Originally published on the Remoet blog.
You wrote an MCP server. It has thirty tools. It works. You posted it to a couple of directories, maybe wrote a tweet. Nobody is installing it.
Here is the part nobody tells you, and it is worse than the install problem. Of the people who do install it, almost none of them ever use it. They connect, they land back in their tool, they stare at a blank prompt box, and they leave. You did not have one adoption problem. You had two, and the second one is the one nobody is building for.
We shipped Remoet's MCP server through five iterations and watched people walk the path from "heard about it" to "agent made a useful call." Most did not make it. Some of the loss is the install itself, which is genuinely hard and is most of what this post is about. But the drop that surprised us, the one we had built nothing for, comes after the connection works. The technical install gets your server connected. The second install gets the capability into the user's head. Almost everyone ships the first and ignores the second.
Install friction is the product
