You Shipped It in a Weekend. Now What?

You can build a product in a weekend now. Open a terminal, talk to an LLM, and by Sunday night you have something that works. I've done it multiple times. This site, my side projects, tools I've shipped for clients. Most of it was built in under 24 hours.

But here's what I keep seeing: people ship something, post it on Twitter, get a few likes, and then nothing happens. The product sits there. Maybe a handful of signups. No real traction.

The building was never the bottleneck. Now that AI has made it trivially easy, the bottleneck is everything else.

Most things look the same now

When everyone uses the same tools to build, everything starts to look the same. Same Tailwind components. Same shadcn UI. Same layout patterns. Same copy structure.

Scroll through any "Show HN" thread or indie hacker launch feed. Half the products are visually interchangeable. If you cover the logo, you can't tell which product is which.

This is the taste problem. The tools can build anything, but they can't tell you what's worth building or how it should feel. That part is still on you.

Design is distribution now

The way your product looks is a growth channel. A product that looks and feels intentional gets shared. People screenshot it, post it, send it to friends. "Have you seen this?" is one of the most powerful distribution mechanics that exists, and it's driven entirely by how something feels.

Think about the products you've shared with someone unprompted. They probably looked good. They probably felt different from everything else. That's not a coincidence.

If your product looks like a template, nobody is going to screenshot it and share it. It needs to have a point of view.

Positioning is not a tagline

After you ship, the first thing to figure out is positioning. Not your tagline. Not your hero copy. Your positioning: who is this for, what problem does it solve, and why is it better than the alternatives.

Most weekend projects skip this entirely. The landing page says something vague like "the modern way to do X" and hopes people figure it out.

Be specific. "Deploy documentation sites in 5 minutes, no config" tells me exactly who it's for (developers), what it does (documentation hosting), and why it's different (speed, no setup). "The modern documentation platform" tells me nothing.

Where to put your energy after launch

Here's a rough priority list for the week after you ship:

1. Talk to anyone who signed up. Send them a message. Ask what they're trying to do. Watch how they use it. This feedback is worth more than 1,000 pageviews.

2. Fix your landing page. Your first version is wrong. That's fine. Rewrite the hero based on what actual users tell you they value. Remove anything that doesn't directly support the core message.

3. Find one channel that works. Don't spread yourself across Twitter, Reddit, Hacker News, Product Hunt, LinkedIn, and TikTok simultaneously. Pick the one place where your users are most concentrated and go deep.

4. Build in public, but with purpose. Share what you're learning, not just what you're building. "Here's what my first 10 users told me" is more interesting than "just shipped dark mode."

5. Don't add features yet. The urge to go back to building is strong because that's the comfortable part. Resist it. Your next feature should be determined by what users ask for, not what you feel like building.

The taste gap

The biggest advantage you can have right now is taste. When everything is built with the same tools and the same templates, the thing that stands out is the one that feels like someone cared about every detail.

Typography, spacing, color, copy, interactions. These things compound. A product with good taste at every level feels fundamentally different from one that's technically identical but visually generic.

You can't prompt your way to taste. You develop it by looking at a lot of good work, understanding why it's good, and being willing to throw away the first version because it's not right yet.

FAQ

I shipped my project and got zero signups. What do I do?

First, check if anyone even saw it. Look at your analytics. If you're getting traffic but no signups, the problem is your landing page or positioning. If you're getting no traffic, the problem is distribution. These require different fixes.

Should I keep building features or focus on marketing?

At the early stage, marketing. You probably already have enough features for your first 100 users. Adding more features before you have users is a way to avoid the harder work of getting your product in front of people.

How do I make my product stand out visually without being a designer?

Look at products you admire and study what makes them feel good. Pay attention to spacing, typography, and color. Use fewer colors, not more. Give elements room to breathe. Consistency matters more than creativity. And get feedback from people with taste.

Is it worth doing a Product Hunt launch?

It can give you a credibility badge and a small spike of traffic, but it's rarely a long-term growth strategy. If you do it, treat it as one data point, not your entire launch strategy. Most successful products I've worked with got their real traction from channels other than Product Hunt.

When should I consider paid growth?

After you've validated that your landing page converts organic traffic and you understand your messaging. Running ads before you have a converting page is burning money. For most side projects turned startups, that's somewhere around the 200-500 user mark.