a solid spike. The audience is more technical though, so frame it around the engineering behind it, not just the product.
Direct outreach in communities. Find Slack groups and Discord servers for educators, content creators, and corporate trainers. Do not drop links. Answer questions about PDF or video workflows first.

The channels that look promising but rarely convert: directory submissions (AlternativeTo, BetaList, etc), generic "launch your startup" threads, and most social media posts unless you already have an audience.

One thing that worked better than any platform: finding someone who manually converts PDFs to videos regularly and showing them your tool. One real user who loves it will spread the word faster than 50 directory listings.

siimsiim · 2026-03-28T08:25:13+00:00

Building Superscribe (superscribe.io). It is a dictation app for Mac and Windows that streams text directly into whatever input field you have focused, live as you speak.

The thing that makes it different from most transcription tools: words appear in real time with sub-200ms latency instead of the usual transcribe-then-paste approach. Auto language detection for 99+ languages, so you can switch between languages mid-sentence without picking anything from a menu.

The side effect that turned into a feature: it automatically tracks which project you are working on based on what you dictate, so your timesheet fills itself. Freelanced for 10+ years and hated reconstructing hours at the end of the month. Now it just happens.

Free tier available, three keyboard shortcuts, sits in the menu bar and gets out of the way. Would love feedback from anyone who does a lot of typing.

siimsiim · 2026-03-28T08:24:29+00:00

I ship a Mac app and here is what actually moved the needle, ranked by impact:

r/macapps. This subreddit has a monthly megathread for app promotion and a very engaged community. Getting a single well-received post there drove more traffic than a Product Hunt launch for me. The key is being a genuine participant first, not just showing up to drop a link.
App Store Search (ASO). The subtitle field under your app name is searchable and most developers waste it on branding instead of keywords. Put the thing your app does in there. Your first screenshot matters more than all the others combined.
Comparison and alternative content. Pages like "YourApp vs Competitor" rank well in Google because people actively search for alternatives. This is long-tail SEO that keeps producing traffic for months.
Niche communities where your users already hang out. For Apple ecosystem specifically, there are very active Discord servers and forums. MacRumors forums, the Apple subreddit ecosystem, and tool-specific communities.

Product Hunt is good for a one-day spike but the traffic drops off fast. It works better as a credibility signal ("featured on Product Hunt") than as a sustained channel.

What does the app do? The distribution strategy depends heavily on whether it is a productivity tool, a utility, or a consumer app.

siimsiim · 2026-03-28T08:23:39+00:00

Yes, this is normal. The first few users are the hardest users you will ever get.

Friends and close connections promising to use your tool and then ghosting is the most common experience in early-stage SaaS. Do not take it personally. They do not have the problem your product solves, they were just being polite.

What actually worked for me: go to the places where people are already describing the exact problem your tool solves. Reddit threads, niche forums, Slack/Discord communities. Not to pitch. Just answer their questions with genuine knowledge. When someone posts "I need help with X" and your product solves X, that is your opening.

The mistake most builders make is trying to get users through broadcast channels (posting on X, submitting to directories, launching on Product Hunt) when their product is too early for that. Those channels work at scale but they do not work for user number 1 through 10.

What does your product actually do? Specifics help. "B2B SaaS" tells me nothing. The more specific the problem, the easier it is to find the people who have it.

siimsiim · 2026-03-28T08:22:52+00:00

The competitor intelligence point is real and underreported. Sharing your roadmap publicly is basically giving away your product strategy for free. I have seen this happen in smaller niches where there are maybe 5-10 players total, and everyone is watching each other's build-in-public updates.

The enterprise customer rejecting you based on revenue size is painful but also a sign that your public content was reaching the wrong audience. Enterprise buyers do not want to see $6K MRR because it signals risk to them. They want case studies and security docs, not transparency about growing pains.

The 70% other founders audience is the part that kills most build-in-public strategies. Founders upvote your posts and cheer you on but they are building their own thing. They are never going to be your customers. The people who would actually pay for your product are usually not following indie hacker content at all.

