The shelf nobody was sent to
A five-plugin marketplace had everything a visitor needs — a live site, released plugins, a published example — and almost no visitors. This session worked out why, found that the product’s own output had no way back to it, and shipped the fix.
The question, and the one underneath it
The question was “how do we get traction?” The honest answer turned out not to be a missing channel.
The reflex reading was that no distribution work had been done. That was wrong: the plugins were released, the documentation site was live, a real example artifact was published and reachable, a brand kit existed, launch copy had been drafted months earlier, and two community-directory listings had been merged. The shelf was built.
What had never happened was anyone being sent to it — and two of the surfaces that do get traffic were describing the plugins inaccurately, advertising a companion plugin that does not exist and a feature that had since been replaced.
The reframe
A plugin installs with claude plugin marketplace add, which clones the repository directly. Someone can install, use, and rely on all five plugins without ever loading the repository page — so the usual signal of appreciation is unreachable from inside the product.
Where the path actually goes
Tracing the install and the artifact end to end showed both terminating without a way home. Click any stage for detail.
The last hop was the finding. A generated walkthrough is a single self-contained HTML file whose whole purpose is to be handed to someone else — and it carried no mark of what produced it. Every shared artifact was a dead end rather than a door.
Three calls that shaped the work
Each was weighed against alternatives rather than assumed. Switch tabs to compare.
Lead with the artifact
The flagship renders a document you can open in one click. A competing option — leading with the spec-adherence review idea — is more novel but needs the reader to first understand a subtle failure mode. With very little attention to spend, nothing subtle survives.
- Proof in one click
- The only output that is itself shareable
- Leads with the less novel idea
Subtle attribution only
A quiet line in generated documents, and nothing else. Louder options — a pointer at install time, or treating sharing as a product surface — were rejected: these artifacts get handed to colleagues, and anything that reads as advertising would cost more trust than the link is worth.
- Survives the campaign ending
- No telemetry, no tracking
- Slowest possible signal
Repair before posting
Nothing gets posted until the shelf tells the truth. Two public listings described plugins inaccurately; a post driving readers onto that would spend the one shot each channel gives you. Order beats volume.
- Every later click lands on something accurate
- Repairs are reversible; posts are not
- Delays the visible part
One edit, four render paths
The scaffold file is copied verbatim by every renderer, so the footer only had to be written once — but two existing rules elsewhere had to be reconciled with it.
The collision worth catching
The document renderer already carried a rule: never leave the tool’s own branding on a subject page. A provenance line would have been read as exactly that branding and stripped. Provenance is not branding — it records what produced the file, which stays true after a rebrand — so the rule now says so explicitly, and a test fails if either side stops mentioning it.
How it was actually checked
A test that has never been seen to fail is not known to work, and a renderer cannot be verified by grep alone.
What is still unresolved
Honest leftovers from this session, recorded rather than smoothed over.