The honest version of a "build in public" post is the one you write when the numbers aren't what you expected.

Three months ago I shipped six apps in about six weeks. Momentum, PawFormance, PillPal, HomeGrown, Palette Pro, ContentForge. All live. All working. One paying subscriber across the whole portfolio at month one.

Here's what I learned.

The apps weren't the problem. Distribution was.

I built each app to solve a real problem I had or watched someone have. Momentum came from tracking my own workouts badly. PillPal came from watching my mother manage medications in a way that scared me. HomeGrown came from a garden spreadsheet that was getting embarrassing.

The apps work. They do what they say they do. The problem is that almost nobody found them.

Six months of Google Analytics data: direct traffic to five of the six apps is essentially zero. The two apps with real traffic — Momentum and HomeGrown — have it because I posted two answers on Quora. Not because of any launch strategy. Because I answered two questions that people were actually searching for.

That's the whole lesson: search intent > launch energy.

What I tried

• Show HN posts (2 posts, 0 comments each — posted on a weekend, classic mistake)
• Directory submissions across BetaList, SaaSHub, AlternativeTo, Uneed (all pending or no visible traffic)
• Dev.to articles (this one included) — some SEO value, slow build
• Mastodon presence (strong community engagement, zero app traffic)
• LinkedIn posts about the build process (engagement but no conversion; wrong audience for the apps)

What actually worked

• Two Quora answers that directly addressed the search query someone was already running
• One Medium article that ranked for a specific keyword within two weeks

That's it. That's the whole list.

What month three looks like

Momentum: $7.99 MRR, 1 paying subscriber. That's not a mistake — that's one person who found the app and decided it was worth paying for.

ContentForge: free tier users, 0 paid. The free tier is active enough that I know the product works. The conversion problem is a pricing and messaging problem, not a product problem.

Everything else: free users acquired via the Quora channel, slow trickle.

What I'm doing differently

More Quora. More specific subreddit posts framed around the problem, not the product. One technical article per app on Dev.to optimized for the search query, not for the build story.

The build story is interesting to other builders. The search query is interesting to the person who has the problem. Those are mostly different people.

If I started over: I'd write the Quora answer before I wrote the app.