you shipped 14 side projects and answered 0 users

You’re great at shipping. You’re bad at the part after. This is a friendly rant about the people who tried to talk to your side projects and got nothing back, and about the fix, which takes less time than your last redeploy.

the graveyard

Count them. The todo app with AI in it. The landing page for the thing you’ll build right after this sprint. The Chrome extension. The SaaS you vibe-coded over a weekend, bought the .com for and posted on X with a purple gradient screenshot. All live, somewhere.

Now count how many of them let a stranger ask you something and get an answer from a human. A contact form that emails an address you stopped reading in March doesn’t count.

We’ve been there. Our own first version worked great on localhost and had nobody on the other end.

you think it’s done when it deploys

The deploy is when the product meets people. People have questions. Does it work in Safari. Can I pay by invoice. What happens to my data if I cancel. Why is the button grey.

Every one of those questions comes from someone who got far enough to care. That’s the rarest thing your side project will ever get, and you shipped it without a way to hear it.

“nobody asks anything anyway”

Of course nobody asks. There’s nowhere to ask. You can’t measure demand for a door you never built.

The visitor with a question doesn’t hunt for your email. They close the tab. You never find out, so in your analytics it looks like nothing happened. Nothing did happen, and that’s the problem.

“i don’t have time for support”

You had time to redo the landing page four times. You had time to switch from one ORM to another because a thread on X said so. Answering someone takes two minutes.

Those two minutes are also the most direct marketing you’ll ever do. A stranger asked, a real person answered, and it happened today. People remember that about small products, because the big ones taught them not to expect it.

And the questions are free product research. The first users of anything tell you what’s broken, what’s confusing and what they’d pay for, if you give them a place to say it. Write down what they ask. That’s your roadmap, written by people who showed up.

what it actually takes

Less than you think. One place on the site where visitors can ask. One place where you’ll actually see it. A promise that a human answers.

You don’t need a helpdesk, ticket statuses, macros, SLAs or a satisfaction survey. That’s gear for companies with a support department. You have a Slack workspace and a cat.

Tell visitors two things up front: a human answers, and the answer may take a while. Nobody minds waiting an hour when they know somebody is coming. People mind shouting into a box that never answers.

Where you see the message is the whole game. If the answer lives in an app you have to remember to open, you won’t open it. We know because we didn’t. Put it where you already are. For most people who ship, that’s Slack or Discord, which is open all day anyway, mostly for memes.

That’s the reason we built Spookat. Paste one snippet, and every chat lands in our inbox and its phone app, or, on a paid plan, in a Slack or Discord channel you already read. The launcher is under 4 kb and makes 0 requests to our API before a click, so the fix doesn’t cook the Lighthouse score you worked on. Our guide walks through it, including how to check the page weight yourself in DevTools. Or tell your agent to add spookat chat to your site and go get a coffee.

rules we’d give a friend

Answer the same day. A short answer today beats a perfect one next week.

Sign it with your name. People talk differently to a person than to “the team”.

If you don’t know yet, say when you will. Then do it.

If nobody’s around on weekends, say so. An honest “back on monday” is better than silence, and silence is what people expect.

Don’t argue with the question. If three people ask where the pricing is, the pricing is hidden. They’re right.

ship the reply too

Project 15 is coming, we both know it. Before you post it, add the thing that lets the first person with a question reach you. Then answer them.

See how it works. It takes one snippet.