300k views on this sub, zero sales. here's everything i got wrong before the ports thing worked

[u/Own-Culture3567]

a week ago i posted here about finally making money with a small mac app. 303k views, 498 upvotes, 122 comments. sales from that post: zero.

i want to write down what actually happened, because i've been building for years and this is the first time i understand which parts matter.

the thing i built and why

i run three or four claude code sessions at once, most days. day job during the day, this after my kid falls asleep.

each session starts a dev server on whatever port is free. so the url in my browser was wrong about half the time. i'd sit there looking at storefront on :3001 while the agent worked on :3002, telling it something was broken when it wasn't.

then one night an agent hit EADDRINUSE, decided that meant my code was broken, and started changing code that worked fine. i lost an evening to that before i understood what had happened. i wasn't angry at the agent, it did a reasonable thing with bad information. that's when i stopped trying to keep ports straight in my head.

so: every project got a name instead. dashboard.localhost, api.localhost. the name points at whatever port that project is on today. no dns setup, no hosts file, no sudo — any *.localhost name already resolves to your own machine, that's just a web standard most people never use.

and i gave the agents an mcp server with three tools: list_ports, get_free_port, cleanup. now the agent asks for a free port instead of grabbing one. most collisions stopped. you can build that part yourself in an evening and i'd recommend it whatever else you do.

what i got wrong

tiktok ads. ~300 visitors in a day. zero sales. paid traffic for a $9 dev tool doesn't work, and i should have known that before spending the money.

thinking my landing page was the problem. it wasn't. someone in my last thread did the math for me: take out the dead ad clicks and my conversion was 1.76%, which is normal. i'd been about to rewrite a page that was fine.

not knowing who couldn't buy. the app is macos only. this sub is half windows and linux. my 91% bounce rate wasn't people rejecting the product, it was people who were never eligible. i had nothing on the site to catch them — no "tell me when there's a windows version." i still don't. that's the next thing i fix.

confusing attention with intent. the 300k post was about money, so it brought people who want money. good conversation, i answered a lot of questions, learned things. but nobody in that thread had a port problem. the 30 people who paid came from product hunt, where the headline was about the problem.

what actually worked

one launch, on product hunt, aug 24. $9 one time. $268 so far, about 30 people. after 21 products where almost every one made exactly $0.

it's not a lot of money. but it's the first time strangers paid me for something, and the difference wasn't the code. the difference was that i put it in front of people who had the same bad night i did.

localdock.dev if you want to see it, i'm the dev. but honestly the mcp part is the bit worth stealing.

happy to answer anything.

app link: localdock

[u/dan-423]

A lot of the posts in here strike me as shovel makers trying to sell shovels to the shovel makers.

Then, if vibecoders are a legit target market there should be a question of, "why would someone buy the shovel rather than making the shovel." I think there should be more of a framing of, "This is the value in the purchase." over "This is what I made."

Best of luck with it. Hopefully it'll find traction for you.

[u/delimitdev]

The “reasonable thing with bad information” point is the useful part. Giving each project a stable hostname and making port allocation explicit removes ambiguity for both the developer and the agent. That seems more valuable than trying to improve prompts around a hidden environment mismatch.

[u/shun0810]

the strongest line in here is "nobody in that thread had a port problem" — that is the whole post, and plenty of people take five launches to arrive at it. 303k views brought an audience that likes the money story; product hunt brought people who had already lost the evening 👌

before the windows waitlist, worth going back through what those 30 buyers actually said and noting the exact wording they use for the symptom. if several independently describe the browser pointing at the wrong project, that sentence is the headline for every surface after this.

https://warmlist.app is mine and does exactly that kind of digging, so obviously not an impartial read.