Solo founder here, currently marketing a niche developer tool (ZIP API for cloud storage). Sharing what I've learned in the first two weeks:

The "post everywhere" strategy doesn't work. I tried posting on Reddit with links to my product — comments got silently filtered by AutoMod. Even linking to a Dev.to article got flagged as a banned domain on r/cloudflare. You can't even tell your stuff is invisible unless you check in a private window.

What's actually working (slowly): answering real questions in subreddits where my users hang out, with zero self-promotion. One genuine technical answer on r/cloudflare got 5 upvotes. That's more signal than any launch post.

The hardest part isn't building the product — it's accepting that marketing is a months-long trust-building exercise, not a launch event.