Why is nobody using what I built?

The short answer: almost certainly because nobody has seen it yet, not because it’s bad. Building got cheap and attention didn’t. By October, 66.7 million new public GitHub repositories had been created in 2026, twice as many as in all of 2022. But the number that reached 10 stars stayed at about 203,000 to 227,000 a year. On Show HN, launches went from 10,091 a year to 40,645, and the number reaching 100 points stayed between 615 and 840. There is about the same amount of attention to go round, split between two to four times as many things. So an empty dashboard is now the normal starting point. The founders who got past it didn’t wait for one launch to work. They went to where their buyers already were and kept showing up for weeks.

I measured it three ways, each inside one source so nothing is compared across sources: every new public GitHub repository by month since 2022, every Show HN launch since 2022, and every r/SaaS post since 2022, each sorted by what the builder says they’re stuck on. Then I followed 33,282 founders across seven builder subreddits to see what happened after their first post.

An empty dashboard is the normal starting point

It helps to know what normal looks like before you decide your product has failed. Of the GitHub repositories created in 2026, 99.66% have fewer than 10 stars. Of the Show HN launches in 2026, 62.3% got no comments at all. On Hacker News every post starts with 1 point, and in 2025 and 2026, 60.8% of Show HN launches never got past 2. If you posted your product and heard nothing, you’re in the majority, by a long way.

That doesn’t mean nothing can be done. It means silence is what happens by default, and getting noticed is work you do on purpose, not something a good product earns on its own.

Building doubled. Attention didn’t.

GitHub is the closest thing there is to a count of how much people are building. Here’s every new public repository by year, and how many of each year’s repositories have 10 or more stars today:

New repositories went from 32.1 million to 66.7 million, and 2026 isn’t over. The number anyone starred ten times barely moved. The share fell by half, from 0.68% to 0.34%. If anything that understates it: a repository from 2022 has had four years to collect stars and one from this summer has had a few months, yet 2026 already has the most starred repositories of any year. The amount of attention isn’t shrinking. It’s just not growing, while what competes for it is.

Show HN, the “I built this” section of Hacker News, has the same shape:

Between 615 and 840 launches a year get real traction on Hacker News, whether there are 10,000 launches or 40,000. Two very different places, the same pattern: the number of things that get noticed is roughly fixed, so each extra thing built lowers everyone’s odds. I went through what the launches that did well had in common in Does launching on Show HN still work?

One in four stuck founders is stuck right here

You’d expect people to feel this, and they do. I had every r/SaaS post since 2022 sorted by what the builder says they’re stuck on: 126,650 posts by people building something of their own. Of the ones who said what was in the way:

Getting customers went from 16.9% to 24.9%, and most of that rise came this year. Running the business, the problems you only have once you have a business, fell from 16.9% to 11.7%. More people are finishing things, and more of them arrive at the same empty room.

Should you have checked whether anyone wanted it first?

This is the standard advice, and it’s the first thing people tell you in the comments. So I tested it on the people who posted more than once. I took 33,282 Reddit users with at least two posts about something they were building, whose first post went up before July 2026 so everyone had at least four months to post again. Then I sorted them by what that first post was about and looked at what they posted later:

The founders who started by asking “does anyone want this?” were the least likely to post a first customer later: 3%, against 4.1% for founders who started by showing what they’d built. The 95% ranges don’t overlap (2.5% to 3.4% and 3.8% to 4.5%). And they were no less likely to say later that nobody was using it: 4.3%, against 3.1%.

I don’t read that as “validation is useless”. I read it as “asking a forum isn’t validation”. The people who answer an idea post on r/SaaS are other founders, not your buyers, and a good reception there tells you very little about whether anyone will pay. The group that did best was the one that started by asking how to launch or get seen: 4.8% later posted a first customer. They also said nobody was using it more often than anyone except the people who were stuck from the start, which is what you’d expect from people actually trying to sell. Both outcomes come from the same thing: putting the product in front of people and finding out.

These are small shares, because most people never post again, and it’s what people posted, not what happened to them. But if the advice worked the way it’s usually given, I’d expect the “asked first” group to come out ahead. It came out last.

When the silence shows up

Of the founders who first showed what they’d built and later said nobody was using it, half said so within 32 days. 27% said it within a week and another 22% within a month. That first month is when most people decide whether their product works, and it’s the month when the numbers above say almost nobody has seen it yet.

