I’m a 25-Year Engineer Who Never Did Marketing. Here’s What My SaaS Launch Is Teaching Me.

Shipping was familiar. Marketing is a separate craft — and I’m starting at zero.

For twenty-five years, I’ve been an engineer.

I’ve written code in a lot of languages, debugged systems at 2 AM, shipped features to production and watched them run for years. During all of that, I have done approximately zero marketing.

Last week, I launched my SaaS on Product Hunt. A week later, I still have zero paying users.

This isn’t a post about a comeback. I don’t have one yet. This is a post about everything I didn’t know I didn’t know, written from inside not knowing. If you’re an engineer who might one day sit where I’m sitting, maybe it’s useful.

The misunderstanding

For most of my career, I thought of marketing as something that happened after engineering. You build the thing, then “the marketing people” do their work, then users arrive.

The mental model looked like this: build → launch → grow.

I wasn’t dismissive of marketing. I just thought of it the way a software engineer might think of printer repair: important to somebody, definitely not me.

Now I’m doing all of it myself, and the mental model has quietly collapsed.

Marketing isn’t what happens after engineering. Marketing is what happens instead of engineering, for weeks at a time, when the product is already good enough and no one knows.

Five things I got wrong

Here’s what twenty-five years of engineering did not prepare me for.

1. I thought the product would speak for itself.

It won’t. A good product is a precondition for marketing to work — not a replacement for it. I’d heard this advice a hundred times. I hadn’t internalized it until I watched my Product Hunt page start at #41 early on launch day, drift into the 50s by the time the 24-hour window closed, and end with seven votes total — six from strangers, one from me. Zero comments. Meanwhile, products I thought were objectively messier got upvoted by friend groups I don’t have.

1. I built features when I should have written sentences.

I started building the product in earnest just over two weeks before launch. I didn’t start rewriting the landing page copy until the Monday of launch week.

A few days after going live, two different sources told me the same thing, independently. One was a founder I’d asked to look at the page. He said: “This copy reads like AI wrote it. Rewrite it.” The other was an AI-powered landing page review tool built by another founder — I’d run my page through it, and it came back with the same verdict.

An AI tool caught the AI-written copy. They were both right.

I’d spent just over two weeks on the product. A few days on the page that explains the product. Nobody was going to notice the two weeks of features. Everyone noticed the few days of copy.

1. I didn’t build an audience while I was building the product.

This is the most common advice in indie hacker circles. “Build in public.” I understood the words. I did not understand the compounding.

You don’t build an audience in the week of launch. You build it in the year before. Starting the month of launch is starting too late, and I started later than that.

1. I confused “submitting to directories” with “doing marketing.”

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In the past week, I’ve submitted my SaaS to sixteen directories, counting the ones still pending. Some approved instantly. Some will publish me in May. Most will send me a small trickle of traffic.

Submitting to a directory is a box you tick. Doing marketing is a relationship you build. They are not the same thing, and I had them confused in my head for longer than I’d like to admit.

1. I treated launch day as marketing.

Launch day is the starting gun. It isn’t the race. I had spent so much energy preparing for the gun that I hadn’t really thought about the twenty-six miles after it.

Turns out, the twenty-six miles is the whole job.

What CS didn’t teach (but probably should)

Computer science taught me a lot. It taught me how to think about complexity, how to decompose problems, how to reason about correctness. It did not teach me any of this:

Marketing is empathy, compressed into a sentence. You aren’t explaining the product. You’re answering “why should this person care?” before they’ve asked. This is a skill with a learning curve — and I was starting on day one of the curve.
Distribution is a feature. The product with the best distribution will usually beat the product with the best architecture. This feels deeply unfair to engineers. It is also true, and rearranging yourself around it is part of the work.
Writing is a force multiplier. Every engineer I respect has opinions on variable names. Very few have opinions on the sentences that go on landing pages. Those are the same kind of skill, applied differently.
Positioning is a product decision, not a marketing decision. What you say your product is for changes what the product becomes. Positioning doesn’t happen after the build. It’s part of the build.
“Building in public” is a craft, not a hashtag. Sharing what you’re working on in a way that actually builds an audience is a skill. Posting screenshots into the void is not. I did the second one for a while and was confused when it didn’t work.
What I’m trying now

Here’s what I’m doing with the zero users, in case any of it is useful.

I’m writing. This essay is part of that. If I can’t run paid ads and I don’t have a big audience, the one thing I can do is leave behind honest, useful posts about what I’m learning. Maybe someone finds one in six months and finds me through it.

I’m talking to people. Not through Product Hunt comments — I got zero of those. Through emails. Through conversations that started on other platforms. Through every small interaction with someone who might have the problem my product solves. I’m not naturally good at this. I’m getting better.

I’m aware of the itch, but not acting on it. There’s a temptation, when you’re quiet, to add features that sound impressive in tweets. I feel it. Honestly, there are things I already know I want to fix. But right now, there are other things that need more attention, so those fixes are sitting in a list. I’m not resisting the itch — I’m just aware I can’t scratch it this week.

I’m accepting the timeline. Nothing I do this week will show up as revenue this week. That’s the part that’s hardest for an engineer. In engineering, you write the code, you run it, you see the result. In marketing, you write the code, you run it, and you see the result three months later, maybe.

A small note, from me to past-me

If you are an engineer who has spent twenty years, or twenty-five, or thirty, building things — and you’ve never really done marketing — here’s what I’d tell myself from a year ago:

You aren’t behind. You’re at the beginning. The beginning of anything is uncomfortable, and it’s especially uncomfortable right after spending a long time in the adjacent craft.

You aren’t going to be bad at marketing because of something you lack. You’re going to be bad at it because you’ve never done it. Though, to be honest, knowing this hasn’t translated into results on my end yet. I’ll let you know when it does.

Sit with the discomfort. Write a lot of sentences. Talk to a lot of people. Ship the product — and also ship the words about the product.

I’m a week in. I have zero users. I’m fine. I’m learning.

If you want to follow along, I’ll keep writing as I figure it out. If any of this resonated, you can try the tool I’ve been building at originbrief.app. Or just read the next post. Either one helps.

— Aritomo