For the first two weeks of building XEdge I didn't mention the product once.
I showed up in Discord servers, answered questions on Dev.to, replied to LinkedIn posts from bigger accounts — all without pitching anything. Just genuinely trying to be useful.
By the time I mentioned XEdge, people already knew I knew what I was talking about. The click-through rate on those first mentions was dramatically higher than anything I've posted since, because trust was already there before the ask.
700 users later, $0 marketing spend, I keep coming back to the same lesson: distribution isn't a numbers game, it's a trust game.
You don't need more reach. You need more trust density in the right rooms.
What room are you in right now where you've been lurking instead of contributing?
Harsha Kumar
Posted on
Why I stopped trying to grow and started trying to help — and what happened to XEdge's traffic
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I'm about two days into a new account and staring at exactly this fork — publish and hope, or shut up and be useful first. "Trust density in the right rooms" is going to stick with me. It's uncomfortable because it's slower and you can't screenshot it — but "you can't screenshot trust" is probably why it works. How did you pick which rooms? Did you go where your users already were, or where you personally had something real to add?