23,000 Reddit views gave me 14 downloads. Here is what I learned.

The Art of Distribution

I launched my macOS app on Product Hunt today.

I am not writing this as a clean success story, because it is not one. I am writing it because I think I made a mistake many technical founders make: I spent a lot of time making the product better, and only later understood how brutal the visibility problem really is.

TimeBill is a native Mac app for freelancers to track billable hours, create invoices, and export timesheets locally. No account, no cloud dashboard, no SaaS lock-in.

I still believe the positioning makes sense. Client names, hourly rates, project notes, invoices and timesheets are not just generic productivity data. They reveal a lot about your business and your clients. So my bet was that a local-first Mac app could be valuable for freelancers who do not want every sensitive workflow to become another cloud subscription.

It is already in the Mac App Store and covers the core workflow: tracking work, organizing projects, creating invoices, exporting timesheets and keeping the data local. I also built the invoice model around EN 16931 because European e-invoicing support is on the roadmap.

But the hard part has not been building the app. It has been getting anyone to care.

A while ago I posted about TimeBill on Reddit. One post got around 23,000 views. At first that sounded huge to me. In reality it produced around 14 downloads. Some useful feedback, some nice comments, but not meaningful traction.

That was the first lesson: views are not demand.

Later I looked more seriously at the funnel. My App Store numbers were actually not terrible in isolation: 309 product page views led to 63 downloads, so about 20.4% page-to-download conversion. Those 63 downloads led to 16 paying users, so about 25.4% download-to-paid conversion. Realized profit per paying user was about $9, which means the expected profit per download was around $2.29, and the expected profit per App Store view was around $0.47, or roughly €0.43.

On paper, that does not look hopeless.

The problem is getting qualified people to that App Store page cheaply enough.

I tried Reddit Ads. The campaign spent €94.79, got 65,628 impressions, 153 clicks, a €0.62 CPC and a 0.233% CTR. Again, not absurd numbers. But for my funnel and current revenue per buyer, even that CPC is already too high unless the traffic is very qualified. And for a macOS app, a lot of traffic is simply structurally bad. Mobile users cannot install it. People browse casually. They click, but they are not necessarily in a buying moment.

This is where the small-number economics became painful.

If one App Store view is worth roughly €0.43 to me, then a €0.62 ad click is already upside down before even considering that not every ad click becomes a clean App Store product page view. The math can work only if I improve revenue per buyer, improve conversion, reduce CPC, or find much more qualified traffic. Preferably all of them.

That is the part that hurt, because the product can be decent and the funnel can even look okay, but the business still fails if distribution is too expensive or too weak.

Over the last weeks I kept improving the things I could control. I rewrote the website, built more focused landing pages, added small free SEO tools, worked on App Store keywords, screenshots, subtitles and copy, tested Reddit and Google Ads assumptions, and tried different positioning angles: native Mac app, local-first invoicing, privacy-friendly freelancer tool, time tracking plus invoices, alternative to bloated SaaS tools.

Some of these angles sound strong to me. But the market does not care what sounds strong to the maker. It only cares whether the right person sees it at the right moment and understands the value fast enough.

Today I launched on Product Hunt, and I had to adjust my expectations there too. I hoped Product Hunt might be the missing publicity boost. Now I think it is more of a momentum amplifier. If you already have a community, newsletter, customer base or active maker network, Product Hunt gives that momentum a visible place to gather. If you come in cold, you are still mostly pushing the rock yourself.

My current takeaway is simple:

A launch does not really validate the product. A launch validates your distribution.

That is uncomfortable, because building is the part I know how to do. Distribution is the part where there is no compiler error, no failing test, and no obvious fix. Just tiny numbers, leaky funnels and a lot of ambiguity.

So the thing I would tell other technical founders is this: do not wait until the product feels “ready” before you take distribution seriously. A polished product with no audience is still almost invisible. And a tiny audience with a clear pain may be worth more than a beautiful app shown to 65,000 mostly indifferent people.

I am still proud of TimeBill. I still believe local-first software has a place, especially for sensitive business workflows. But I am also trying to be honest about the real bottleneck.

For me, it is not shipping. It is earning attention from the right people.

For context, this is today’s Product Hunt launch: Product Hunt TimeBill Launch