90 days to paywall: building distribution before there is anything to sell

I shipped the Clera beta three weeks ago. No paywall. No revenue. A handful of TestFlight testers, most of them people I know.

Clera turns Instagram Reels into structured notes. Share a reel from Instagram, get back a recipe with ingredients and method. A travel reel gives you a list of places and tips. A tutorial gives you numbered steps. The problem it solves is simple: most people's Instagram saved folder is a graveyard of things they meant to come back to and never did. Clera makes those saves actually usable.

The stack is Flutter, Gemini 2.5 Flash for vision and text, Whisper for transcription. Backend is a FastAPI service on a Hetzner VPS. It works. That part is done.

The part I have not solved yet is distribution.

The commitment

I set a hard goal for myself three weeks ago: 300 weekly active users by day 90. The paywall ships the same day. Not before.

The "not before" matters. I do not want to build a paywall before I know whether anyone actually returns to the app after the first use. If the median user summarizes two reels and never opens the library again, a paywall is the wrong next move. I need to know whether people use the summaries, not just create them.

Day 90 is early August 2026. That is the deadline.

Why distribution is the actual problem right now

The app works well enough to test the retention thesis. What I do not have is a reliable way to reach the person who needs it.

The ICP I am building toward is a 25 to 40 year old who scrolls Instagram for an hour or more a day, saves reels in good faith, and almost never revisits them. They have a real job. They also have a real life outside it. They want to cook the recipe and actually take the trip. They just never remember the reel.

That person is not searching for "Instagram reel summarizer." They are not on Product Hunt. They exist in communities organized around the content they save: cooking, travel, fitness, home projects. Reaching them means showing up in those communities with something useful, not a pitch.

Three channels, 90 days

The plan I have locked is three channels, prioritized by cost and feedback speed.

1. Beta subreddit expansion. The TestFlight beta is live now. I am posting in r/alphaandbetausers, r/TestFlightBeta, and a few niche communities to grow the beta cohort. The goal here is not 300 users. It is 50 real testers who will tell me where it breaks.

2. Reddit value posts. Starting week three, I am posting in r/digitalminimalism, r/getdisciplined, and similar communities. Not links. Posts that are actually useful to the people in those threads. The app comes up only if it fits naturally.

3. Build-in-public on Indie Hackers and X, leading to a Product Hunt launch on day 60. This post is the start of that sequence. I will write one of these every two weeks: what changed, what the numbers look like, what broke, what I learned. The PH launch on day 60 is timed to hit when the free tier is stable and the first retention data is in.

What I am measuring

Three things matter in the next 30 days:

• Beta cohort size (target: 50 active testers by day 30)

• 14-day library return rate (is anyone reopening their summaries after creating them?)

• Category mix of summaries (are people summarizing instructional content, or something else entirely?)

If the library return rate is low, I will rethink before the PH launch. If the category mix is wrong, the ICP is wrong and the positioning needs to change before day 60.

What this series is

This is post one. I will write one every two weeks until the paywall ships. Each one will have real numbers, not projections. I will name what broke and what I got wrong.

If you are building a consumer iOS app as a side project and you want to trade notes, I am around. And if your saved Instagram folder looks like mine does, you can join the TestFlight beta at the link in my profile.

Stack: Flutter, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Whisper, FastAPI, Hetzner. Solo founder. Nights and weekends.