How to Get Users for Your Vibe-Coded App

Last month I shipped three apps. Two in a single weekend. Claude Code handled most of the heavy lifting while I described features in plain English.

All three are live. All three work. None of them have users.

I'm not alone here. My Twitter timeline is full of "just shipped!" posts from other devs doing the exact same thing. We're all staring at analytics dashboards that look like EKGs for dead patients.

Cursor and Lovable don't mention this part in their marketing. They solved building. Distribution? Still brutal. Maybe worse than before, actually.

The vibe coding explosion

Andrej Karpathy threw out the term "vibe coding" in February 2025 - basically, stop worrying about code structure and just tell the AI what you want. Let it figure out the implementation. Collins Dictionary picked it as Word of the Year by December.

Y Combinator reported that 25% of startups in its Winter 2025 batch had codebases that were 95% AI-generated. A quarter of the world's most competitive startup cohort is basically vibe coding their entire product.

The platforms enabling this are on a different trajectory:

Cursor hit $1 billion ARR by November 2025. Their revenue was doubling every two months. Valuation: $29.3 billion.
Claude Code reached $1 billion run-rate revenue just six months after its May 2025 launch.
Lovable raised $330 million at a $6.6 billion valuation in December 2025.
Windsurf hit $82 million ARR before getting acquired by Cognition.
Emergent raised $70 million at a $300 million valuation with $50 million ARR, targeting $100 million by April 2026.

Everyone can build now. Everyone is building.

The discovery problem nobody talks about

If thousands of people are shipping apps every day, and discovery channels haven't scaled to match, you're competing against an avalanche.

Your lovingly crafted SaaS is drowning in a sea of other lovingly crafted SaaSes. All shipped by people who also spent a weekend on Cursor or Lovable. All posted to the same Product Hunt. All tweeted about to the same audience.

The numbers paint a grim picture:

Paid acquisition costs have increased 60-80% since 2022
The average B2B buyer now interacts with 11+ pieces of content before purchasing
Launch platforms like Hacker News are saturated with AI wrappers
Using "AI-Powered" in your HN title now underperforms due to fatigue

The old playbook - build something, launch on Product Hunt, hope for the best - doesn't work anymore.

Studies show Indie Hackers delivers a 23.1% conversion rate per engaged post compared to Product Hunt's 3.1%. But even that requires 4-6 months of sustained community engagement first. One agency reported a 300% increase in signups over 6 months from strategic community engagement alone.

You can't growth-hack your way out of obscurity. You need search engines and AI assistants to actually want to recommend you.

Why AI search changes everything

Search is changing. Fast.

AI platforms account for 0.15% of global internet traffic. Sounds tiny until you realize it grew 7x since 2024. ChatGPT drives 87.4% of all AI referral traffic. Perplexity takes 15-20% in the US.

AI search visitors convert 23 times better than traditional organic search visitors. Ahrefs found that visitors from AI search platforms generated 12.1% of signups despite accounting for only 0.5% of overall traffic.

When ChatGPT recommends your app, people actually try it. They trust the recommendation. They're not clicking through ten blue links hoping to find something good.

So how do you get ChatGPT to know you exist?

From SEO to Answer Engine Optimization

Traditional SEO focused on ranking for clicks. That game is changing.

AI answer engines like Perplexity, ChatGPT, and Google AI Overviews intercept user queries and provide synthesized answers. The goal isn't ranking anymore. It's earning citations.

Research shows that 76.10% of pages cited in AI Overviews also rank in Google's top 10. The coupling between AI visibility and backlinks is strongest in tech and finance.

ChatGPT heavily favors established sources. Wikipedia dominated at 27% of citations in one study. The AI doesn't crawl the web looking for random SaaS tools. It looks at what trusted sources link to and talk about.

Perplexity is different. Reddit accounts for 46.7% of its citations. It has a strong recency bias, prioritizing content from the last 1-2 years.

What actually increases your chances of being cited:

Adding statistics to content increases citation visibility by 22%
Adding direct quotations increases it by 37%
Brand search volume is the #1 predictor of LLM citations
Having presence on 4+ third-party platforms significantly increases citation probability

We wrote a whole guide on generative engine optimization if you want to go deeper.

The vibe coder's marketing problem

You're technical. You love building. You spent 10 hours perfecting your app's animations. You spent 0 hours thinking about how anyone will find it.

The typical vibe coder marketing strategy:

Post on Twitter/X
Submit to Product Hunt
Wait
Wonder why nothing happened
Start building the next app

Sound familiar?

I went down a rabbit hole last month trying to figure out why some apps get traction. Looked at maybe 30 launches that actually worked. Reddit threads, newsletter mentions, blog posts from randos, ChatGPT spitting out their name unprompted.

What do all these have in common? Backlinks and authority signals. The stuff search engines and AI can actually count. We put together a breakdown of how that whole machine works if you want to go deeper.

What actually works for getting users

Hacker News (done right)

Alright, Show HN. You probably already know this one. Best way to get in front of developers who actually download stuff and try it. My best post ever got 200 and something points - kept getting signups from it for weeks.

What took me embarrassingly long to figure out: timing matters. Tuesday or Wednesday. Morning UTC, like 8 to 11. Kept a spreadsheet of my posts because I'm obsessive like that. The time slot alone seemed to account for almost 30% more engagement. Sample size of 20 so take that for what it is.

