Developers! You are NOT in the Software Business.

A developer drowning in code, completely ignoring the attention icon. Generated with ChatGPT.

You spent three weekends and 47 cups of coffee building an app. You deployed it, posted it on Twitter and LinkedIn with a fire emoji, sat back and waited for a flood of users to sign up.

Its being 24 hours, 48 hours then 72 hours but still:

Zero users and just crickets.

Not even a hate comment and even your mom did not sign up. Brutal right? At this point you are double checking your dotenv file like maybe, just maybe, there is a HIDE_FROM_USERS=true flag you forgot to remove.

You start being hard on yourself for wasting all that time building a cool app and no one cares. But its not your fault because no one told you the cold harsh truth:

You are not in the Software Business. You are in the Attention Business

No one signed up not because your product doesn't work but because no one knows you exist. The success of your product now depends on who knows about it, who talks about it and who cares.

This post is a wake up call to help you stop hiding behind your code and learn the real game: how to get noticed.

The Problem

Lets be honest. Shipping an app today is easier than ever. Vercel and Netlify are turning deployments into single clicks. We have frameworks practically doing the heavy lifting for us. TailwindCSS and Shadcn makes you design your pages without writing a single line of CSS. There is React which needs no introduction. Want React to render on the server? Boom, there is NextJS. Then of course there is AI practically begging to write your code for you.

Seriously, you can sneeze into your keyboard and Copilot will turn it into a React Component. What once took a team of engineers and several weeks of planning can now be prototyped by a solo developer.

But most projects still die…

With all these advantages, most projects fail; not because of a server crash or critical error but something way different.

In most cases, the software works. It is functional and even well designed. But the lack of eyeballs makes the app fades into obscurity. This is mostly as a result of developers hiding behind their code because that is where comfort exists. They tell themselves the ultimate lie: build it and they will come.

We like to pretend that shipping is the finish line. But the truth is, it is just the beginning of a brand new problem: How to get people to notice.

What Attention Actually Means

In the context of building software products, attention goes far beyond social media likes or page views. It is about earning awareness, interest and trust from the people your product is meant to serve. It means putting your work in front of the right audience consistently and communicating its value clearly.

For developers, this often requires stepping outside of the codebase and into unfamiliar territories like writing, storytelling and audience engagement. This isn't about becoming a full-time influencer; it is about learning to communicate why your product matters. The ability to capture attention and not just ship features is what separates forgotten side projects from products that thrive.

The mistake some developers make is lurking in build-in-public or developer circles on Twitter, proudly building an app for farmers. It's great except farmers are not on Twitter debating React versus NextJS.

Attention is about strategic visibility. It is not just being online but being visible to the people you built your app for. Without that, even the best product ends up as just another well documented ghost town.

How to Grab Attention

Learn to Tell a Compelling Story:

Remember those times when you had no real intention of reading something, maybe a blog post or a twitter thread but you glanced at the first line just to kill time? And then, somehow, you were still reading five minutes later. The reason is simple, you got hooked.

That is the power of a good story. It makes you care before you even realize you are invested.

Nobody gets excited about "a full-stack CRUD app with JWT authentication and optimized state management" Cool flex, but try saying that at a dinner table and watch the conversation die. People don't remember features, they remember stories.

Storytelling is how humans make sense of information. When you are building something, you are not just writing code, you are solving a problem or creating a new possibility. If you can't communicate what you are building, why it matters and who it's for, your work risks being overlooked no matter how technically impressive it is.

Instead of writing a social media post titled, "I built a food delivery app" followed by how you switched state management from Redux to Zustand and a mountain of all the technical jargon you can think of, you could say:

It's 11:43 PM. You're starving. The fridge contains half tomato, expired yoghurt and regret. You open your favorite delivery app… and boom, everything is closed. That is when you realized this app is useless when you actually need it most. So I built one that isn't useless. My app only shows places that are actually open; late-night joints, 24/7 kitchens and that one sharwama spot that never sleeps. It's built for night owls, gamers, coders on deadline and anyone who's ever stared into an empty fridge late at night. Because, when it's late, you are hungry and everyone else is asleep. You don't want options, you want food.

No buzzwords and no mention of tech stacks, frameworks or database choices. Just a relatable moment, a real problem and a clear solution. In a single short story, you know who it's for, why it matters and what it does. With the power of storytelling, you can turn a basic food delivery app into something people instantly understands and remember. And this is what grabs attention.

Build an Audience Before (or While) You Build:

One of the effective ways to ensure people actually care about your product is to involve them before it launches. Building an audience early gives you two critical advantages: validation and visibility.

When you share your journey publicly through blog posts, tweets or email newsletters, you begin to attract people who are interested in the problem your are solving. These early followers can become testers, and your first users. They give feedback and help shape the product.

Building an audience takes time, consistency and its one of the most difficult things to achieve. But here's the thing; you don't have to do it alone.

Some developers build their own following from scratch, brick by brick. Others? They slide into the DMs of influencers who already have the crowed they are trying to reach. And that works too.

Why spend 6 months shouting into the void when someone else has already gathered your future users under one roof?

Whether you are building your own audience or leveraging someone else's, the goal remains the same: get in front of people who care about what you are building.

Study Marketing Like you Study Frameworks

You cannot build something cool and expect the internet to magically care. Many developers treat marketing as an afterthought; something to worry about when the product is complete. In reality, marketing is just as crucial as the code you write.

Marketing is like the docs to your product. Without it, people won't know what it does, why it matters and why they should care.

Just like you dive deep into new frameworks, dissect how they work and figure out the best use cases, you should approach marketing the same way. Learn how to write clear messaging. Understand your audience's pain points. Study positioning, and how attention flows online.

You don't need to become a full-time growth hacker. If you can understand React's virtual DOM, you can definitely learn how to write headlines that doesn't put people to sleep.

Marketing is just another system. Learn how it works

Document the Journey

One of the most effective ways to build early interest in your product is to share the process behind it. Rather than waiting until everything is complete, start documenting your progress as you go. You can share initial concepts, design decisions and small milestones.

This kind of transparency fosters early engagement. People are likely to support a product they have seen evolve in real time.

Sharing your build doesn't mean live-tweeting every useEffect() refactor or writing your daily git log. No one cares. Not even your future self.

What people do care about is the story: What are you building? Why? What is broken today? What tiny win made you feel like a genius?

When you document your process with a bit of personality and a lot less jargon, people pay attention. They relate to struggle, celebrate the progress and slowly get invested in the outcome.

You don't need to turn your timeline into a textbook. Just share like you are explaining it to a friend who does not how to code, not your senior backend lead. Keep it human, keep it light and no one wants a thread titled, "Optimizing my GraphQL Resolver Layer".

Final Thoughts

The internet is full of amazing apps no one is using. Because the only people who saw them were the developer, their roommate and their dog.

The truth is you are not writing code anymore, you are writing hooks. And not the React kind of hooks but the kind that make people care.

In a world where a anyone can spin up a full stack app over the weekend, building isn't the hard part anymore. Getting noticed is.

You are not shipping features, you are shipping emotions and context. You are not in the software business, you are in the attention business.

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I am building small, weird, and hopefully useful things on the internet while documenting every misstep along the way. Subscribe to my newsletter to follow the journey, get behind-the-scenes lessons, and maybe avoid some mistakes I already made.