The founders who got their first customers took a similar time. In Where did founders find their first customers? about half of the ones who said how long it took got there within a month (51%), and the rest took longer. The most common thing they described was posting where their buyers already were, often a subreddit, and answering people who asked for exactly what they’d built (40% of the ones who said how). Only 5 of the 30 credited a single post or launch.

What I’d do if nobody is using what I built

1. Find out whether anyone has seen it. Count visits to your site, not views of your posts. One founder in the data wrote up their first week honestly: about 5,000 views on their Reddit posts, about 10 visits to the site, no sign-ups. That isn’t a product problem. Nobody arrived.
2. Write the long version once. Who you are, what problem pushed you to build it, how it works, what’s still rough. On Show HN, launches with a full write-up reached 100 points 5.65% of the time, against 1.31% for a bare link. A link asks people to do the work of caring. A story does it for them.
3. Pick one place your buyers already ask for help, and stay there. Not five launch sites in a day. One subreddit, forum or community where people describe the problem you solve, and answer them, for weeks, whether or not your product comes up.
4. Write to people one at a time, and say why them. In the first-customers data, founders who were still stuck mentioned cold email and DMs more than the ones who’d got customers. My reading is that most of what gets sent is the same message to a list. Ten messages to people you picked for a reason, that say what you noticed about them, is a different thing from a thousand to a list.
5. Judge it after a month of that, not after launch day. Launch day is when the fewest people have seen it.

What I can’t tell you

A GitHub repository isn’t a product. A lot of new repositories are tutorials, homework, experiments and, lately, code that AI tools create on people’s behalf, which is part of why the count grew so fast. Stars aren’t users either. I’m using GitHub as a measure of how much gets built and how much of it gets any attention at all, not as a measure of products or businesses. Show HN is a cleaner count of products, and it tells the same story.

The Reddit numbers are what people chose to post. Founders who quietly got customers often didn’t post about it, and most founders never post a second time. The founder comparison can tell you who later said what, not why. And I can’t tell you that more building caused less attention per product. They happened in the same years, in two places, and that’s what I can show.

How I did it

GitHub: for every month from January 2022 to October 2026, I asked GitHub’s search API how many public repositories were created that month, and how many of those have 10 or more stars, on 27 October 2026. GitHub’s search counts can be approximate at this size, so treat them as close, not exact. Forks are left out, as GitHub search does by default.

Show HN: every Show HN post since 1 January 2022 from Hacker News’s public search API, 110,710 in all, with points and comments as they stood in October 2026. Points arrive in a post’s first day or two, so older posts haven’t had an unfair head start.

r/SaaS: every visible r/SaaS post since 2022 (all but about 1,000 of 197,230 were labelled), from the Arctic Shift archive. Each went to a small model (Gemini 2.5 Flash-Lite) with the same instructions: decide whether the poster is building a product of their own, and if so pick the one thing they say they’re stuck on from a fixed list. On a blind check by a stronger model, the two agreed on the exact label 68% of the time and landed within half a point of each other on the share stuck on customers. The method and categories are on Building got easy. Getting anyone to care didn’t.

Founders over time: posts in r/SaaS, r/SideProject, r/startups, r/indiehackers, r/Entrepreneur, r/microsaas and r/buildinpublic, grouped by Reddit username, leaving out deleted accounts. For one person, the model’s “stuck on customers” label wasn’t good enough: when I read 40 of them, only 18 were someone stuck on getting customers; the rest were promotions, feedback requests and success stories. So a later post only counts if the model labelled it that way and the post says it in words (no users, zero sales, can’t find customers, how do I get my first users, nobody is using it) and isn’t announcing a result. On a fresh hand check, 31 of 40 of those were right. “Posted a first customer or revenue” uses the same phrase match as the first customers post (“I got my first paying user”, “we hit $1k MRR”), about 85% genuine on a hand check. A founder whose first post already announced a result is left out.

Cite as: GTM for One (gtmforone.com), “Why is nobody using what I built? Building doubled, attention didn’t”, https://www.gtmforone.com/blog/why-is-nobody-using-what-i-built.

I’m building GTM for One for the part after the build: working out who would actually want what you’ve made, and writing to them one at a time.