How to market an app you built with Cursor
You are not short on ability. You are short on the hours marketing needs, every week, for months.
The side project is real. It deploys, it has a payment flow, three friends use it and one of them is not being polite. You built it in evenings and it took less time than it would have two years ago.
What has not got cheaper is everything after the deploy. The hard part is not that marketing is difficult to understand. It is that it needs to happen on Tuesday when you are mid-sprint at the job that pays you, and then again on Wednesday.
The constraint is hours, not ability
You could learn every channel here in a weekend. You have probably already read the Reddit rules, know what a cold email sequence looks like, and could write the posting script yourself. Plenty of developers have.
The scripts are not what fails. What fails is week three, when the build is interesting again and marketing has no deadline attached to it. A side project does not fire you for skipping a week, so you skip a week, and eight of those weeks later the traffic graph is still flat.
So the useful question is not what to do. It is what will still happen on the weeks you do not show up.
What the work costs by hand
| The work | By hand, per week | Your part here |
|---|---|---|
| Writing and making posts | Two to three hours | Approve or reject |
| Publishing to five networks | Half an hour, if you remember | None |
| Finding threads worth answering | An hour of scrolling | None |
| Writing the replies | Twenty minutes each | Read and paste |
| Building a lead list | An evening, once, then never | None |
| Cold email and follow-ups | An hour, mostly forgotten | Answer the replies |
The hours are rough and yours will differ. The shape does not: it is a part-time job, and you already have one.
What AutoTraction runs
Enter your website. It reads the product, works out who it is for and how you sound, then drafts your positioning and your first posts. That is free, and it is a fast way to find out whether your landing page says what you think it says.
After that it generates videos with voiceover, six-slide carousels and founder posts in your voice, and publishes them daily to TikTok, Instagram, LinkedIn, X and Facebook through official APIs at human pace, on your own accounts. It finds the Reddit, X and LinkedIn threads where people are asking for what you built and drafts your reply for you to paste. It sources the people who reach your buyers and writes to them by email and on LinkedIn, following up until they answer, then hands you the conversation. It pitches journalists when there is a story. It runs Meta and TikTok ads under a cap if you want them. And it watches which posts brought signups rather than views, then makes more of those.
If you want to try the manual version first, and you should, the first 100 users playbook is the week-one plan.
What it will not do
- It does not auto-post replies. Reddit and X replies are drafted and you paste them, so your accounts never carry an automation pattern.
- It does not manufacture engagement. No bought likes, no bot accounts, no comments at scale.
- It does not post from accounts that are not yours. Publishing goes through official APIs on the accounts you connect.
- It does not touch your codebase. It reads your public site, nothing else.
- It does not fix a landing page that does not land. Check yours with the free site grader before you send traffic at it.
Your four minutes a day
A briefing tells you what ran overnight. Two approvals, the replies you agree with, and the humans who wrote back. The reason it is four minutes and not twenty is that the four-minute version survives a bad week, which is the only property that matters for a project you run beside a job. The habit is in the four-minute marketing routine.
Which plan fits
Solo at $19 a month is the right size for one side project: the whole platform, email outreach from your own mailbox, one campaign at a time, 250 credits. Ten credits is about a week of posts and a verified lead costs 2, so the credit line is what you watch if outreach becomes the main channel. Pro at $99 adds LinkedIn outreach alongside email, a mailbox set up for you and three campaigns at once. Details per tier on the pricing page.
Related pages
If you want the mechanism spelled out before the pitch, marketing for apps built with Claude Code is the same product described in terms of what runs and what waits. If the project started in a browser builder, see marketing a Lovable app. The general page is marketing for vibe coders.
I have a full-time job. Does posting from my own accounts expose the project?
You choose which accounts to connect. Plenty of people run product accounts rather than personal ones. The trade is reach: a founder account usually performs better, and you can start with the product account and add yours later.
Can I keep the scripts I already wrote?
Yes. Channels only run where you connect an account, so you can use it for content and replies and keep your own outreach tooling.
Does it need access to my repo or my server?
No. It reads your public website and the accounts you connect. There is nothing to install in the app.
What happens on a week when I ignore it completely?
Posting, outreach and press keep running. The drafted replies stack up unpasted and the people who wrote back wait for you, which is the part only you can do.