Indie hacking day 55: build the audience, not just the product

I was building, building, building.

Then I found out a strong competitor had been building an audience for about 4 months before they even published the product.

Now I have a product… and almost 0 audience.

You always get impressed by an existing product and immediately fall into the trap of building right away. AI era or pre-AI era — doesn’t matter. I always end up in the same trap: avoiding thinking deeply about distribution. It’s the same in any industry.

The tiny lesson: maybe it’s different per product (industry, niche), but you need to handle that boring distribution far before — or at least in parallel with — the actual product build.