I will not promote! $0 to $1k on AppSumo with an MVP in 2 weeks. No distribution before we fix retention

About a month ago, we had: 0 users 0 sales a landing page a raw product pitch no polished MVP We spent around 2 weeks turning the idea into something usable, launched it through an early-stage software marketplace, and crossed our first $1,000 in sales roughly 2 weeks later. Small milestone, but enough to create a new problem: Should we keep pushing distribution, or stop and fix retention first? What got us here: We did customer discovery before trying to scale We ran 64 async/live conversations with founders, operators, GTM people and developers. The interviews focused on specific daily-work cases rather than “productivity” in general: - what interrupts their work - where they lose the thread - how they recover today - which tools their workflow is scattered across - what still feels unresolved This gave us early users, clearer positioning and the first feature priorities. Distribution was completely manual We used: - Reddit - X - LinkedIn - 1:1 conversation inside our network No cold email. No automated outreach. No large existing audience. The first purchases came from conversations, not scale. Launching early exposed better questions Before launch, we kept asking: “What else should we build?” After launch, the questions became: “Why did this person buy?” “Why did this user stop returning?” “Where does the product fail to create value quickly?” “What makes somebody use it again after the first week?” Those feel like much more useful questions. We already have more distribution channels prepared But pushing more traffic into weak retention would probably just multiply the leaks. We are pausing most expansion and focusing on: - activation - first-session value - repeat usage - product accuracy - reducing friction and noise The first $1k feels like a signal, not proof that we should scale. For founders who have been through this: What told you it was time to slow down acquisition and focus almost entirely on retention? Was it a specific retention number, user behavior, churn pattern, or just repeated qualitative feedback? thx