Sharry, 4 Months In: Why I Stopped Building Features and Started Chasing Distribution

Jul 27, 2026

— 5 min read

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Sharry went into Early Access four months ago. Since then I've shipped a steady stream of features, posted consistently on X, and watched the visitor numbers barely move. This is the honest version of what happened — including a very recent, very unglamorous fix that did more in 48 hours than four months of feature work.

What shipped since launch

The core pitch hasn't changed: open a link, share your screen, no downloads, no installs. But a lot happened under the hood:

Good, honest product work. None of it moved the traffic needle.

The number I was avoiding

505 visitors. That's the total for Sharry since tracking started in late January — across 5.5 months. Growth has been essentially flat since March.

I'd been posting on X 5-7 times a week for most of that time. When I finally pulled the referrer data, X (t.co) had sent 7 visits to sharry.live. Total. Not per week — for the whole 5.5 months. The actual traffic, such as it was, came from people already searching: Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and a surprising amount from ChatGPT recommending the site.

That was the moment I stopped treating "post more on X" as a strategy. Sharry's problem was never that the product wasn't good enough. It was that almost nobody who might want it could find it.

What I did instead

I cut X posting down to 2-3 times a week — enough to keep building an audience for the long game, but not pretending it drives Sharry signups — and put the freed-up time into the boring, unscalable work of getting Sharry listed where people actually look for screen sharing tools:

None of this is exciting work. It's forms, waiting for approval, and reading community rules closely enough not to get banned for self-promotion.

Then the graph did something it hadn't done in months

The AlternativeTo listing went live on July 17th. Daily sessions jumped from a typical 5-15/day to 240, then 658 the day after. It cooled off from that initial spike, but sessions have held in the 50-90/day range for the week since — well above the old baseline. alternativeto.net has pulled in over 300 visits total and is now Sharry's #1 all-time referrer by a wide margin — more traffic in a week than X managed in 5.5 months.

I was careful not to call this a trend after 48 hours. A week later, I will: this isn't a spike that fades, it's a new, durably higher baseline. I still don't know exactly how many of those sessions turn into an actual shared screen versus a curious click-through, but the traffic itself is real, and it's sticking.

But directionally, it confirms the thing I was reluctant to admit: for a tool like Sharry, being findable in the two or three places people go when they're actually looking for a screen sharing tool is worth more than another week of building in a vacuum.

What's next

Show HN and Reddit are already underway, with mixed results. HN is temporarily restricting new Show HN posts site-wide right now — not personal, just bad timing, so that one's on hold. One Reddit post got auto-removed by the subreddit's spam filter before a human ever saw it; I've asked the mods to take a second look. Directory listings alone don't scale the way multiple channels can, so I'm not giving up on either. Product Hunt is planned for early August. I'll keep shipping small product improvements where they clearly matter, but the main focus for now stays on distribution, not more features.

If you want to see where this ends up: try Sharry — still free, still no account required for viewers — and if you've been through this same "I built it, why isn't anyone coming" phase with your own project, I'd genuinely like to hear what worked.