I shipped the product. I have no idea how to launch it. Tell me about your first time.

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:

Tell me about your first launch.

Not the success-story-clip-version. The actual version:

• What did you do in the week BEFORE launching that you'd do again?
• What did you try that completely flopped — and you laugh about now?
• Where did your first 10 real users come from? (And how did you know they were real and not curious tourists?)
• What surprised you about how it actually felt — better than expected, worse, weirder?
• If you could go back to the week before your first launch and tell yourself one thing, what would it be?

I'm asking because I think I can build a useful tool. App Store Analyzer aggregates demand signals across 20 App Store markets and 50+ niches for indie iOS devs deciding what to build next. The engineering is solid now. But solid engineering doesn't find users.

And honestly: launch stories are the kind of thing I think most of us love to tell once enough time has passed. The good parts, the embarrassing parts, what you'd do differently. There's no advice or research that beats hearing what someone actually went through. So this isn't really a "give me tips" post — it's a "tell me your story" post.

Drop yours. Long or short. First project, second, third — doesn't matter. I'll read every one. And in two weeks I'll write a follow-up with the patterns I see: what looked completely different across stories, and what was weirdly the same.

— Aurin