How do you overcome the "build it and they will come" trap?

[entreel]

I recently saw a dev tool with great architecture and test coverage sitting at ~30 users after 4 months.

It seems like a common structural issue for technical founders. We naturally bias toward optimising code and feature completeness because that's what we are good at, while treating distribution as a secondary problem to be solved "later."

For the technical founders here who successfully transitioned from engineering a product to actually distributing it, how did you force that mindset shift? Did you bring on a co-founder, or did you brute-force the marketing yourself?

(I wrote up some of my own thoughts on this on Hashnode https://istiaq.hashnode.dev/the-ideas-in-startup-ecosystem, but I'm looking for practical advice from this community).

[remyp]

Build it and they will come is a perfectly great strategy if you can build it quickly and start showing it to customers.

Completely ignoring customers while you "build it and build it and build it and polish it and polish it some more and get to 100% test coverage and make sure the UX is good enough for for your dog to use and then polish some more" is the trap.

In other words: ship it when it barely works and don't improve it until a customer tells you to improve it.

[ismail_hossain]

This is exactly where I am right now. I’ve been heads-down for 6 months on a no-code portfolio builder. It’s 95% done and ready to go live, but I’m struggling with the shift to marketing. It’s easy to solve logic problems in code; it’s much harder to solve the problem of 'how do I get people to actually see this?' Dealing with that 'build it and they will come' instinct is a daily battle.

[entreel]

marketing takes time, the chance of overnight success is quite low I guess. So you have to start showing while building slowly

[arjunthazhath]

Building distribution is the most hardest thing ever. I would recommend you to read books on that but its a grind 1000x harder than building the product itself.

[entreel]

can you recommend some books pls

[setnone]

It's really hard out there, but trap? who's trapping you?

[entreel]

Your just trapping yourself lol, by delaying the distribution and just building that is what I mean

[setnone]

some strong advice here for example

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47667504