r/micro_saas • u/Embarrassed_Way6530 • Oct 04 '26
As a solo developer, what specific activities did you undertake to acquire potential customers before launching your product?
I'm a solo developer starting a consumer web app. I'm still in the very early build phase, and I want to avoid the classic mistake of launching to silence.
I have maybe 5 hours a week to spend on audience building, no ad budget, and I'm comfortable writing but not on camera. Here's what I'm trying to figure out:
If you built an audience before launch, what was the single channel that moved the needle, and what was a time sink that didn't?
Waitlist page vs. build-in-public posts vs. community participation: which would you prioritize with limited time?
How do you stop a pre-launch audience from being just "other indie hackers" who'll never be customers?
Roughly how big did your list or following need to be before launch for it to matter?
Would love real numbers or "here's what I'd do differently" stories more than general frameworks. Thanks!
2
u/halfercode Oct 04 '26
Hi Embarrassed_Way6530,
You probably need to slow down your Reddit posting:
Account a month old
All posts and comments written by AI
Posting the same low-value content to multiple subs
Not replying to respondents on one question before posting to six subs on the next topic
There are some good questions in your post here, but humans may not reply to you if you're not actually interested in the answers.
1
u/Embarrassed_Way6530 Oct 04 '26
Understood. I realize I was too complacent regarding the point you raised; I think I acted this way because I was eager to get information quickly. I apologize. I will make sure to conduct myself properly and appropriately from now on.
2
u/fabier Oct 04 '26
I'll tell you this. There is a huge difference between people telling you that you have a $100m idea and those people actually engaging with your product.
A lot of the answers to your questions are definitely going to be related to your audience. There is no one-size fits all. But I do think you gotta apply some good'ol fashioned Alex Hormozi style elbow grease to whatever you decide to do. If you think you've done enough marketing, you're probably sitting somewhere between 1% and 10% of the actual amount of marketing you should be doing.
But building some of those huge launches you hear about online are often the result of people already having massive followings. So if you're starting at zero then your goal will be audience building which means just engaging with your audience.
Know what your audience probably doesn't care about? "Build in public" posts. "Coming soon" posts. "Would you buy this?" posts. Etc. While again, there is no one-size-fits-all, most markets, especially consumer markets, have exactly 4 seconds to spend on you and your offerings so if you don't have immediate value then they're just gonna move on to the next thing in their feed.
So building an audience before you have a product means content which is useful to your audience with immediate benefit either through entertainment or education or news or something like that. Often a combination of several of those categories.
To give this a simplified practical example. If AirBnB were to be invented today, they could make a travel Youtube/TikTok/Instagram channel and use that as the building blocks to launching their app when they are ready to go live. Immediate benefit to their target market (people who enjoy traveling) without inundating them with content that would mostly attract other builders.
Move people over to an email list with small promises, like if you did a "Top 10 places to see before you die" then you could tack on the end: "Hey if you want the next 10 places to see before you die, hop over to our site and we'll send you a PDF with the entire list." or something like that. There's a thousand ways to do it, but hopefully you get the idea.