u/No_Engineering4501

Wrote this up because it genuinely surprised me. A routine badge-verification bot from a directory site couldn't find our homepage content, and when I actually fetched our own page the way a non-JS crawler does (ChatGPT's browser tool, Perplexity, Claude's web search), there was almost nothing there. No headline, no pricing, no features, just a loading spinner frozen mid-render.

Turns out most AI crawlers don't execute JavaScript the way Googlebot does, so a fully client-rendered React site can look completely normal in a browser while being functionally empty to anything else reading the raw HTML.

Full writeup here if useful: [link]

Curious if anyone else running a JS-heavy site has actually checked this, curl your own homepage and see what comes back, might be worth 30 seconds to find out.

Been building something on my own for a while now and keep running into stuff I genuinely didn't see coming. Not the big obvious things like fundraising or hiring, more the small operational stuff. Legal paperwork, security compliance, the boring admin side of running a company.

Curious what caught other solo builders off guard. Not looking for "everything is hard" answers, more the specific thing you didn't expect to eat so much time.

Been tracking this loosely in my head and it's kind of alarming. Feels like way less time than I'd expect actually goes into the product itself, most of it's outreach, support, random admin stuff, security/legal things that need attention, the unglamorous side nobody warns you about.

Curious what this actually looks like for other people. Is that just how it goes once you're past the very early stage, or is there a way to protect more time for the actual building part?

I’m a strong engineer and a weak marketer. I can build the product; the part that kills me every time is getting anyone to pay for it. Every project I’ve shipped has died at the same spot — not bad code, just zero distribution and honestly some avoidance of the whole “go out and get users” grind.

For those of you who pushed through and got to 10 paying customers, I want the unglamorous version:
• Where did those first 10 actually come from? (cold outreach, a specific community, personal network, a launch, DMs?)
• How long did it take, and how much of it was you manually grinding vs. anything repeatable?
• If you’re also a technical founder — what finally got you to do the distribution part instead of avoiding it?

Not selling anything, genuinely trying to learn from people who’ve done it.

Been doing this for a while now. Full time job during the day, then nights and weekends on my own thing. Some weeks it feels fine, other weeks I'm just tired all the time and not sure the balance is actually working.

Curious how other people who've done this manage it. Do you just accept being tired for a season, or is there an actual way to make it sustainable long term? Not looking for "just quit your job" answers, more interested in how people actually survive the overlap period.