Building got easy. Getting anyone to care didn’t.

I keep saying the same thing on LinkedIn: building got easy, getting someone to care didn’t. A few weeks ago I realised I’d never actually checked whether it was true.

So I pulled every Show HN and Ask HN post since January 2022, every post in r/SaaS, and the posts from six other subreddits where people talk about what they’re building. That came to 686,751 posts. Then I had a model read 184,410 of them and answer one question about each: what is this person stuck on?

In 2026, 26.3% of the builders who said what they were stuck on were stuck on getting customers. In 2022 it was 16.7%. One in six became one in four, and most of that jump happened this year.

First, the easy part

Hacker News is a good place to count how many people are shipping things, because Show HN is literally the “I built this” section. In 2022 there were 2.3 Show HN posts for every 1,000 things posted to Hacker News. In 2026 there are 10.9. Hacker News itself didn’t grow over that time. It’s been around 1.1 million items a quarter all along, so what changed is the mix: more of what people post is something they made. People asking questions went the other way, from 4.8 Ask HN posts per 1,000 items to 2.7.

r/SaaS says the same thing, louder. It had 1,406 posts in the first three months of 2022 and 39,855 in the first three months of 2026. And people say they’re building with AI: about 2% of builders mentioned it in 2022, and 13% do now. That only counts the ones who mention it, so the real number is higher.

More launches, the same attention

Here’s the number that made me stop. If four times as many people are launching on Hacker News, you’d expect more of them to get noticed. They don’t. The number of Show HN posts that reach 100 points barely moved:

Attention is roughly fixed. Around 600 to 800 launches a year get real traction on Hacker News, and that was true when there were 10,000 launches a year and it’s still true at 40,000. So the chance of yours being one of them fell from 6.1% to 1.6%. Most launches now get no comments at all: 62.3% this year, against 47.8% in 2022. That’s the easy part and the hard part in one table.

Then the hard part

Here’s what people said they were stuck on, year by year, across the seven subreddits:

Getting customers sat between 17% and 20% for four years. Then 2026 happened. The margin of error is under a point either way (about 0.6 points), so this isn’t noise.

What I didn’t expect was what went down. In 2022 a lot of people were stuck on running a business: money, hiring, co-founders, burning out. Those are problems you only have once you’ve got a business. That fell from 20.8% to 12.2%. And “does anyone actually want this?” dropped from 27.0% to 19.0% in a single year.

My guess, and it is only a guess, is that people have stopped asking that question first. When you can build something over a weekend, spending a week finding out whether anyone wants it feels slower than just building it. So people build, ship, and then discover nobody’s there.

People are saying it out loud

I also looked for the plain version: posts where someone says they have no users, no signups, no sales, or that nobody is using what they built. Among posts stuck on customers, that went from 2% in 2022 to 8% in 2026. It’s a plain text match, so it’s rough: when I read a random 25 of them, about four in five really were someone saying they had nothing yet. But it’s the same rough every year, and it quadrupled.

It’s not one subreddit

I half expected r/SaaS to be dragging the number up on its own, since it’s so big. It isn’t. Every community went up in 2026:

Share of stuck builders in each subreddit who were stuck on getting customers. “Too few” means under 30 labelled posts that year; r/microsaas and r/buildinpublic were tiny before 2024.

Two posts from this year that say it better than any table:

“My product is finally ready. Now I’m nervous about reaching out to my first 10 companies.”

“I spent months building the tech, but as an engineer with zero sales skills, I’m stuck.”

Building isn’t that easy either

This is the part that complicates my own LinkedIn line. Building problems went up too, from 19.6% to 24.5%. Starting is easy now. Finishing isn’t.

And the people who said they built with AI aren’t the ones driving the customer number. In 2025 and 2026, when they were stuck, 49% of them were stuck on the build itself and only 15% on customers. For everyone else, customers was 23%. Some of that is just how people write: if you mention Cursor in a post, you’re probably describing a bug. But it means the customer problem isn’t a vibe-coder problem. It’s everyone’s.

