Awareness and time

“If I just build a good product, it will spread on its own.” If you are a software engineer, you may have thought that at least once.

Unfortunately, reality is not that simple. No matter how good a product is, it will not be used if no one knows it exists.

At the same time, good things do sometimes spread over time. shell-pop.el, an OSS project I built, did not gain users right after release — it started growing about five years later. And even now, more than ten years after publishing it, Issues and PRs still arrive from time to time.

It is rare for quality alone to spread something. But things that are genuinely valuable are sometimes recognized over time.

For a solopreneur, the biggest enemy is not quality, but awareness. And awareness is not something you get overnight.

Beyond awareness

Ads can widen awareness. But they cannot buy trust.

Now that AI is speeding up development and the gap between features is narrowing, “who is building it” and “why they are building it” matter more than before. Users are looking not only at the features, but at the developer.

So I try to make my development process as open as I can.

• What I implemented today
• What I struggled with
• What I got wrong
• Calls for beta testers
• Feedback I received from users

By keeping that up, the product is no longer “an app I have never seen” on launch day.

Little by little, the number of people who already know it grows.

That is a little different from the awareness you get with ads. I think of it as trust, accumulated.

What is worth accumulating

Continuing to post is not the goal in itself. What is worth accumulating is

• The voices of users
• A history of improvements
• The trust that “this person keeps building”
• The track record that “this product is getting better”

That is it.

Post counts and follower counts are merely what grows as a result.

Economics has a well-known line called Goodhart’s Law.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

English certifications, the GitHub contribution graph, follower counts, weight, step counts, revenue. All of them are important measures, but none of them are the goal.

A measure tells you where you are now. The destination lies further ahead.

In my case, that is building software people want to use every day.

In closing

I build software that supports continuing. That is exactly why I value the same way of thinking in marketing.

Rather than spreading wide in a short time, accumulating trust over time. Improving a little every day, sharing it, and facing the people who use it. I believe that accumulation is what leads to a product people use for a long time.

A long distance, not a sprint. That is the mindset I will keep building with.