I'm Valerio, solo founder of Zenovay (cookieless web analytics). I spent the last 6 weeks doing dedicated distribution work. Not feature shipping. Just writing, posting, and engaging.
Posting this on a saturday because the audience for this thread is other founders, and saturday morning is when we read things we should have read earlier in the week.
What i underestimated
The time required to actually do distribution well.
I budgeted 10 hours per week. The honest number was 25. Writing a post that is worth reading takes time. Responding to comments takes time. Researching the platform's tone takes time. The act of clicking 'submit' is 5%. The rest is preparation.
The cost of context switching.
I tried doing 2 hours of distribution and 6 hours of product in the same day. The distribution work was bad, the product work was worse. Both kinds of work need a different brain mode. I now schedule whole days for each.
How much hand drafting matters.
Both reddit and hacker news react badly to anything that smells like ai generated text right now. I had to retrain myself to write the way i actually talk, including the awkward pauses and sentence fragments. it actually performs better.
The slow accumulation of cred.
First few posts on a new community got buried. The third or fourth one started landing. There's a 'this person actually shows up here' signal that builds over weeks. No shortcut for it.
What i overestimated
The importance of the perfect post.
I rewrote my first reddit post 6 times before posting. The one that actually got the most traffic that week was a 4 line comment on someone else's thread. Time spent perfecting the post was time not spent participating.
The reach of any single platform.
I thought hacker news would be the big lever. It was modest. The slow accumulation across 5 platforms outperformed any single home run. Diversification matters more than i thought.
The persuasive power of features.
I kept writing posts about cool features (3d globe, terminal cli, mcp server). They were interesting. They did not move signups much. The posts that moved signups were about outcomes (post launch numbers, what did and did not work, here's what i learned).
What i changed mid stream
Around week 4 i shifted from 'tell people what we built' to 'tell people what i learned'. Same factual content underneath, different framing. Signups per post roughly doubled. The post is not 'this is our cli', it is 'here's what i discovered while building a cli for analytics that no one writes about'.
The hardest part
Honesty in public. Sharing real numbers when the numbers are small. Admitting that a feature didn't work. Writing a post that contradicts a post you wrote 2 weeks ago because you learned something new.
Every time i was tempted to round a number up or hide a failure, the post performed worse. Every time i shared the awkward truth, the post performed better. There is something deeply correct about the platforms' bullshit detectors.
What i'd tell my earlier self
- Pick 3 platforms, not 5. Five is too many for one person to do well.
- Write 70% of the week's content on monday. Improvising mid week burns out faster than you'd think.
- Spend an hour reading other founders' posts before writing your own. Pattern match the tone.
- Track utm params from day one, not from when you remember.
- Reply to every comment in the first hour. Algorithms reward velocity, not lifetime engagement.
Zenovay at zenovay.com. Web analytics with revenue attribution. Built by one person, distributed by the same person, both functions equally underbudgeted.
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