I recorded a podcast episode[1] with Jason where he talked a lot more in-depth about how he got SubmitHub off the ground. Here's what he said:

> To launch SubmitHub I hand-tailored more than 1000 emails to blogs. It took me about 4-5 months of doing it everyday to get through this list. It didn't just launch overnight, there weren't people banging at my door. I had to go and email these guys, and they didn't respond. So I would tweet them, I'd Facebook message them, I'd send SoundCloud messages, I'd send another email, then I'd try to find another contact... Those 250 blogs and labels didn't come overnight.

I've consistently found it to be the case that there's a lot more information lurking under the surface when you sit down and talk to someone about what they did. What you can surmise from reading a short post or interview really only scratches the surface... which is why it's easy to underestimate how difficult it was for people to launch their successful businesses.

A related anecdote: In Jason's podcast episode he talks about how someone read his Indie Hackers interview, thought "This idea is so easy!", and cloned the look and feel of his site. Of course their clone went nowhere. They didn't do any of the hustling, marketing, selling, etc, because all of that was behind-the-scenes stuff. It was invisible to them, so they failed to factor it in, and instead gave too much weight to the obvious parts.

[1] Shameless plug: The Indie Hackers podcast launches tomorrow morning at https://IndieHackers.com/podcast! It'll be three episodes to start, 1 hour each, and Jason's is #1.