The guide's roadmap: eight steps in two halves

Before you dig in, here's the whole path: eight steps in two halves. First, fix the funnel. Then, go get people.

Why this guide is worth reading

Most articles about distribution stop at "make content" and "be consistent." This one stands out because every step leads to something concrete—and that concrete thing is copy-pasteable:

One more thing to be clear about: the money and time go into the second half, but whether you survive long enough to get there depends on the first half. So start at step one.

Step 1: Set up analytics so the funnel is visible

A funnel doesn't exist until you can see it. The guide skips Google Analytics — the out-of-the-box experience is rough, and it's missing features you actually need. The paid alternatives have the features but aren't open-source. If you want to own your data, the open-source stack is two tools, each covering a different side:

Three steps to install, four events to track

OpenReplay is an npm package. Installing it in a Next.js app takes three steps.

@openreplay/tracker

NEXT_PUBLIC_OPENREPLAY_PROJECT_KEY=your_key
NEXT_PUBLIC_OPENREPLAY_INGEST=https://openreplay.yourdomain.com/ingest

const tracker = new Tracker({ projectKey: process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_OPENREPLAY_PROJECT_KEY!, ingestPoint: process.env.NEXT_PUBLIC_OPENREPLAY_INGEST!, });

export default tracker;

But installing it only gets you halfway. Replays alone just let you watch one session at a time — you can't see patterns. Events let you stitch those sessions into a funnel.The code is one line:

tracker.event('experiment_created');

Place an event at every gate in your funnel. The four the guide uses cover the full journey from clicking signup to actually using the product:

If you'd rather follow along with a video, the guide links two walkthroughs:

Step 2: Check five numbers against benchmarks

Once you can see the funnel, here's what to look at: five numbers, each covering one part of the funnel.

The table's most useful feature is the frame of reference. A brand-new indie project hitting 2% visitor-to-signup is already "average" — the real screenshot in the guide shows 2.2%, labeled "about average for most websites." Don't set 10% as your starting target. Lock down 2% first.

Bounce rate is right on the main Plausible dashboard — the location is circled. Image: George Field / freeCodeCamp

Bounce rate is on the homepage. Conversion rate, on the other hand, requires you to set a goal yourself: scroll to the goals section at the bottom of the Plausible dashboard, click "set up goals," add a Pageview goal, and choose the page users land on after signing up (for example, /register). Back on the dashboard, the goals section will show the conversion rate for that goal.

Step 3: High bounce rate? Check traffic source first

When the numbers look bad, where do you start? This is the most actionable rule in the entire guide, because it's exactly the opposite of your gut instinct.

Step 1: Is the source the right audience?

Say your bounce rate is 80%. The first thing to do is open your source list and ask whether those sites have anything to do with your product. Don't touch the landing page yet. The guide puts it bluntly:

If you're building a garden management SaaS and your traffic is coming from car repair forums and news sites, that's a traffic quality problem, not a page problem.

How to Get Your Side Project Seen and Gain Paying Users · freeCodeCamp

Devremote, a job board for remote developers, has the "right" kind of source list: dev.to, freecodecamp.org, LinkedIn, GitHub, and Google. All places developers actually hang out. That traffic is fine.

This is what a healthy source list looks like: the people coming in are already your target audience. Image: George Field / freeCodeCamp

Step 2: Fix the landing page only after the source is right

Eight points, usable as a checklist:

After a change, give it a month. Usually takes two or three iterations to see movement.

Step 3: Only after bounce rate is healthy and conversion is still low, look at the CTA

These two metrics are linked: if your bounce rate is good, conversion is usually not far behind. So if your bounce rate is healthy and conversion is still under 2%, the button copy is likely the problem. A CTA just gives the user a nudge. Here are five variants you can A/B test directly:

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Step 4: Find the Narrowest Step in Your Funnel

After those first three steps, here's the sequence applied to a real funnel. This is the only set of first-party data in the guide, pulled over the previous 24 hours.

