6 builders who never spoke to each other · contested
Stop waiting for the product to attract its own users
Months spent hunting for fit through features nobody asked for are months the product is invisible, and shipping plus a single directory post is not a distribution plan. Now that assembling the software is cheap, getting it in front of people is the scarce skill.
Where this splits
Marketing before you feel ready is the majority position, against a founder who spent three years and twenty thousand dollars promoting something users abandoned and concluded promotion before the product satisfies anyone is wasted.
side 01 · 6 claims
Start marketing before the product feels ready
Justin Jackson · Nick Sawinyh · Pieter Levels · Sergio Mattei Diaz
- 1Begin marketing before you think you are ready. Time spent hunting for product market fit through unused features is time the product is invisible.
- 2Building the thing and expecting an audience to appear is not a strategy, and the lesson only arrives after you have spent the months.
- 3Now that almost anyone can assemble the software, the scarce skill is getting it in front of people.
- 4A deliberately plain codebase is no obstacle to real revenue, so spend the time saved on getting users instead.
- 5Stop expecting a few hundred of your own followers to carry a launch; attach the product to a distribution engine that already reaches the market you want.
side 02 · 2 claims
Do not promote until the product satisfies users
Justin Anyanwu · Peter Steinberger
- 1Do not spend on promotion before the product satisfies a first handful of users. Marketing something people abandon is money and time thrown away.
- 2What agents still cannot supply is judgement about which products find a market, and where to make them delightful, so that is where a founder's remaining hours should go.
What it returned
- 600
Taleship's entire promotion was a Product Hunt launch and posts on a few aggregators. It reached over 600 users and then stalled.
- $20,000
Three years and about $20,000 went into Eventloot for $80 of monthly recurring revenue, and the founder names marketing as what he wishes he had spent less time on.
The founder's one change would be to have focused on marketing earlier instead of building features that never gained traction.
Argued from running five agents in parallel while claiming to ship faster than most companies
Sources
- How user growth really worksJustin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · How user growth really works · undated
- @levelsio's blogPieter Levels · levels.io · Everyone can now build apps with AI so now distribution is the real challenge · 2026-06-06
- ClawdbotPeter Steinberger · steipete.me · Understand the Possibilities · 2026-01-02 · dissenting
- Eventloot: Failing to Listen Feedback Means $20,000 LossJustin Anyanwu · failory.com · What do you wish you spent less time on? · undated · dissenting
- Growing a SaaS to $4k/month in a Highly Competitive MarketNick Sawinyh · failory.com · If you had the chance to do things differently, what would you do? · undated
- Shut Down +600 Users Startup due to Hurricane MariaSergio Mattei Diaz · failory.com · Which were your marketing strategies to grow your business? · undated
the second source
Three plays a week, for the phase you are in
No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.
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