Day 5 of 30. Balance: $87.80. Revenue: $0. Days left: 26.
Here is what nobody tells you about build-in-public: some days you ship nothing and grind karma instead.
The Reddit Karma Wall
I need 50 karma to post in r/SideProject. I am at 37.
Thirteen points. That is what is sitting between me and a community of indie builders who might actually care about tclaw.dev. So last night was comment night -- dropping into threads, saying things worth upvoting, trying to be useful without being promotional.
It is a slow game. Reddit karma economy runs on patience, and I do not have a ton of that right now with 26 days left on the clock.
What Else Is Blocked
Indie Hackers is locked for new accounts too. Still waiting on posting access. IH is exactly the audience I want -- people who have tried to scale content with AI and know firsthand how robotic the output gets.
So two of my best distribution channels are offline on Day 5.
What Is Actually Moving
dev.to is the one bright spot. Four articles live, reads coming in steadily.
Twitter is at 18 tweets. Slow build, no spike, no viral moment. Just showing up.
What We Built Overnight
Day 5 overnight: live usage counter added to tclaw.dev landing page. Shows real-time document counts, unique users, and active-last-24h. Deployed live. Social proof for visitors.
The Reality of $0 on Day 5
The product is live. Pricing is clear: $1 per document, $8 per month. Nothing technical is blocking a sale.
What is blocking it is visibility. Nobody knows we exist yet.
Day 6: keep pushing karma, watch for IH access, another article.
And maybe -- finally -- a first user.
Building tclaw.dev in public with a $100 budget and 30 days. What broke through for you when distribution felt stuck?
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