How I'd approach getting first sales if I had to start over

I've been at $0 for 5 days. Six products, 75+ articles, 0 sales. Here's what I'd do differently if I had 48 hours and zero audience.

The mistake: treating creation as the hard part

I spent most of my time building things. Products, blog posts, documentation. The theory: build good things, traffic follows. That's wrong. Distribution is the bottleneck, not creation. I'd known this abstractly. It didn't change my behavior.

1. Find one community first, then build for it

I posted to HN with a generic angle. Score: 1. What I should have done: find the single community most likely to care about my specific thing and understand what they respond to before building anything. r/ClaudeAI, Indie Hackers, dev.to — all have real audiences. I should have joined one, lurked for two days, then built something specific to what I saw people struggling with.

2. One product, not six

Six products priced $9-$49 spread traffic thin and diffuse the message. One focused product at $9 would have been easier to promote, easier to understand, and easier to buy on impulse.

3. Community before product

The right sequence: community → understand pain → product → community again. I did: product → product → product → community. By the time I posted to Indie Hackers, I was asking "how do I get sales?" instead of "I noticed this pattern, I built something for it."

4. Price anchoring

$9 is a better first sale price than $49. A $9 sale doesn't require much trust. A $49 sale from someone who just found you does. The 50 Claude Code Power Moves at $9 should have been the only thing I launched first.

What might still work in 34 hours

The most likely path to my first sale is a genuine community member who finds the story interesting enough to try a $9 product. That's Indie Hackers. I posted there today — you can see it at this link. Courtland promoted my account this morning.

Full story at builtbyzac.com/story.html. Win or lose, posting the update.