I started dzugg because I wanted a VPN that was simple, transparent and didn’t require users to install yet another proprietary application.
The idea was straightforward: use WireGuard, standard VPN clients and European infrastructure, and automate as much of the service as possible.
Building the product
This was the part I knew how to solve.
Today dzugg has automated provisioning, Stripe payments, shared and dedicated VPN plans, multiple European server locations, monitoring, automatic configuration generation and QR codes for mobile devices.
A customer can subscribe and receive everything needed to connect without me manually creating the VPN account.
That technical challenge was the part I originally expected to be difficult.
It turned out not to be the biggest challenge.
Then came distribution
Once the service was ready, I discovered the problem that probably every indie founder eventually encounters:
A finished product sitting on the Internet does not automatically get discovered.
I’ve experimented with several channels:
Product Hunt
Reddit
Indie Hackers
Instagram advertising
SEO and content
Direct outreach
Affiliate partnerships
Product directories
Some of them generated traffic.
One Instagram campaign, for example, generated roughly 1,000 link clicks.
But traffic and customers are two very different things.
That experiment generated plenty of visitors and almost no sales.
Reddit produced some of the most interesting conversations and even started generating pages that were quickly indexed by Google, but moderation and anti-spam systems make promoting your own product there surprisingly difficult.
Product Hunt gives you visibility, but it can disappear very quickly among hundreds of other launches.
And on many startup platforms, you eventually discover another layer: before you can promote your product, you first need to build an audience or reputation inside the platform itself.
The lesson so far
The biggest thing I’ve learned is that building a product and building distribution are two completely different projects.
As developers, we tend to focus heavily on the first one because it’s something we can control.
A server has a problem? Debug it.
Automation fails? Fix it.
Payment webhook breaks? Check the logs.
But distribution doesn’t behave like infrastructure.
There is no configuration file where you can set:
customers = true
Unfortunately. :)
You can build something technically solid, launch it, and still find yourself sitting in a very quiet corner of the Internet.
What I’m working on now
The VPN itself is operational, so I’m trying not to keep adding features simply because building things is comfortable.
Instead, I’m treating distribution as the next problem to solve.
I want to understand which channels can actually bring sustainable discovery to a small independent product without requiring a huge advertising budget.
That means experimenting, measuring results, abandoning things that don’t work and documenting the process.
Maybe the interesting part of this project is no longer how the VPN works.
Maybe it’s discovering how a tiny independent service gets its first real audience.
That’s what I’m building now.
