I Built a Genuinely Good LaTeX Editor. Now What?

Here’s a problem they don’t teach you in a PhD program: I made a thing, and I have no idea how to tell people about it.

The building part, I understood. Every problem had a shape — you debug it, it works, you move on. Six weeks of that and texspark became something I genuinely reach for every day, which is the highest praise I can give my own software.

Then I looked up from the code and realized: nobody knows it exists.

So far my marketing strategy has been, in its entirety: tweeting into the void with #buildinpublic, writing blog posts like this one, and refreshing a Telegram bot that mostly reports visits from Googlebot. (Hello, Googlebot. You’re my most loyal user.)

The honest inventory of what I know about marketing: Nothing. That’s the inventory.

But here’s what I’m trying, in increasing order of terror: SEO groundwork first — comparison pages, feature docs, blog posts that might index before anyone searches. Then the communities where LaTeX people actually live. Then, once the checkout pipeline is real, the big swings — Show HN, Product Hunt — the places where an indie app either finds its people or dies in the “new” tab.

If you’ve marketed a developer tool before, I would genuinely love to hear what worked. And if you haven’t but you write LaTeX on a Mac — well, that’s convenient. texspark.io. Tell a friend. Apparently that’s how this works.