You shipped it. That was the easy half.

I have shipped a handful of small things. The pattern never changes. Building takes a few weekends and feels like progress the entire time. Then it goes live, I post it once, and the analytics graph shows one visitor — me, refreshing the page to check whether the deployment actually worked.

Nothing was wrong with the software. There was simply no reason for anyone to know it existed. Distribution is a separate problem with its own skill set, and I had been treating it as something that would sort itself out once the thing was good enough. It does not.

The part I kept skipping

Engineers are comfortable with problems that have a compiler. If the build is red, something is wrong and you go and fix it. There is no equivalent signal for “nobody can find this”. No test suite catches a product with no visitors, and no alert fires when nobody cares.

The usual advice is “do marketing”, which is like telling somebody to “just do Kubernetes”. That is a category, not a task. What I want from tooling is the same thing I want everywhere else: tell me the actual state of things, then tell me the next concrete action.

What actually found people

What I have been using for this is SEOFarmer, and it is built around exactly the situation above: you shipped, now grow traffic. It is aimed at a product that exists and has no audience yet.

The part that fits how I work is that it does not open with advice. It opens with evidence — your own Search Console numbers, live keyword volume and difficulty, and the public conversations where people are already asking the question your product answers. That gets condensed into what it calls Growth Missions: a short prioritised list instead of a wall of metrics. Publish a comparison page. Fix one specific issue. Answer this thread. Add these internal links.

Two mission types did most of the work for me, and neither of them is clever.

• Commercial and comparison keywords. Nobody searches for your product by name, because nobody knows it exists. But people do search for “competitor alternatives” or “X vs Y” — queries with obvious purchase intent that you can answer with a page you write in an evening. The tool flags the intent, and the recommendation is usually “write an alternatives page”, which is the least creative item on the list and the one that works.
• Launch platforms, filtered. There are a thousand lists of places to submit a product and most of them are stale, pay-to-play, or dead. This keeps a manually checked list and filters it by product fit, by whether you are willing to pay, and by the maximum you will spend per opportunity. The detail I actually care about: anything it has not verified is labelled unverified rather than guessed. No invented traffic number, no promised backlink.

There is also a community feed: public discussions — Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow among them — matched to opportunities with a link to the original thread, which makes it a conversation you could join rather than another listicle.

The honest trade-offs

It is metered, and you should read the numbers before you like the idea. Every AI action costs Farm Credits and every fresh keyword lookup costs a Live Research search. The cheapest plan is €9.90 a month for 100 credits and 25 searches on one website. €19.90 gives you 250 and 50 across three sites, and €39.90 gives 600 and 120 across ten. Cached research is free to reopen, which softens it, but if you intend to generate a lot of content every month you will be watching a counter.

• The free trial is five credits and two searches. Enough to see the interface, not enough to judge whether the recommendations hold up in your niche. Plan on one paid month as the real evaluation.
• The 50% discount is the first billing period only. It is a normal tactic and the site says so plainly, but the ongoing price is the one to budget. Prices are in euros.
• It is a young product. Support is one email address, there is no company entity named on the site, and the roadmap — more integrations, advanced reports, agency and multi-site tools — is listed as next rather than shipped. You would be an early customer, with the usual consequences.
• The AI writer only runs when you explicitly ask it to, which I read as a feature, and it still produces drafts that need you. It knows only what you told it, and it will happily write a confident comparison page with a detail wrong about your competitor. Read it before you publish it.
• The site is honest about the ceiling of its own measurement: mark a mission complete and it stores a baseline, so later Search Console data shows what happened to clicks, impressions and positions. It does not claim to prove why. That is the correct claim, and it is also the limit — SEO is slow, noisy, and a specific page often just does not work.
• And the hard one: none of this creates demand. It finds searches that are already happening and shows you where your thing might be a plausible answer. If what you built does not answer a question anybody is typing, a good tool will make that clear, which is still the most valuable thing it can do for you.

What I would do in the first month

Ignore the dashboard. Pick one comparison query your product can genuinely answer, write the page properly, and ship it. Submit to three launch platforms that fit and skip the rest. Answer two threads where somebody is asking the question you solve — answering, not dropping a link, because the link is not why you are there.

Then wait, and keep the baseline. The measurement is boring and mostly disappointing for the first few months, which is exactly why having something else store the baseline matters more than any of the advice. Shipping was still the easy half — at least this half has a to-do list.