9 marketing strategies I've learned as an indie maker
9 marketing strategies I've learned as an indie maker
If you read my newsletter, you’re probably an indie maker or an aspiring one.
You have a product idea, maybe you even build it (or even better, validate it first as I suggest doing here).
But the first question you’ll ask yourself will be, and now how do I market it?
Everybody keeps saying that marketing is more important than building, but what is exactly marketing?
I asked those questions myself, and the super generic answer is
Marketing is the act of satisfying and retaining customers.
Very useful, right?
In this issue, I want to show you some tactics and strategies I’ve put in place, or noticed other successful indie hackers put in place to succeed.
Are you ready? Go!
1. Have in mind who are your customers
Ok, this is not marketing, but without this, you’ll struggle a lot.
An example, Podsqueeze was able to grow from 0 to $10k MRR in 5 months because they targeted podcasters, and they solve a problem for them. They started doing cold outreach and it worked amazingly well. If you have a clear idea of who your target users are and where to find them, you’re in a very good spot.
The point here is not to do cold outreach, but to know who your customers are.
2. Launch on Product Hunt
This is a small piece of the whole cake, a tiny one. But it’s still useful to give some visibility to your product and get a good backlink with a Domain Rate of 91.
Don’t expect a huge success (it might happen, but it’s unlikely) especially if you don’t have an audience on social platforms or a newsletter, but it’s still worth it in my opinion.
I have a free guide that explains how to do it effectively.
3. Submit your product to Directories
As soon as you have your product landing page ready, buy a service to submit your product to many directories (as many as possible), this will boost a little bit your SEO game.
When I launched Userdesk.io (now acquired) I kicked my Domain Rate to 30 in a short time.
4. Make giveaways (on Twitter/X)
The right giveaway can give you a lot of visibility.
In a giveaway, you give something for free, in exchange for some interactions with your tweet.
It can be a free Notion page, an ebook, a template, whatever, but it must provide value.
I suggest using Gumroad, because you can collect the email of the participants and retarget them later.
5. Launch free tools
This is my favorite because if you are a builder, you will have fun creating them.
Build free tools useful to the target users of your product, and publish them on your product website.
This will boost your organic traffic, and create backlinks.
Of course, just building them is not enough, you need to market them. How? Post the link on Reddit (pay attention to the subreddit rules), LinkedIn, Twitter, Meta, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, Facebook Groups. Everywhere.
Especially in the places where there are interested people.
I launched a Password and ID Generator, a Timezone Checker for Meetings, and a Blog Post Image Resizer as free tools for Shipped.club. And I plan to launch more!
6. Create a blog
Write articles on the blog of your product. Use Google Keyword Planner to find the best topics. You want to target keywords that are relevant to your audience, with a good amount of traffic, and low competition.
Pro tip: when you publish a new blog post, post it also on other platforms (Medium, HashNode, and others relevant to your content), but set the canonical URL to your original blog post.
Follow this free blogging course of ahrefs to learn more about this topic.
Do you see what they (ahrefs) did? They created a free video course on a topic specific to their niche (SEO), and people link the course on the web, generating more backlinks. I just created a new backlink for them, this is how it works (you can do it too!—the free course I mean).
7. Press coverage
An article on a good news website can help you both with SEO, brand awareness, and give more visibility to your product or yourself as a maker.
If you have an interesting backstory, there’s a chance an author might be interested in it. Use a service like PressPulse to easily find press opportunities.
8. Use F5 Bot — get an email when a word is mentioned on Reddit
This free service is a very goldmine.
It’s called F5Bot and it keeps monitoring Reddit for specific keywords that you define.
For instance, for Shipped.club I’m interested in MicroSaaS, Boilerplate, and Next.js discussions. Whenever this keyword is mentioned, I receive an email with the link to the thread, so that I can jump into the discussion and add value to it.
Someone might notice the product I’m working on from my bio, and browse to it.
9. Start a YouTube Channel
Ok, this might look overwhelming, because recording and editing videos is time consuming, but depending on the topic, the quality of the video doesn’t have to be incredible.
I’ve recently started posting more web dev content on my YouTube channel. I share my screen and show what I’m doing. It doesn’t need an equipped studio or pro editing skills.
The nice thing about YouTube is that it has SEO, people might find your content even after many months since it was published.
i.e. I posted a live-streaming video 2 years ago, and it has 16k views! 😱 And as you can see, the quality is pretty poor 😅
As you can imagine, nothing is simple with marketing.
It requires time, consistency, trial and error. Don’t expect an overnight success, it is quite unlikely to happen.
And if you see posts of very successful people, you are missing all the previous years of struggles to get there.
Whenever you are ready, I can help you with your indie hacking journey in a couple of ways.
Learn how to Build and Launch your Micro SaaS with my free email course.
7 lessons in 7 days, 500+ developers already joined, start learning today.
Shipped.club is the Next.js SaaS Boilerplate that allows you to build, ship, and make money with your product quickly.
200 indie makers are already using it, and are shipping together in the private Discord community.
Shipped now comes with Parity Purchasing (extra discount) depending on your country, discover your discount on the landing page!
That’s all for today.
See you next Sunday 🙌
Luca