Here's how to read it: the first three steps go 127 → 77 → 61. Loss, sure, but within normal range. The real bloodbath is between email verified and workspace created. So the thing to fix is the onboarding flow; the signup process itself is fine. This is backwards from what most people assume, because the signup page is the one that gets endlessly polished.

The original funnel card in OpenReplay. The "Skipped" count on each row is how many people dropped off at that step. Image: George Field / freeCodeCamp

Once You've Found the Step, What to Look For in the Replays

Pull up the session replays for that specific step and check six things: whether navigation is causing confusion, repeated clicks or clicks that do nothing, form errors, obvious hesitation, what they did right before leaving, and — most useful of all — watch sessions that completed the step side-by-side with sessions that abandoned it.

On the Retention Side: Five Signals Someone Is Actually Using the Product

• They come back regularly: 2–3 times a week is good for most products. Tools like report automation, which you set and forget, will naturally be lower.
• They repeat the core action: Logging in doesn't count. Are they actually doing the thing the product exists for?
• They explore features beyond initial setup: That means they're going deeper.
• They hit the "aha moment": The first time they feel the core value. Count how many get there.
• They come back and repeat it: The strongest signal of all — they tasted value and came back for another bite.

Second Half: You've Fixed the Funnel. Now Solve "Nobody's Coming."

But a perfect funnel still gets zero if no one walks in the door. The sentence this guide most wants you to remember: when it comes to getting people in the door, distribution matters far more than the product.

If you can't get people in the door, what's the point of a great sofa, beautiful lights, and nice decor inside?

How to Get Your Side Project Seen and Gain Paying Users · freeCodeCamp

That's not saying product quality doesn't matter. It matters enormously once someone is inside. It's saying one person building a product can't carry everything at once. Like any engineering problem, you tackle it in pieces — and this is the piece you tackle first. As for what distribution means, the definition from the first section suffices: distribution is touch points at scale.

From there, the guide dismantles two popular sayings:

Without distribution, your project is forever just a project.

Step 5: Borrow Someone Else's Audience

First thing in the second half: distribution requires an audience, and an audience isn't something you build in a year. You're building, testing, pouring effort into your product — you don't have an audience sitting there. The good news: you don't need your own. You can borrow someone else's.

Seven channels. Here's how they stack up: the cheaper they are, the slower. The faster they are, the more they cost — and the fast ones aren't always right for the early stage.

The Four Free Channels

• Guest posts: Find a product that's complementary to yours, with a slightly different market, and ask if you can publish on their blog. More common than you'd think, and often welcomed. Use Medium as a starting point, or search directly for blogs in your industry. Long-term, this builds your SEO too.
• PR platforms to find journalists: Platforms like Qwoted let you pitch reporters who are actively covering your topic. They'll often quote you and include a link back to your site. A reality check, by the way: many of those "as mentioned in Forbes" LinkedIn posts come from this exact mechanism, not from the person being a big deal.
• Community forums: Low cost, low barrier, and people there are generally willing to help. But you have to give value first. Spamming is negative points and may get you banned. The rule is 90% of your posts help others, 10% mention your product. One crucial difference from social media: people come to communities to solve a problem. You can use that, but don't abuse it. The guide names Peerlist, a professional community for developers and product people, as an example.
• SEO blog: The granddaddy of internet marketing. The modern definition isn't just ranking on Google — it also means being cited by tools like ChatGPT and Claude. Done right, this is the steadiest free traffic, capable of bringing in over a thousand people a month. The cost is time: 3–9 months or longer to see results. The rhythm is 4–6 quality posts per month, with links coming back from elsewhere. One concrete tactic: when you answer a question in a community, link to one of your blog posts as further reading. It feeds your SEO and genuinely helps the person asking.

The Three Channels That Cost Money

Small podcasts: Target shows with 500–5,000 monthly active listeners. This size is far more willing to book guests with no name recognition, and the audience in a niche show is more curious about products like yours.

