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Comment by csallen | Hacker News Reader

Hi Tapha! I run Indie Hackers (https://IndieHackers.com), a site where I interview the founders of profitable business and side projects. I just passed $1k revenue this month (you can follow along via my timeline here: https://IndieHackers.com/blog).

My number one marketing approach by far has been to tailor the site to the HN audience.

I do this primarily by asking questions that people on HN always like to see answered (how much money are you making? how did you come up with the idea? what tech did you use? what are your best marketing channels? etc). Lots of similar sites don't ask any of these questions, especially not the revenue one.

I tend to share the most interesting interviews with the HN audience every couple weeks or so, and they usually do pretty well!

View on HN

Did you just answer a HN question on side projects with your side project which aims to answer questions about side projects for the HN audience?

Yes.

That's so meta :)

Are you planning to auto-interview you? :p

Love ur website btw. Thanks a lot!

I think this was meant for me? No, I'm not planning to interview myself, but you can read about my progress on the blog: https://www.indiehackers.com/blog

That's so WarriorForum

How on earth do you monetize? I can't see any ads on it. BTW great site, I visit it at least once weekly.

There is a word "sponsored" on top of some of the cards, so "native advertizing"

Yep, this is it. I charge sponsors on a CPC basis. In the near future I'll be doing actual interviews with sponsors, so readers will get to know all about how they started their companies, too.

Where / how did you reach out to these sponsors? I run a website in the travel industry and would like to add some advertising on it as well

good day of HN marketing today!

Yep, the SubmitHub story hit #1 and got 42.8k pageviews and 25.2k uniques yesterday. Today it's fallen off the front page, but I've still gotten 14k pageviews and 6.8k uniques.

I posted a screenshot of the Google Analytics from the past 28 hours here: https://twitter.com/IndieHackers/status/788141583199719424. It shows pageviews and unique visitors to https://IndieHackers.com.

Quick question about your /blog page: it's more of a /timeline with some milestones + blog posts on it, rather than a blog, right? Is it custom more or is it made with some Wordpress plugin? And third question: you have $450 MRR as of last month. Did you more than double it this month? Is it recurring, or you just had some extraordinary income that you don't expect to last in the next couple of months? Thanks and kudos for the good work!

Great work on this site! Very helpful resource. I looked at the timeline, how did you launch to 1000 email subscribers and get 300k page views in the first month?

Check out the blog post here: https://www.indiehackers.com/blog/launching-to-300000-pagevi...

I started with 0 subscribers and pageviews, but was at the top of HN for something like 30 hours (Thu morning to Fri afternoon), then only a couple days later I hit #1 on Product Hunt. That weekend alone got me to something like 200k pageviews and 800 subscribers. After that, I just added as many interviews as I could every week, and started sending out weekly newsletters.

Awesome! Great work!

Thanks for sharing Courtland!

Great work and thanks for the tips! How did approach people for interviews?

I wrote about it here (https://www.indiehackers.com/blog/launching-to-300000-pagevi...), but basically I scoured "Ask HN" posts, built a list of 120 companies, tracked down most of their email addresses, and asked them to do an interview and share their revenue numbers for the site. I ended up launching with 12 companies a few weeks later. Since then most of my interview requests have been inbound.

Love your site.

Thanks!

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