I can ship a full-stack app in a weekend. I could not, for the life of me, get a single stranger to care about it.

Every launch I did before this year followed the same pattern: build for 3 months, post "I made this!!" on launch day, get 4 likes from other devs, watch it die by day 3.

The problem was never the product. It was that I treated marketing like an afterthought — something you slap together the morning of launch instead of building alongside the code.

What actually changed things for me was reducing "marketing" down to a small, repeatable checklist instead of a vague skill I was missing:

1. A positioning doc — one page forcing you to answer "who is this for and why do they care" BEFORE you write a single line of landing page copy. Most technical founders skip this and it shows.

2. A launch sequence — not a single post, but a mapped-out week of what to say, where, and in what order, so you're not improvising on launch morning.

3. A distribution list — the actual places (communities, subreddits, PH categories, newsletters) worth posting in for a dev tool, ranked by effort vs. payoff.

4. A follow-up template — because the sale isn't the launch post, it's the 5 DMs you send to people who almost bought.

None of this required "marketing skills." It required a system, because devs are already good at following systems — we just never had one for this part.

If you're technical and about to launch (or already did and got crickets), happy to talk through what's not working. I turned this exact checklist into a small toolkit if anyone wants the files — just ask.