Distribution Bottleneck: Indie Developers Have No Legitimate Place to Promote and Cannot Reach Buyers at the Moment of Need

Summary

Indie developers consistently report that building is easy but distribution is the real bottleneck. There are very few legitimate, high-signal places to promote or pitch a product without being flagged as spam, and paid ads are increasingly unaffordable. At the same time, potential users are asking for solutions in AI assistants and search engines, but indie products have no reliable way to be discovered or recommended at that moment of need. Existing channels—Product Hunt, social media, cold outreach—yield negligible results for most solo founders, and there is no systematic way to match a product to the exact moment a buyer is looking. This unsolved distribution gap leaves good products invisible and founders demoralized.