The part nobody warns you about

When Flushiest launched I thought the hard work was done. The app was built, it worked, and people genuinely needed it. Then I tried to put it in front of anyone and discovered I had spent all my preparation on the half of the problem I already knew how to solve.

The specific humiliation was flyers. I had them printed — a real print run, real money — on the assumption that handing them out on a street in Amsterdam was the kind of thing you just do. It is not. There are real constraints on how and where you can distribute physical marketing material here, they vary by municipality, and I found out about them after the box arrived.

I am not going to quote you the rule, because the rule is not the lesson and because the version I would half-remember is exactly the sort of thing that gets someone else fined. Check with your municipality before you print anything. That is the whole practical takeaway and it takes one email.

Why this keeps happening to good builders

Building has got dramatically easier. AI tooling means a competent person can put a real, working product into the world in a weekend — and increasingly, people do. What has not changed at all is everything downstream of that: distribution, positioning, the boring legal texture of being a business that talks to the public.

So the skill curve has gone lopsided. There is an enormous amount of freely available material on how to build the thing, and comparatively little on what happens the day after it works. The founders I talk to are almost never stuck on the code.

What I would do differently

• Work out your distribution route before you build the thing, not after. If the answer is "we will figure it out at launch", you have not got a launch plan, you have got a hope.
• Find out what is legally constrained in your channel early — physical distribution, unsolicited email, prize draws and giveaways all have rules, and they are cheap to check and expensive to get wrong.
• Assume the first channel will not work, and pick something you can afford to be wrong about. My press coverage came from a route I had not planned at all.
• Write the pitch before the product is finished. If you cannot explain it in two sentences to someone who does not care yet, the problem is upstream of marketing.

Flushiest ended up covered by four news outlets and radio, on effectively no budget. That worked. It worked in spite of my preparation, not because of it, and the gap between those two things is most of what I now get hired to close.