Koran Thorne set out to get 50 users in 25 days with Reddit as the main channel. He built karma for two weeks, then his first posts were removed by Reddit's spam filter, his comments became invisible to everyone but him for nearly a week, and the account was banned sitewide. Day 10: 0 paying users.
David Ch tested every free channel for Shipper in its first 66 days. Reddit posts written as a fellow builder — honest numbers, no links — drove 798,124 views; a #7 Product of the Day added a spike. Directories, Hacker News and an Indie Hackers post did nothing.
With no strong social following, Nevo David built Postiz as open source so he could post it in developer communities like r/selfhosted and DEV, shipping a new version for every small feature to keep having something to post.
Biyun Hu launched a Stripe app with four posts in a week and tracked every visit with her own beacon: zero human visits. She then analysed 600 r/microsaas posts — 42% of launch posts survived moderation, and the median survivor got 1 upvote.
Arthur Yuzbashev's first two products died on Reddit: six bans, one BuildFast sale. He tracked what had triggered each ban, turned that into MediaFast — a tool for marketing on Reddit without getting banned — and sold it by sharing the story on X. Month one: $360; by January 2026: $5,400.
Alexander Belyanin launched tinyfound, a newsletter of founders' first-customer stories, and spent month one offering people free write-ups of their own stories. The result: 5 new subscribers, banned four times on Reddit, banned on Substack, temporarily on Etsy — and Gmail started marking his emails as spam.
Tony Dinh launched Xnapper, a screenshot tool, on Product Hunt and hit #1 Product of the Day: 1,428 votes, 6.2K website visits, 164 sales and $4,212. He credits the launch-day email to his beta list most.
Sabba Keynejad grew VEED's first 1,000 paid users by recording 40+ YouTube tutorials himself and answering questions on Quora, Reddit and Facebook groups — until he was banned from Quora and most subreddits. YouTube stuck: VEED later hired someone to post a tutorial every day, and the channel passed 50K subscribers.
Jack launched PressDrop.io with no followers by listing it on small .lol launch sites — the one that mattered was a $2 slot on bigbubble.lol, which brought a $59 sale within minutes. After a silent week where Product Hunt and Reddit did nothing, publicly doing the job for people restarted sales: $1,093 in 27 days.
Nevo David built Postiz's search presence through open source — GitHub awesome-lists, open-source and SaaS directories, a daily AI blog post and free tools — reaching 70 domain authority. By August 2026 he wrote that traffic went “up and up and up” but revenue didn't follow, and he's moving effort to getting cited by AI assistants.
Instead of building an X audience or launching on Product Hunt, Pratham Naik DMed 80 agency owners from LinkedIn groups in one week, offering free access for honest feedback. 12 replied, 8 used BearConnect, and 3 paid within two weeks: his first $201 MRR.