What I can’t tell you

This is what people post, not what happens to them. People who quietly found customers mostly didn’t write about it. I can’t tell you AI caused any of this either. AI building and the customer problem rose in the same years, and that’s all I can show.

X isn’t in here, because its API costs more than this whole project did, and neither is the Indie Hackers site, which has no way to download posts in bulk. Reddit also removes a lot: about three quarters of r/startups posts and over half of r/Entrepreneur’s were gone by the time the archive got to them, and a removed post has no text to read. So these numbers describe the posts that stayed up. And 2026 isn’t over; the figures for this year run to 23 October.

How I did it

Hacker News posts came from its public search API: every Show HN and Ask HN post since 1 January 2022, 194,265 in all. Reddit posts came from the Arctic Shift archive. That’s every r/SaaS post (253,379), and for r/startups, r/SideProject, r/Entrepreneur, r/indiehackers, r/microsaas and r/buildinpublic, the newest 2,500 posts of every quarter, which for the smaller ones is every post until they got busy in 2024 or 2025.

Each post went to a small, cheap model (Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite) with the same instructions every time: decide whether this person is building a product of their own, and if they are, pick the one thing they say they’re stuck on from a fixed list, using only what the post says. People asking general questions, looking for jobs or commenting on the industry are counted but left out of the percentages.

I didn’t label everything. Every visible post in the six smaller subreddits was labelled. For r/SaaS I labelled 47,095 of its 197,230 visible posts, spread evenly across every quarter, which is plenty for the yearly numbers but too thin for anything month by month. For Hacker News I labelled 15,462, because there I mostly needed the counts, and those are complete. When I combine subreddits, each one counts in proportion to how many visible posts it had that quarter.

To check the labels, a second, more capable model read 276 posts blind, spread across subreddits and years. The two agreed on the exact label 68% of the time, which sounds low until you look at what they disagreed about, mostly “is this person stuck on launching or just showing off their launch”. On the number this page is about, they landed in the same place: 19.6% and 19.2% stuck on customers. I’m checking 100 posts by hand myself and will add the result here. I also tried a model running on my own laptop and TypeSafe’s Jev. Both put the customer share well above the reference (40% and 23%), so I didn’t use them.

The attention numbers are Hacker News’s own points and comment counts, as they stood when I pulled them in October 2026. Points come in during a post’s first day or two, so an older post hasn’t had an unfair head start. The “no users” figure is a simple text match over builder posts, not the model, so they’re easy to check in the data: phrases like “no users”, “zero signups” or “nobody is using”.

People repost. Between 3% and 13% of posts in each subreddit are the same person submitting the same title again, often after a moderator took the first one down. I kept them, since a repost is someone still stuck. Taking them out changes nothing that matters: the customers share is 16.7% in 2022 and 26.3% in 2026 either way.

The categories, as the model saw them. Getting customers: finding users or customers, reaching them, outreach, sales conversations, nobody signing up or paying, churn. Building the product: code, bugs, stack, tools, features, design. Knowing if anyone wants it: is the idea worth it, is there demand, would anyone pay. Launching and being seen: where to post, Product Hunt, landing pages, SEO, content, ads. Running the business: pricing, billing, legal, taxes, hiring, funding, co-founders, time and burnout.

The data

Every number on this page is free to quote. If you want the rows behind it, every labelled post with its source, date, link and label (no post text), leave your email and it downloads straight away. You’ll also get the newsletter when I publish the next one of these.

Cite as: GTM for One (gtmforone.com), “Building got easy. Getting anyone to care didn’t: 686,751 builder posts, 2022 to 2026”, 23 October 2026, https://www.gtmforone.com/blog/building-got-easy.

I’m building GTM for One because of the second chart. Finding someone’s email is the easy bit now. Working out why they’d care is the actual work, and it doesn’t get easier when the code does.