For years, I operated under what I thought was a fundamental truth of tech: if you build a high-quality, well-architected product, users will eventually find it. After launching several SaaS apps with a partner to near-total silence (our user count was less than five), I had a painful awakening.

This post is a candid post-mortem of my journey from the comfortable certainty of the command line into the chaotic world of marketing. It's a story of my failures:

- My attempt at "building in public" that was just a monologue.

- Getting my first Reddit account permabanned for not understanding the culture.

- A Product Hunt launch that completely flopped.

- Realizing that my "clever" automation for finding users was just sophisticated spam.

I'm not a marketing guru now, not even close. But I've learned a ton from these setbacks, especially about the importance of community (Discord), providing value first, and the sheer persistence it takes to get noticed.

I wrote this for other developers who might be standing where I was a few months ago, thinking that code is the only thing that matters. Happy to answer any questions and hear about your own experiences with the "build it and they will come" fallacy.