Newsletter sponsorships work because email open rates are decent — industry benchmarks sit at 35.9% open rate and 2.3% unique click rate. But keep one thing straight: the number that decides how much traffic you get is the 2.3%. The 35.9% only means someone opened the email, not that they clicked. Do the math on 2.3%: a publication with 100,000 subscribers gets you roughly 2,300 clicks. Use that number to decide if the price is worth it. Prices vary wildly: the guide cites one example at $750 for a single placement, with bigger pubs starting at $2,000 and delivering inconsistent results. So its first piece of advice is actually "put this on hold." No budget? Wait until the project has revenue. If you do want to test now, spend $100–200 per placement on a few smaller pubs, find which vertical works, then scale up. Submission pages are usually on the publication's site — Indie Hackers has one in the top right corner.

Influencers / YouTubers is the channel the guide admits to liking the most. Find people with decent view counts but follower counts in the 1,000–10,000 range. Grab their email from their bio, send a direct pitch, and lay out a revenue-share structure. Most won't reply, especially at first. But the ones who do often do more than just agree. The recipient of the letter below not only said yes — he invited the sender into his large Discord community and shared his research method along the way.

The collaboration pitch email: who you are, what you want to do together, and how the revenue share works. Image: George Field / freeCodeCamp

The Platform List for Finding People and Publications

Step 6: Build a Channel That's Yours

Borrowing is fine, but you also want one of your own. Two reasons: it's yours, and it helps you land partnerships — people are more willing to work with you when they see you're putting in the work. The guide, as of 2026, narrows it down to three platforms. One of them, Pinterest (a visual discovery platform where people come to find ideas), is the one most people wouldn't think of.

Pinterest is worth unpacking because the data is almost counterintuitive. The guide shows two real accounts that are purely AI-generated content:

Which Platform to Start With for What You're Building

The principle is simple: start where your users already are. B2B SaaS usually means LinkedIn. Consumer apps mean TikTok. You'll still have to experiment — what works for someone else might not work for you. The rule of thumb is to pair one fast channel with one slow one: a social platform to test quickly, plus a blog on your own site. Social gives you "traffic now," with instant feedback — post today, know if it worked within 24 hours. The blog gives you "traffic later."

Step 7: Post for 20 Straight Weeks. Don't Gamble on Virality.

Once you've picked your channels, the whole game comes down to one variable. Buffer ran a study across 100,000+ users over 26 weeks, and it had one question: does consistent posting actually do anything?

In plain English: you don't need a viral hit. You need 20 straight weeks of a little bit of traffic, every single day. For a blog, that's 4 posts a month, one per week, each one digging into one topic and targeting one specific search term related to your product.

This is also the hardest step. For most developers, social media is the last place on earth they want to be. But that's where the users are. So you have to find a way to make it something you want to do: treat it as an experiment, go play, go try — not a chore.

Step 8: Everything You Post Should Create Value

And the final variable is the content itself. If you're borrowing another audience — especially via influencers — the content is usually their job, part of the deal. But for your own channels, it's on you. Here's a pool of ready-to-steal content ideas.

The Whole Guide Fits on One Formula

If you don't start shouting about your product, it will forever remain just a "project." Until the end of time.

You can't fix a funnel you can't see. Set up open-source analytics first: Plausible (or Umami) for numbers, OpenReplay for session replays, and fire one event at each of four key actions to build a full funnel.

When numbers look bad, the first instinct is to rush to the landing page. This guide says that's backwards.

Apply the sequence to a real funnel and the problem jumps out. This is real data from the previous 24 hours.

The funnel doesn't give you the answer. It tells you where to find it.

A smooth funnel with no one in it still gets zero. The sentence this guide most wants you to remember: getting people through the door matters more than the product itself. AI didn't change that — it just lets you mass-produce unused ideas faster.

You don't build an audience from scratch; you borrow it in year one. Seven channels, from free to the $2,000 tier:

Borrowed audiences are just a start. You also want a channel of your own. TikTok's better for apps, YouTube offers more for SaaS, and Pinterest is the overlooked wildcard where follower count barely predicts views.

What actually decides the outcome is whether you can post consistently for long enough. The platform choice is secondary. On content: don't just sell and show off. And daily build-in-public diaries — nobody cares until you've made it.