Earning Trust Before Launch: One Builder's Journey Through Reddit Karma, Deploy Failures, and Finding the Right Customer

This narrative exposes a bootstrapper's real constraints: meaningful distribution demands authentic engagement and patience, not promotional shortcuts. It also captures a crucial lesson about platform reliability—when systems fail without diagnosis, accepting the reality and documenting it saves time better spent elsewhere. Most critically, it underscores that building a solid product is just the first step; identifying and reaching the specific customer who desperately needs it is the harder challenge.