For the past two weeks I've been head-down in code. 5400 lines refactored across 20+ PRs. Persistent job queue migrated to Postgres. Rate-limiting deployed. Voice-source pipelines fixed (two of them had been silently returning zero for months — that was a fun discovery). API documentation polished. Test coverage on the testable logic up to 70%.
The engineering work, I get. I can sit down with Claude Code at 1 AM and have a sensible PR in the morning. I can read a stack trace. I can grep my way out of any backend mystery in about 20 minutes. Code is a language I speak fluently enough.
What I cannot do — and I'm two weeks pre-launch on App Store Analyzer realizing this — is launch a product to actual humans.
I don't know where people who would care about my tool hang out, or how to get there without being the guy who shows up to a community for the first time with a link. I don't know the cadence — post how often, where, when. I don't know what works and what just looks like work. Even with AI assistance, the launch playbook isn't something I can grep my way through. There's no error message that says "you posted on the wrong subreddit at the wrong hour."
So I want to ask the indie devs here who've already been through this:
