Your Product Is Great, But Nobody Gives a Shit

3 Min. Read Aug 12, 2025 

You’ve built something amazing.

Clean code. Great UX.

You even spent nights polishing the onboarding flow.

Then you hit “Launch” — and nothing happens.

No users. No buzz. No traffic.

You spammed every forum, every platform, every corner of the internet with your landing page link.

A few curious souls clicked… then bounced.

Not a single one stayed.

Congratulations — you’ve achieved total user attrition.

How’s that for a launch?

You think maybe your product isn’t good enough.

So you burn the last of your energy fixing it.

You tell yourself: If I just make it perfect, users will come. I’ll get steady income. I’ll finally quit my stupid job.

But reality keeps kicking your ass.

Your product sinks into the digital abyss, another piece of internet debris.

And here you are, staring at a cold screen, reading this damn post.

That’s you, right?

Relax.

I’m not here to mock you.

I just want you to see the truth:

Building a great product is only half the battle. The other half is getting people to notice — and care.

That’s the part most developers never figure out.

A Different Story

Let me tell you a real one.

A solo-coded product that made $10M in 2 years, and later passed $100M — no VC money, no luck, just strategy done right.

It’s ClickFunnels, founded in 2014 by Russell Brunson and Todd Dickerson (the dev).

ClickFunnels is an all-in-one funnel builder — landing pages, email automation, payments, upsells — everything stitched together so businesses can convert visitors into paying customers without hiring a tech team.

Before ClickFunnels, setting this up meant juggling WordPress, Mailchimp, Stripe, Zapier, and manual chaos. Todd coded the tool that fixed all of that.

But that’s not what made it explode.

While Todd was building, Russell was already publishing — blog posts, webinars, podcasts — all centered on one simple idea: “Funnels are the future.”

He gave away templates, scripts, case studies, and slowly positioned himself as the funnel guy.

By the time the product launched, the audience was already there — thousands of marketers waiting for the exact solution he’d been preaching.

Then came the moves developers rarely make:

He doubled down on marketing.

He built an affiliate program that paid big.

He wrote books, ran live events, and made “funnels” a movement, not just software.

Today, ClickFunnels powers hundreds of thousands of businesses and has generated hundreds of millions in revenue — all bootstrapped.

The secret wasn’t just great code.

It was traffic.

Russell built the audience while Todd built the software.

So when they launched, it wasn’t a cold start — it was ignition.

That’s the strategy: build traffic alongside your product.

Back to You

Developers are trained to optimize for efficiency, scalability, and elegance.

That’s good — but it’s not enough.

Don’t fall for the myth:

“If I build it well, people will come.”

They won’t.

You have to build attention the same way you build features.

If you have a marketing partner like Russell, great — you’re one of the lucky few.

If you don’t, you’d better learn the game yourself.

Too many devs treat marketing like a post-launch bug fix — something to “look into later.”

But “later” usually means “too late.”

By the time your product ships, it’s already lost in a sea of dead apps and indie dreams.

If you’re a solo dev betting your savings on that one product, silence doesn’t just hurt your ego — it kills your runway.

And worse — maybe you find your “Russell,” succeed, and then get kicked out after launch. Happens more often than you’d think.

Be Prepared Before You Launch

The best move?

Start early.

Learn how to build traffic and attention before you even start the product.

Learn to speak to your users, build a following, test messages, share ideas, and earn trust.

That’s what I’m doing now.

I’m writing about timeless marketing skills — the kind buried in books like Traffic Secrets, Content Inc., Influence, and Made to Stick — but from a developer’s perspective.

I break down how to get traffic, build audiences, and distribute your product — without selling your soul or sounding like a growth bro.

I call it Marketing for Developers.

Short reads. Real lessons. No fluff.

If this hit a nerve, you can check it out here.

I’m Xiaobeizi. Nice to meet you.