u/Mysterious-Potato774

my side project is basically done at this point. it's an ai chief of staff type tool, been building it nights and weekends alongside my day job as a software engineer.

and now i'm stuck on the part i genuinely didn't prepare for: getting anyone to actually see it. i have no existing audience, no newsletter, no following anywhere. building felt hard but at least i knew what to do each day. marketing feels like throwing things at a wall with no feedback loop.

for the solopreneurs here who got past this stage, what actually worked? not the generic 'post on reddit and twitter' answer, i mean the real sequence, what you did first, second, third, and what you'd skip if you started over.

Airo (https://www.useairo.co) connects to the apps small business owners already use and takes action directly. Emails, scheduling, lookups, research. The idea was to stop asking people to learn something new. Just talk to it and it handles things.

Launched quietly and still figuring out distribution. For anyone who's built for SMBs, what worked for getting your first real users?

Not pitching anything. Just genuinely trying to understand where time actually goes for people running small businesses. For me, talking to owners, the same stuff keeps coming up but I want to hear it from you. What's yours?