the hardest thing i've hit in 17 years of coding isn't technical

it's distribution. i've been building software for 17 years, 14 of them as an engineer inside companies, the last 3 running my own shop building ERP and CRM systems for local businesses. in all that time the customers came to me, through contracts, referrals, existing relationships. this year, for the first time, i'm building something for everyone, and getting a stranger to care turns out to be harder than any bug i've ever fixed. hi, i'm Emir, a solo developer from Turkey.

this past year two things shifted at once. i started building with AI agents instead of writing every line by hand, which quietly changed what i even spend my time on, less typing, more deciding and reviewing. and the side effect of using those tools all day became the thing i'm building now: Foldif, a Chrome extension that adds a knowledge layer on top of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini, highlight, note, organize, so the good answers don't vanish into infinite scroll.

so here i am, comfortable with the building part, completely green on the part where you get people who've never met you to try something. learning the indie/maker side mostly in public, and mostly by getting it wrong first.

not here to pitch, here to learn from how you all navigate this, distribution, positioning, the strange new shape of building solo. happy to trade notes, give feedback, or argue about whether prompting is a real skill. glad to be here.