u/Emergency-Pack2500

Ran a web agency for 2.5 years. Decent client work but writing about my own projects was always the weakest part. Would ship features all week and never write blog posts.

Built a tool to fix it for myself. AI reads my repo, learns my style, opens blog post drafts as PRs I can edit and merge. Use it daily. Ship 3 blog posts a week now instead of one a month.

The hard part: nobody else is using it.

3 things I'm learning at zero users:

1. "I built it for myself" isn't validation. I assumed the same need would exist in other technical founders. The need is real. The willingness to try a new tool for it is not.
2. Building in public brings impressions, not users. X and LinkedIn posts get views but no signups. Different content, different funnel.
3. Google won't save you fast. New domain, blog posts aren't indexed yet. SEO is a 6-month bet at minimum.

Current move: cold DMs to specific founders who blog publicly but inconsistently. Not scalable, but it's the only way I can have real conversations about whether the product actually fits.

Anyone else stuck in the "built it, use it, can't get others to use it" phase? What broke the seal for you?

Just venting and looking for honest takes from people further along than me.

Built two products. One is a link-in-bio SaaS with 200 users, mostly silent. The other is Branchpost, a tool that reads your GitHub repo and opens AI-written blog post PRs. I built it because I'd skip writing about my own projects for months.

The painful part: I use Branchpost daily. Ship 3 blog posts a week with it now. Zero other users. Google hasn't indexed the blog posts yet either, so the SEO play isn't kicking in.

Tired. Not quitting, just tired.

If you've been here and pushed through, what actually moved the needle? Cold DMs to specific users? Reddit/IndieHackers posts? Switching positioning?

I’ve been working on a project called Branchpost.

It connects to your GitHub repo, learns your blog structure, and opens AI-written blog post PRs.

Technically, it works.

But here’s the problem:
I launched it and… almost no one cares.

I realized I made the classic mistake:
built first, didn’t validate demand.

Now I’m trying to understand:

• Do devs even want automated blog writing?
• Or is writing not painful enough to solve?

Curious how you’d approach this:

If you had this product, how would you get your first 10 users?

I write posts as MDX in my Next.js repo (frontmatter, components, the whole thing). Love that it's version-controlled and lives next to the code, but the actual writing loop feels worse than it should:

- Switching from "coding brain" to "writing brain" kills momentum

- Frontmatter drift — I forget which fields are required until the build fails

- Cover images / OG images are a whole side quest

- I have a list of post ideas in Notes that never become posts

Curious how others handle this. Do you batch-write? Use a CMS on top? Just push through it? Or does everyone eventually give up and move to Substack/Ghost?

(Asking because I've been stuck on the "ideas in Notes → actual post" step for months and I'm trying to figure out if it's a me problem or a workflow problem.)