A few days ago, an acquaintance of mine who is building a business through vibe coding came to me to vent. He poured his heart out, saying that even objectively speaking, the service he built is fantastic, yet absolutely nobody is paying attention to it.
When I actually looked at his product, it really was well made and genuinely appealing. It was an app where you paste a link to a YouTube cooking video and it automatically pulls out every ingredient used in that recipe. The idea was not bad at all. It was clearly something that could save serious time for people who love cooking.
So I started thinking through how to actually solve this. If the core problem is that nobody is paying attention, then logically, almost all of his time needs to go toward fixing exactly that. Instead, it felt like he was pouring his energy into completely different things.
If You Don't Exist, Nothing Else Matters
These days the channel I watch the most belongs to a guy named Alex Hormozi, arguably one of the most influential voices in business content right now. There is one thing he repeats constantly. Whatever you do, spend your first four hours getting known. People do not even know you exist yet.
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| If you don't exist, your product doesn't either |
That is exactly it. I wanted to tell my friend that making his service known is, right now, the single most important thing he can be doing. Whether that means creating content or writing articles, the specific method matters far less than just doing it.
Don't Shout in Times Square. Go to the School Gate.
Once you accept that you need to spend your time on visibility, the next question becomes obvious. What kind of content should you actually make?
First, you need a clear picture of your ideal customer. You need to know exactly who your service is for so you can go straight to wherever those people gather in the largest numbers. If you built something for students, you do not promote it in the middle of Times Square. You stand right outside the school gate where the students actually are.
Knowing your customer is step one. And these days, the narrower that target, the better. Why? Because anything built for "everyone" has already been completely cornered by massive corporations with massive budgets.
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| Niche targeting turns ordinary shoppers into loyal customers |
A great example of doing this right is a UK fashion brand called Roman Originals. When they ran Instagram ads, they did not just target people interested in women's clothing. They narrowed it down hard: people interested in women's clothing, who also travel frequently, who also live in the UK. Anyone who checked all three boxes saw that ad and immediately thought, this is literally made for me.
Finding the Perfect Intersection
My friend needs to think carefully about who his app is actually for. Right off the bat, you can already split his customers into two overlapping groups: people interested in cooking, and people who love searching YouTube for cooking videos.
From here, the job becomes finding exactly where that specific overlap hangs out the most.
Honestly, YouTube and social media are the best tools for this. Almost everyone uses YouTube. And on social platforms, if you create a sharply targeted video, the algorithm does the heavy lifting of delivering it to exactly the right people. This is exactly why I always tell people to actively run at least one social platform. It is one of the strongest levers in marketing, period.
To figure out where this exact intersection lives, I set up the target avatar and asked Claude directly. It gave me this:
"There are different places depending on the characteristics of your target. The place where people who actually cook their own meals gather is 82COOK, the oldest and most active cooking community. It is primarily housewives in their 30s to 50s sharing recipes, recommending ingredients, and leaving restaurant reviews, with the Kitchen Talk and Hit Recipe boards being especially active."
There is the answer. The next move is simple. Go post in a community like that. Something like, "I built this app, give it a shot if you're curious."
Show the Magic, Don't Explain the Machine
Now that we know where our target customers actually are, the next question is what kind of content to post. The best approach, hands down, is showing people immediately how your app solves their problem.
Dropbox nailed this early on. In the beginning, they explained their product by saying "this is a service where your files automatically sync." The reaction was lukewarm at best.
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| Don't explain your product, show the problem being solved |
So Dropbox released a single two minute video. It showed a file being dragged on one computer, then instantly appearing on a different computer. They did not explain the feature. They showed the exact moment the problem disappeared. That one shift reportedly boosted their conversion rate by 10%.
Riding the Wave of Existing Traffic
If I were my friend, here is exactly what I would do. Since his app pulls ingredients from any YouTube cooking video, I would look up the current trending food videos and pick two or three of the most viral ones right now.
Then I would make a Shorts video or piece of content showing exactly what ingredients go into those trending videos. Instead of just saying "my app has these features," show yourself actually pasting the URL of an already viral cooking video and watching the ingredients pop up live on screen. That moves the customer from simply knowing what the app does to instantly understanding how it fits into their actual life.
If that feels like too much, there is a simpler version. Go to that high traffic video directly, write out the ingredients in the comments section, and end with something like, "I organized this using this app, and it made things way easier."
In short, you are borrowing the traffic someone else already built.
You might be thinking, do I really need to go this far? But right now, you need to use every single tool available to get your service in front of people. Like I said earlier, this is your biggest bottleneck right now, so it has to be the first thing you solve.
So here is the summary. First, define exactly who your customer is. Then figure out exactly where they spend their time. Finally, take their actual pain point and explain how you solve it in your own unique, engaging way.
Business can feel impossibly hard, but in a lot of cases, a small shift in perspective makes it remarkably simple. There is no such thing as a lack of response without a reason behind it. Every failure has a real, identifiable cause. Once you solve that specific problem, the next step tends to fall into place naturally.
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