The Pattern Nobody Talks About
In March 2022, while most people watched the Ukraine crisis from their screens, I loaded my Toyota RAV4 with supplies in Nice and drove straight into the war zone.
Solo. Self-financed. No NGO. No backup plan.
My wife's family fled Vietnam as refugees. Someone helped them once. "It's my duty," I told Nice-Matin before heading out.
I declined their journalist's request to join. They'd slow me down. Got a speeding ticket in Germany. Kept driving.
When something matters, I don't wait for permission.
This isn't new behavior. It's how I've always been.
The Wiring
Started karate at 10. Switched to kung fu at 15. By 17, I was teaching it in Nice. At 18, I trained at Shaolin Monastery with monks Shi Heng Fa and Shi Yan Lu.
At 19, I was selected for French special forces — high IQ scores plus physical ability. Then I broke both knees before deployment.
Military career over. Most people would've spiraled.
I went back to China instead.
At 20, I got scammed. Lost everything. Homeless. No money, no visa, no contacts.
Police didn't care. French embassy didn't help.
The local triad did. They saw me on the street for a few days, invited me for tea, and gave me a way to survive. The people society calls criminals were the only ones who showed up.
I spent 15 months figuring out how to survive in a country where I barely spoke the language. Learned Mandarin in a month by drinking with people and listening. Found a way home.
Three months later I was selling suits. A year after that, I launched my first ecommerce store and sold a jeans brand to buyers from Paris.
That's when I learned: I can build my way out of anything.
The Next 20 Years
100+ projects. Most "failed." A few made real money.
The portfolio outcome? A house. Passive income. Stocks. Freedom to keep building.
I've never called myself successful. But in 20 years of building, I've never lost money I couldn't afford to lose. At one point in Hong Kong, I had 5 HKD in my wallet — less than a dollar — and I was still playing the game.
I'm not here to teach from the mountaintop. I'm here because I finally faced the one thing I kept skipping.
The 80% Overlap
At Founder Institute Hong Kong, I mentored dozens of new founders. Watched them struggle. Watched them fail. Watched a few succeed.
And something clicked.
Everyone thinks their founder journey is unique.
It's not.
The same paralysis at the start. The same scope creep mid-build. The same burnout at the end.
While neurotypical founders saw individual struggles, my autistic brain mapped the common architecture underneath.
There's an 80% overlap in every indie hacker's journey.
But here's the part nobody talks about:
The founders who made it weren't better builders. They weren't smarter. They weren't more funded. Some of them shipped objectively worse products than the ones that died in silence.
The difference was simpler. And more painful to admit.
The Thing I Kept Avoiding
I'm going to describe a pattern. See if it sounds familiar:
You spend months building something. You're proud of it. You launch.
Silence.
A few polite comments. Maybe some upvotes that don't convert. Then... nothing.
So you tell yourself: "The product just needs one more feature."
You go back to coding. It feels productive. You're making progress. The feature ships.
Still silence.
"Okay, one more feature."
Three months later, you're still "improving" a product that nobody uses.
The product didn't fail because it was bad. It died because you went back to coding when you should have been talking to people.
I've done this more times than I can count.
Why We Retreat
Building feels like progress. You can see the code. You can measure the commits. There's a dopamine hit when something works.
Talking to strangers about your product? Posting in communities where nobody responds? Sending DMs that get ignored?
That feels like begging. It feels like shouting into the void. It feels like the rules are broken.
For my brain especially — pattern recognition, systematic thinking — distribution feels like a rigged game. Effort doesn't map to output cleanly. You can do everything "right" and get nothing. You can post garbage and go viral.
So you retreat to code. Where it's safe. Where you're competent. Where the rules make sense.
I survived 15 months in China with nothing. I got selected for special forces. I've built my way out of every hole I've ever been in.
But posting on Twitter consistently? That's what I couldn't do.
The graveyard of indie products isn't full of bad ideas. It's full of good ideas that never got seen — built by people who couldn't sit in the discomfort of distribution long enough for it to compound.
The Insight That Took 100 Projects
Here it is. The pattern underneath everything:
I can build anything. I can ship fast. I can iterate until something works.
I just keep skipping distribution.
Not because I don't know what to do. I know exactly what to do. Post on Indie Hackers. Engage on Twitter. DM potential users. Write content.
I know. I've always known.
I just don't do it consistently. Because when I open Twitter to "do distribution," I end up scrolling. Or I convince myself I need to fix one more bug first. Or I write a post, hate it, delete it, and go back to code.
The successful founders I watched at Founder Institute? They weren't doing anything magical.
They just showed up for distribution when I retreated to building.
Every day. Even when it felt pointless. Even when nobody responded.
That's it. That's the whole pattern.
Not better products. Not better marketing strategies. Not better timing or funding or luck.
Just showing up. Consistently. For the work that doesn't feel like work.
What My Brain Needed
I've tried everything.
Todoist. Notion. Trello. Linear. Every productivity system designed by people with more discipline than me.
None of them worked. Because they all treated tasks equally.
Code for 8 hours? Check. Do 15 minutes of distribution? Same check.
My brain saw that and thought: "Well, I did something productive today."
But I didn't. I did the comfortable thing. Not the thing that would actually grow the business.
I needed a system that didn't trust me.
A system that said: "Distribution first. Every day. Before you touch code."
A system that made me feel something when I skipped it.
Not a reminder I could dismiss. Not a checkbox I could ignore.
Something with stakes.
The Streak
Losing hurts more than winning feels good.
Psychologists call it loss aversion. I call it the only thing that works on my brain.
When I had a 14-day streak going, I did distribution on day 15 — not because I wanted to, but because I couldn't stand watching the number reset.
That's embarrassing to admit. But it's true.
And by day 30? Something shifted.
I wasn't doing it for the number anymore. I was doing it because it's who I am.
"I'm someone who does distribution every day."
That identity shift is the whole game.
Not motivation. Not discipline. Not productivity hacks.
Identity.
So I Built Something
I built the tool that finally worked on my brain.
It forces distribution first. Every day. Before I can code guilt-free.
It has a streak. Miss too many days, it breaks.
It has a hierarchy that puts distribution at the top, building in the middle, and operations at the bottom.
I called it Railgun.
I'm using it right now to build Railgun's distribution. Day 1 as I write this.
I don't know if it'll work for you.
I know it works for me. For the first time in 100+ projects, I'm actually doing the distribution work instead of hiding in the build.
If This Is You
If you're someone who knows what to do but can't make yourself do it...
If you've shipped something good and watched it die in silence...
If you keep retreating to code when you should be talking to people...
Maybe you need a system that doesn't trust you either.
Or don't use it. Honestly, the insight is the gift:
Show up for distribution every day. Even when it feels pointless. Especially when it feels pointless.
That's the whole pattern. You don't need my tool to do it.
But if you're like me, and your brain needs stakes to show up?
The streak is waiting.
100 experiments. Still shipping.
Jude Cale
@judecale