The Resistance Manifesto: Build It & They Will Come
Every growth hacker I know calls that delusional. We call it our manifesto. Welcome to The Resistance.
My name is Fred and I’ve been building side-projects for twenty-four years.
I still believe the most dangerous, exhilarating sentence in tech is:
“Build it and they will come.”
Every growth hacker I know calls that delusional. We call it our manifesto.
Welcome to The Resistance.
1 The Founding of the Resistance
Ten years ago I met my friend Jacques at a hackathon in Helsinki.
We threw together a photo-based receipt tracker—ML matched purchased items with their paper receipts—in a few hours.
The demo won a bottle of sparkling wine; the code died a week later.
But we kept hacking. Late one night in Dubrovnik, staring at yet another abandoned prototype, we asked:
“Why does every indie success story end with, ‘and then we learned marketing’?”
“What if we just built something so good we never had to learn marketing?”
No handshake required. That was the birth of The Resistance—guided by a probably delusional rule:
Build it and they will come.
2 Why Build It & They Will Come Matters
Focus forces quality. Zero ad-budget means the product must shout for itself.
Time is finite. Solo hackers either write copy or write features. I pick features; better own the choice.
Marketing trends rot. SEO hacks expire; useful tools age like oak.
The Resistance isn’t anti-marketing—it’s pro-craft.
Ship something people pay for because it’s just damn useful—then tell that story honestly. If the story’s good enough, that is marketing.
3 A Decade of Almosts
We kept building side projects without much business success. My own:
2016 – 2018 — Automated accounting-prep for freelancers → €270 MRR, 1 paying customer, sunset
2018 – 2019 — Embeddable ML components for apps → prototype, zero external users
2020 — Goal & roadmap visualiser → I use it, no one else does, still online
2021 — Train-your-model-in-Google Sheets add-on → 50+ sign-ups, never emailed them, 1 pilot customer project, ended up not charging anything
2023 – 2024 — “Catch-up with friends” photo agent → 1 lifetime preorder, refunded, pivoted away
2025 — Token-efficient LLM Gateway → 10 signups, pivoted away
3 So… Did Anyone Actually Come?
Sometimes.
We got signups, sometimes even the occasional customer.
All without a single tweet, blog post, or SEO trick.
Turns out if we just talked with friends and frequented the occasional startup conference, we were able to convince a few others that we built something worth paying for.
But “a few others” doesn’t pay rent, and there was a clear pattern: launch → polish → marketing dread → shiny new repo.
4 Why Do I Keep Pivoting?
I recently found out that I have ADHD. Suddenly the loop made sense:
Shipping v1 → dopamine avalanche.
Write marketing copy → dopamine desert.
Brain screams “new idea!” → repeat.
I had to break the loop.
5 Why I’m Writing This Now
I’m knee-deep in a new AI tool I can’t stop polishing.
Temptation: keep coding and hope they’ll magically appear.
This post is my line in the sand—proof I shipped words, not just commits.
6 The First Amendment
To prevent us from actually giving up too early, we finally admitted one exception to the manifesto:
“Marketing is allowed—if it feels like hacking the product.”
No spam.
No irrelevant cold outreach.
No AI-generated slop content.
Just demos, docs, blog posts, and automated funnels that feel like part of the build.
If the “marketing” itself is useful or entertaining, it passes the test.
7 Join The Resistance
If any of this feels familiar—
• you push v1 and immediately pursue a new idea
• marketing makes you itch
• you have more domains than users
—then you’re probably already one of us.
This substack will feature stories about and from side projects or solo projects that are attempting to get paying users by just hacking the product.
Build it & they will come?
Maybe. Let’s find out the hard way—together.
— Fred, still resisting, still building.