Nobody is checking your Stripe dashboard but you.

There is no point checking the Stripe or RevenueCat dashboard every five minutes. I know, because I did it for two days after Steady got its first paid subscription. The number does not move because you look at it. Close the tab and do something that markets the app.

Here are the four notes I keep coming back to.

1. You cannot sell anything to anyone

You can only help someone buy. Most builders do not understand the difference, and I was one of them for five products.

Selling is pushing a thing you made at people who did not ask. Helping someone buy is finding a person with the problem, showing them you understand it, and getting out of the way. ReplyWisely exists because of this note. It finds the posts on X where someone already has the problem your product solves, so the reply helps first and mentions the product second.

2. Solve what the customer needs, not what you know how to build

I know how to build dashboards, trackers and admin screens. Nobody needed another one of those. What a person fasting needs at hour fourteen is to get through hour fourteen. That is a different product from the one my skills wanted to build.

3. Unfamiliarity kills more products than bugs

A bug gets reported. Unfamiliarity gets a quiet uninstall. If a new user opens the app and cannot tell in ten seconds what it is for and what to tap, the quality of the code never gets a chance to matter.

I now spend more of the first week after a launch on the first screen than on the feature list. One sentence that says what this is. One obvious next tap.

4. Reddit is the cheapest way to get found by ChatGPT

People ask ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini for product recommendations now. The models lean heavily on Reddit when they answer. Writing honestly about your product on Reddit, in the subreddits where the problem lives, is the lowest cost way I have found to show up in those answers.

Not a launch post. A real answer to a real question, with the product mentioned where it fits. Think of it as the cheapest form of what people are now calling generative engine optimisation.

None of these notes are new. I just did not believe them until the dashboard stopped moving and I had to do something else.