What 90 Days of Comments on AI Side Panels Taught Me About Distribution

For the last 90 days I have been doing one annoying thing on purpose: commenting on every Hacker News, Reddit, and Dev.to thread about AI side panels, screenshot-to-AI workflows, and Chrome extensions that kill the copy-paste tax. Not as marketing. As research.

Three numbers I want to share, with the receipts.

One: "Send this page to Claude with one click" hit 3 Reddit comments and 0 conversions. "Here is why I deleted my second LLM app because my sidebar covers it" hit 1 comment from a developer who DM'd me 6 hours later asking how to import his workflow.

The first framing leads with the product. The second leads with what I gave up. The second one wins by a mile. Every time.

Two: of the 18 users I have right now, 6 came from one Indie Hackers post (the "I trusted a cookie audit, it cost me 50 hours of cron runs" story). 0 came from my Product Hunt launch in June.

PH is launch-day amplification. It is not a steady channel. I keep having to relearn this.

Three: the only channel with a non-zero conversion rate on cold traffic is Twitter #buildinpublic. It took 14 days before anyone replied to my first post. Week 5 brought a DM from a developer who said "I want to try this but I refuse to install a closed-source sidebar." I had an answer for him because the previous day's PR was open-sourcing the screenshot-annotation module.

What I keep getting wrong

I keep wanting to open every post with "I am building a Chrome extension, and here is what it does..." and end with the Chrome Web Store link. That post gets ignored. The posts that work open with a specific friction I had, the moment I realised a tool existed for it, and what I cut from my setup because of it. The product link, if it appears at all, is in the last paragraph.

I also keep wanting to list features. Ten starter scenarios, four messaging bridges, two capture modes. Reading that back, I sound like a landing page. I am a person.

The actual takeaway for solo builders under 50 users

Do not chase a launch-day spike. PH or any other spike will give you 1000 signups and zero signal. You will not know which one of the ten features brought them, which one bit them on day 2, or which one was the reason they churned.

Instead, find ten users who will tell you the truth. Comment in places they already are. Share what you cut, not what you ship. Let the product link be quiet. The conversion will come from the trust pipeline, not the click count.

The extension I ship is called AI Buddy. It is a Chrome side panel that routes selected text and annotated screenshots to ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or DeepSeek, and pushes answers to Telegram and Discord so the conversation does not die in the sidebar. It has 18 users, and today I am grateful for every one of them.

Links in profile.