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Developer's 90-Day Comment Experiment Reveals What Actually Converts Early Users

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A solo developer spent 90 days deliberately commenting on Hacker News, Reddit, and Dev.to threads related to AI tools and Chrome extensions, treating the exercise as distribution research rather than marketing. The experiment yielded 18 users for his Chrome extension, AI Buddy, with six of those users traced to a single Indie Hackers post and none to a Product Hunt launch. He found that posts framing personal friction and trade-offs consistently outperformed feature-led pitches, and that cold-traffic conversions came almost exclusively from Twitter's #buildinpublic community. His key takeaway is that trust built through honest, problem-first storytelling drives conversions more reliably than launch-day traffic spikes, which generate signups but little actionable signal.

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Developer's 90-Day Comment Experiment Reveals What Actually Converts Early Users · ShortSingh