A Week Without Code: Marketing That Opened Doors

The author paused all coding for a week to focus entirely on marketing Lagree Buddy via Instagram, TikTok, and cold outreach. He built narrative-driven content, secured interest from Lagreeing at Home, and demoed the app to Sebastian Lagree in person, while learning that content creation is more labor-intensive than expected. Although short-term analytics didn’t move, the week produced meaningful connections and validation that distribution work is indispensable.

Key Points

• Cold outreach yields few but meaningful wins: ~30–40 DMs produced 4–5 solid responses.
• Marketing and in-person demos (e.g., with Sebastian Lagree) create opportunities no feature release would.
• Relationships compound even when short-term analytics don’t move.
• High-quality content is time-consuming; daily stories and FAQs took hours, not minutes.
• ‘Build it and they will come’ is false—consistent promotion and creative distribution are essential.

Sentiment

Overall, the Hacker News discussion demonstrates a strong consensus in agreement with the article's core premise: marketing is an essential, often underestimated, and challenging component of product success, particularly for solo developers, effectively debunking the 'build it and they will come' myth. While there were critical comments regarding marketing ethics, terminology, and the perceived scope of the author's efforts, these did not detract from the fundamental agreement on marketing's necessity.

In Agreement

• Solo/indie developers must prioritize content creation and share their building process because they are the 'product too' and authenticity is key to escaping competition.
• The 'build it and they will come' adage is a fallacy; products won't be found if people don't know they exist, and even word-of-mouth requires initial telling.
• The non-development aspects of launching a product, such as App Store setup and promotion, are often far more work and complexity than anticipated, particularly for side projects.
• Solopreneurs must anticipate and learn to wear several hats, with marketing being a crucial one that engineers frequently try to minimize or avoid.
• Sustained social media engagement and 'organic' promotion are universally challenging and require consistent, strategic effort, often involving multiple accounts, devices, and content rolls of the dice.

Opposed

• The term 'organic' in marketing is criticized as 'newspeak,' obfuscatory, and attached to antisocial behavior, arguing that it dilutes clear communication and often masks underlying incentives towards dishonesty.
• Marketing, specifically its modern tactics like 'rage bait,' can easily devolve into unethical practices, likening it to 'peddling drugs to the masses,' and suggesting it often earns its bad reputation.
• The author's statement that 40 outreaches in a week yielded 'not that amazing' results is seen as a minimal effort, comparable to coding for only 15 minutes a day, implying an underestimation of the scale required for effective marketing.
• A specific concern was raised about the app's name, 'Lagree Buddy,' due to the Lagree brand owner's notorious litigiousness regarding trademark infringement.