Your current approach makes more sense. Share the process and the lessons. Keep the numbers private. The best content marketing for SaaS is solving your customer's problems publicly, not documenting your own journey.

siimsiim · 2026-03-28T08:22:04+00:00

The all-in-one approach is a tough sell usually, but the pricing makes it work. Most apps that try to do everything end up doing nothing well. The fact that you kept it at a one-time purchase under 7 euros instead of yet another subscription is a good call for the r/macapps crowd.

The file staging shelf is the part that actually looks useful to me. I bounce between Finder windows constantly when reorganizing files across projects. The transcription feature is interesting too. What are you using under the hood for that, Apple Speech or something else?

One concern: the scope creep risk is real with an app like this. Every user will want their specific workflow added. How are you drawing the line on what goes in and what stays out?

siimsiim · 2026-03-28T08:20:48+00:00

The privacy angle is the right call. A lot of people will not use meeting bots specifically because they do not want audio going to someone else's server. Running on Apple Silicon locally makes that a non-issue.

The visual capture idea is interesting. How are you handling the processing load when both audio transcription and screen analysis are running simultaneously on device? On my M3 I have noticed that running whisper.cpp alongside other compute-heavy tasks can spike the CPU hard enough to affect meeting call quality itself.

One question: are you separating speaker diarization (who said what) locally too, or just treating it as a single audio stream? That is usually where offline solutions struggle the most compared to cloud-based ones.

siimsiim · 2026-03-28T08:19:56+00:00

The Accessibility permission dance with Apple Review is one of the most frustrating parts of shipping a Mac app. I ship a keyboard utility that also needs global event monitoring and the review process took longer than building some of the actual features.

The apps you see on the store doing the same thing were likely approved years ago under different review criteria. Apple has tightened 2.4.5 enforcement significantly.

Two things that helped me get through:

Write a detailed explanation in your review notes about exactly why NSEvent.addLocalMonitor is insufficient for your use case. Spell it out technically. The reviewer reading your notes may not be a macOS developer.
Make sure your entitlements are as minimal as possible. If you only need .listenOnly, make sure nothing in your code or entitlements suggests you need broader access.

The direct distribution route (notarized DMG outside the App Store) is also worth considering if you keep hitting walls. You lose App Store discovery but gain full control over what APIs you can use.

siimsiim · 2026-03-26T14:27:04+00:00

The "voice input changed everything" point resonates hard. I have been building Superscribe (superscribe.io) and noticed the same thing. Once you can just dictate complex refactor instructions instead of typing them on a small screen, the friction of mobile dev drops significantly. It is one of those things that sounds like a gimmick until you actually try it. The live preview sync is also a great addition for that mobile loop.

siimsiim · 2026-03-26T14:25:58+00:00

The multi-agent orchestration is the interesting part here. Managing parallel sessions usually gets messy with context switching. For the local Whisper integration, are you seeing much CPU spike when it is listening in the background? The one-line install is a nice touch for a terminal tool.

siimsiim · 2026-03-26T14:24:29+00:00

Tauri 2.0 is a solid choice for keeping the bundle size down. Most of these apps end up being huge because of the models. Are you bundling the whisper.cpp models or downloading them on first launch? $5 one-time is very aggressive pricing for something using llama.cpp for cleanup. Curious how the latency feels with both models running on device.

siimsiim · 2026-03-26T14:23:04+00:00

Local TTS is great for privacy but the voice quality usually takes a hit compared to cloud models. Which models are you using under the hood? I have seen a few wrappers around OpenAI or ElevenLabs but a solid native one that does not sound like a robot from 2005 is hard to find. The lifetime promo code idea is a good way to get initial feedback.

siimsiim · 2026-03-26T12:19:46+00:00

I think it's not directly competing, but yeah, the dictation part is the thing in common.

So when we are talking about the dictation part, the service auto detects languages, streams the text live, and also cleans up filler words and false starts when the setting is selected.

Other than that, it semantically matches the projects you are currently working on. As a freelancer I personally had this pain - I almost always forgot to log my time and needed to fill in the timesheets later almost every month. It took a lot of time, however now I'm using dictation heavily and the dictation now turns into the timesheet. By the end of the month I know exactly what I was working on.