Titles: "Open Source" still works. "CLI" works. "API" works. Don't put "AI-Powered" in there though. People's eyes just glaze over. Too many chatbot wrappers have ruined it.

If you crack top 5 for the day, coordinate it with a Product Hunt launch that same week. HN Monday, PH Tuesday or whatever. The combined momentum seems to do something. I don't fully understand the algorithm but it works.

Reddit (the Perplexity play)

Reddit doesn't get enough credit.

Reason one: it works. Like, actually works for getting early users, assuming you're not being an obvious shill. Talked to a founder recently who got 100 users off one post. 14k views. Didn't even hit the front page.

Reason two - the sneaky one - Perplexity is basically half Reddit citations at this point. If you want AI search to find you, having Reddit posts that mention your thing actually helps. Wild but true.

The catch, obviously: Redditors can smell marketing from miles away. If your entire history is "hey check out my app" you're toast. Gotta lurk. Gotta comment on other stuff first. r/SideProject, r/indiehackers, whatever niche makes sense for you.

Write for the robots (seriously)

Yeah yeah, "write for humans not algorithms." That was good advice in 2015.

Different world now. ChatGPT and Perplexity are literally scanning pages looking for quotable bits. If your content is dense academic paragraphs, they skip it. If you've got snappy facts with real numbers? That's what gets pulled into AI answers.

So: short paragraphs (I aim for 40-60 words). Headers phrased like actual questions. Real statistics. Named sources. TL;DR at the top.

Weird trick that works: make a /stats page. Update it every month with fresh industry numbers. Perplexity pulls from these constantly. I've seen it happen.

Go where developers already are

VS Code Marketplace. JetBrains. GitHub Marketplace. Whatever.

Point is: devs don't want to leave their editor. I learned this after watching a CLI tool I built get zero traction. Same functionality repackaged as a VS Code extension? Installs the next day. People will click "install" without thinking. Ask them to sign up, verify an email, create a workspace? Gone.

Same deal with open source. Throw up a useful repo. Decent README. Link to your paid product somewhere in there. Some percentage of people who love the free thing will check out what else you've built.

Get like 5-10 of these integration listings up in your first couple months. Compounds faster than you'd expect.

Why you probably won't do any of this

Real talk.

You're already stretched thin. You're fixing bugs, answering support emails, maybe working a day job on top of all this. Link building means sending cold emails for months. Writing guest posts nobody reads. Showing up in Reddit threads every day pretending you're not there to promote yourself.

It works. But it's boring. And slow. Most founders bail after two weeks because they'd rather build features.

I get it. I've been there. The new feature feels productive. The outreach feels like begging. So you ship app after app, each one dying in obscurity, and you start thinking maybe you're just bad at picking ideas. You're not. You're bad at distribution. We all are.

Cursor and Claude Code solved the building problem. Nobody's solved the distribution problem. That still takes time, or money, or both.

The authority shortcut

The fastest path to authority isn't building links one email at a time. It's acquiring existing authority from trusted sources.

Sites like Wikipedia, Reddit, and Hacker News already have the trust signals that search engines and AI systems look for. When contextual links from these sources point to your domain, that authority transfers.

This is what Revised does. We find backlinks from high-authority sources and make them available through proper redirects. No PBNs. No spam. Just contextual links from sources that Google and AI search already trust.

If you're shipping apps every month, you don't have six months to spend building authority manually. That's the whole point. You need the SEO signals and AI visibility without turning into a full-time link builder.

Otherwise you're just watching your competitors ship ten more apps while you send cold emails.

Building vs. distribution

Building software? Solved. Genuinely. Claude Code, Cursor, Lovable - doesn't really matter which one. Working app by Sunday is completely realistic now.

Distribution? Still a nightmare. Actually maybe worse than before, because everyone can ship now. "Can I build this?" stopped being the important question a while ago. "Will anyone find this?" That's the whole game.

I spent years convinced I was bad at picking ideas. Turns out I was just bad at getting people to notice things. Most of us are. The founders who break through aren't always better at the technical stuff. They're the ones who figured out earlier that Google rankings and ChatGPT recommendations don't happen by magic. Backlinks. Authority signals. The un-fun parts.

Six months of manual grinding gets you there. Or you skip that part. Both valid. Just... stop shipping app after app and being confused when nobody shows up. Pick a lane.

Where to start

Sitting at zero users? Here's my debugging process. (I run through this with basically every launch now.)

One: Ahrefs or Moz. Check your backlinks. Zero from quality sources? That's why. Google doesn't know you're alive.

Two: Google Alerts. 30 seconds to set up. Now you'll find out when someone mentions your app name somewhere.

Three: This one's annoying but necessary. Pick ONE community. Reddit, Indie Hackers, HN - whatever fits your thing. Hang out there for a few weeks being useful before you post anything about your product. Feels slow. Works though.

Four: Read your own content pretending you're an AI trying to quote stuff. Dense paragraphs? Those get skipped. Break things up. Add quotable stats. Write headers like search queries.

Five: Actually do the math on what your time is worth. Sometimes buying authority makes more sense than spending months building it.

This is why we built Revised. Got tired of the cold email grind. We find backlinks from places that already have authority - Wikipedia edits, Reddit threads, news sites - and make them available to people who'd rather build products than do outreach. Here's how it works if you want details, or just reach out.