Shipping an app takes a weekend now. Getting 100 people to use it takes everything else.
I watch vibe coders ship something solid, post it once, and get zero traction. Here are 7 distribution moves I'd run if I shipped today.
1. Stack your launches instead of betting on one day. A Top-5 Product Hunt finish gets you around 1,500 visitors and 120 signups in 48 hours. That's good, not life-changing. Run it as a sequence: Product Hunt, then Peerlist (week-long window, every product gets featured), then Show HN, then the directory long tail. Each one is a discovery moment and a permanent backlink.
2. List on the AI directories built for apps like yours. There's An AI For That, Toolify, and Futurepedia send buyer-intent traffic that doesn't expire, plus dofollow links that get your app cited inside ChatGPT and Perplexity answers. Toolify takes a one-time fee around $99 and ranks because of aggressive category SEO.
3. Build in public, but post lessons, not features. Revenue screenshots get likes. "Here's the approach I tried, why it broke, what I switched to" gets follows and signups. Base44 grew to 250,000 users in about six months on nothing but the founder sharing the build, then sold to Wix for $80M.
4. Get your first 100 users from Reddit, not your timeline. Honest "here's what I built and learned" posts in r/SideProject and your exact niche subs out-convert Product Hunt for most indie apps. One founder pulled 60 of their first 100 users from Reddit. Set up F5Bot to ping you the second someone mentions your keywords so you reach the thread first.
5. Pay creators to demo your app before you pay Meta to guess at your audience. A few hundred dollars to niche micro-influencers for native "here's what I use" videos beats broad social ads under $1,000, which need triple that to even produce usable data. Cal AI's founder DM'd fitness creators by hand and pushed the app past a million downloads.
6. Run paid as narrow intent capture, never broad prospecting. Skip Meta until your budget can feed it. Put $10 to $20 a day into long-tail Google Search on 5 to 10 buying-intent keywords like "best [your category] for [audience]" That tests whether people will pay before you scale anything.
7. Ship free micro-tools instead of blog posts. AI Overviews gutted informational SEO, and 83% of searches that trigger one end without a single click. Small free tools still pull traffic: target "[thing] generator" and "[thing] calculator" keywords, the kind your AI coding tool builds in an afternoon, and point them straight at your app as the upgrade.
