Marketing your product is easy: She made $511 in 16 days

I got sick of writing UX teardowns.

So I did what I always do when I burn out on something. I went to Claude, talked strategy for a few days, built a whole new system in Notion, and convinced myself I was making progress. Classic.

But something good actually came out of it this time. We're talking about distribution now. How you get people to notice what you built when you're a solo builder, alone in a dark room, crying to yourself because you shipped something and have no idea what happens next.

EG runs Be Yourself Marketing, a newsletter about showing up as yourself to grow an audience without burning out or faking it. She's doing exactly what I just described, and doing it well. Worth subscribing!

First time reading?

Let's look at Avery. Ex-Apple, ex-HubSpot, psychology brain, indie developer. She built Rankd, an App Store Optimization tool, while traveling around Asia living my dreams instead of me living them. Less than a year in and she just hit $511 MRR in 16 days of marketing.

Everyone shared the revenue chart. That number went everywhere. But the number wasn't the move.

Here's what I noticed when I actually dug into her X (aka Twitter) profile.

The product is the engine. The life is the marketing.

She also never puts a link in the posts that spread. Her posts with a Rankd link card got two likes. Two... She figured out that links kill reach, so she separates the story from the CTA deliberately. The content spreads. The product gets pulled in afterward.

And when a milestone does hit, she frames it the same way every time:

She credits the distribution, not the product. That framing difference is doing a lot of work.

The pattern is everywhere! I noticed the same pattern with EG, a friend I made in a newsletter cohort. She talks about her life first, creates a real connection with her audience before ever mentioning what she's selling.

Everyone says "build connection before selling" but most people aren't actually doing it consistently. EG does. Avery does.

The numbers make it believable. The life makes it shareable. Both matter, and they do different jobs.

So the steal here isn't just "post your revenue chart." No fam, that’s too simple. It's more specific than that. Show the life the product makes possible. Strip the link out of the content that's supposed to spread. Post consistently enough that when the number hits, it lands somewhere warm, like the ocean off Florida. Not Washington. I grew up there, and those beaches don’t hit the same.

That's kind of what I'm trying to do with Product Potion right now. Not the perfect journey. Not the highlight reel. The bloodbath version of building in public, from inside the trenches with bullets flying over my bald head. The illusion social media sells is millions of followers posting about how they got there. What's rare is someone posting about getting there in real time, while it's still messy, like a sloppy joe, and still a grind.

That's the move. Be in it, in public, with proof when you have it and honesty when you don't.

So here's what this comes down to. Stop selling the product in every post and start showing the life around it. No links in the content that's supposed to spread. Post consistently enough that when a real number hits, it lands somewhere warm. And when it does, frame it as a marketing result, not a build result. That one word swap does more than you'd think.

Avery figured this out in under a year while eating banh mi somewhere in Vietnam. You can figure it out too.

👋 I’ll see ya next week! — Dana

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