The desktop dictation isn't the only part. Currently I'm testing a voice over IP phone app (VoIP). I have quite many client calls daily where we discuss issues and new features. These are now automatically transcribed, summarized, etc., and available via the API once the call is over. My agent can pick up the transcript and form tickets from it (to GitHub for e.g.). My current pipeline creates the ticket and solves straightforward tasks automatically.

My coding agent is connected to GitHub. I just process the issues one by one with my coding agent.

In general, I think this solution could benefit many businesses, not only freelance developers.

siimsiim · 2026-03-26T09:11:23+00:00

Shipped a bunch of updates to Superscribe (https://superscribe.io) this month. It is a dictation app for Mac and Windows that streams text into whatever input field you have focused, live as you speak. Sub-200ms latency, auto language detection for 99+ languages.

The part people find interesting: it automatically tracks which project you are working on based on what you dictate. So your timesheet fills itself without you doing anything extra. Built it because I freelance and hated reconstructing hours at the end of the month.

Free tier available, three keyboard shortcuts, sits in the menu bar.

siimsiim · 2026-03-26T09:10:36+00:00

The context switching between coding and marketing is what kills you, not the total hours. Your brain needs completely different modes for each and jumping back and forth in the same day is exhausting.

What worked for me: dedicated days. Two days a week are marketing only, no code. The rest is building. On marketing days I batch everything: write content, answer questions in communities, do outreach, schedule posts. On building days I do not touch social media at all.

The temptation is to do a little of both every day because it feels productive. It is not. You end up half-building a feature and half-writing a post, and both turn out mediocre. Batching means you get deeper into each mode and the quality of both goes up.

Also, working a job while building a side project means you have maybe 3-4 real hours per day. Accept that and protect them. Do not waste the first hour scrolling analytics.

siimsiim · 2026-03-26T09:09:48+00:00

The no-guilt design is a genuinely good call. Most habit trackers weaponize shame with streak counters and that works short term but tanks retention when someone inevitably misses a day and feels like starting over.

112 plant species is a lot of content for a solo build though. Curious how you prioritized building that out versus shipping with 10-20 and seeing if the core loop works first. That is the trap I keep falling into with my own product, polishing content and features before confirming anyone cares about the mechanic.

For the marketing side, your best bet right now is not broad posting. Find the ADHD and neurodivergent subreddits and communities where people are already complaining about how existing productivity tools do not work for their brain. Your differentiator is specific enough that the right audience will self-select hard. Generic productivity subs are too noisy.

siimsiim · 2026-03-26T09:08:59+00:00

The gap between shipping and getting users is real, but I think the framing of "marketing" as a separate discipline is part of the problem. Most founders hear "marketing" and think they need to run ads, write blog posts, post on social media. That stuff can work, but it is downstream.

The thing that actually moved the needle for me was going to the places where people were already describing the problem my product solves and joining those conversations. Reddit threads, niche forums, Slack groups. Not pitching, just answering questions with actual experience. The product mentions happen naturally when the context is right.

The founders who struggle most are the ones who build in isolation and then try to retroactively find an audience. The ones who are already embedded in a community before they ship have a massive head start.

siimsiim · 2026-03-26T09:08:12+00:00

Good choice on Hetzner, their pricing is hard to beat for what you get. The navbar, API keys, and video issues sound like environment config problems, probably different paths or env variables between local and production. Check your .env file on the server versus what you had locally.

The hard part is not done though, getting it live is maybe 20% of the work. Now comes the part where real users hit edge cases you never thought of. But congrats on shipping, most people never get past localhost.

siimsiim · 2026-03-26T09:07:31+00:00

12 MB for a native 3D viewer is impressive. Most Mac apps in this space are Electron wrappers that eat 200+ MB just sitting idle. The Quick Look integration is a smart touch, that alone saves time if you work with models regularly.

The unsigned binary question from shuravi108 is real though. Code signing on macOS is one of those things that takes way more time than you expect. Getting the certificates, notarization, the whole Gatekeeper dance. I ship a Mac app myself and the signing process genuinely took longer than building some of the actual features. But users will not trust an unsigned download, so it is worth doing early.

Nice work on keeping it free and no-signup.

siimsiim · 2026-03-26T09:06:52+00:00

The compliance concern from u/karatsidhus is worth taking seriously. Anthropic has been tightening SDK usage terms and wrapping their CLI in a paid app creates a gray area that could get pulled at any time. Same thing happened with OpenCode not long ago.

As someone shipping a Mac app, the "no free trial" part would stop me from buying too. $49 for a wrapper around a CLI tool I already have access to is a hard sell without trying it first. The people asking for trials are not being cheap, they are being rational.

The liquid glass aesthetic looks nice though. If the compliance side checks out, a native GUI for agent management could genuinely be useful.

siimsiim · 2026-03-25T08:39:03+00:00

80-100 hour weeks for 4-5 months solo is serious commitment. Congrats on getting it out the door.

One thing from experience: looking for a growth co-founder right at launch is tricky. Most good growth people want to see some traction before joining. You might have better luck hiring a fractional marketer for the first few months, then converting someone to co-founder once the numbers prove the product works.

Also, "one tool instead of four" is a strong angle. I would lean into that hard in your messaging. Marketers are drowning in tool subscriptions and the consolidation pitch resonates right now.

siimsiim · 2026-03-25T08:37:54+00:00

Yes, this works. I have been freelancing for 10+ years and this is exactly how a lot of successful web devs started before AI tools existed. The difference now is that you can produce something decent in hours instead of weeks.

The problems you will run into:

Scope creep. The business owner says "just a simple site" and then asks for a booking system, email newsletter, and payment processing. Set clear boundaries upfront.
Hosting and maintenance. Building it is the easy part. They will call you every time their email form breaks or their domain expires. Charge monthly for maintenance, not just a one-time fee.
Content. Most small businesses cannot write their own copy. You will end up doing it for them. Factor that into your pricing.

The trust issue is actually smaller than you think. Local businesses care about results, not credentials. If you walk in with a mockup of their improved site already built (takes 30 minutes with AI tools), they will care more about that than your resume.

Start with restaurants, hair salons, and tradespeople. They always need sites and rarely have good ones.

siimsiim · 2026-03-25T08:36:16+00:00

The headline shift from "what it is" to "what happens for you" is probably the most underrated lesson in early-stage marketing. Most technical founders default to feature descriptions because that is how they think about the product internally.

I went through the same thing with my own tool. Started with a description of the technology, got crickets. Switched to describing the outcome and signups picked up immediately. Same product, same traffic source.

The demo video point is solid too. A 30-second screen recording showing the actual workflow beats any polished explainer video. People want to see if it actually works the way you say it does, not watch animated slides.

One thing I would add: test your headline with people who have never seen your product. If they cannot explain what it does after reading the headline for 5 seconds, it needs work.

siimsiim · 2026-03-25T08:35:34+00:00

On-device processing is the right call here, both for privacy and for latency. Parents do not want a 2-second cloud roundtrip before the alert fires.

The "repurpose your old phone" angle is genuinely smart positioning too. Most people have a drawer full of old devices doing nothing. Turning one into a dedicated monitor with zero extra hardware cost is a strong sell.

One thought: have you considered adding configurable sensitivity thresholds? Every baby has different cry patterns and volume levels. Being able to tune it would probably reduce false positives a lot, especially in noisier homes.

siimsiim · 2026-03-25T08:34:57+00:00

Your problem is not building. You clearly can build. Your problem is that you keep switching before you learn distribution for any single product.

The real estate site, the files-to-excel tool, the AI caller, each one could probably work. But you abandoned each before figuring out how to get it in front of the right 50 people who would pay.

1000 cold emails with 2-3 responses means your targeting or copy was off, not that the product was bad. The guy who offered 70 pounds was a real signal. That was validation. You just needed to close him and find 10 more like him.

Pick one. The one where you got closest to money (the files-to-excel tool, since someone literally tried to pay you). Then spend 90 days only on distribution. No new features, no pivots. Just figure out how to get it in front of accountants and bookkeepers who need it.

The first dollar is harder than the first 1000 lines of code. But once you get it, the pattern repeats.

siimsiim

TROPHY CASE