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Comment by mlboss | Hacker News Reader

Some tactical advice:

- Search for online app directories like product hunt/indie hackers and put your app entry.

- Search for relevant reddit forums, become a member, start answering questions related to your product and add a link at the end.

- Same a last one. Add a post with lot of content of how to solve a problem that community faces and then add your product link.

- On Twitter join the indiehackers/build in public community. Regularly post your updates/screenshots. Engage in community.

- Write a ebook related to you domain. Create a landing page to collect email to deliver ebook. Mention how users can solve the problem by just using your app. Create ads to market the free ebook.

- Split ebook into smaller tweets/reddit post and regularly post them.

- Cold outreach to member on reddit community and ask for app review.

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>- Search for relevant reddit forums, become a member, start answering questions related to your product and add a link at the end.

Please stop doing this, it's painfully obvious and it's ruining the internet.

You can be as dishonest or helpful as you want. Back when google did organic ranking a lot of communities thrived on forum signatures. If you have thousands of helpful posts others know your level of expertise.

But this is something that is completely missing with these Reddit posts. Most are spam.

Its to easy to join and to hard to have dialog or ban users on reddit. It has kind of one single standard while with forums it depends a lot what the topic is. If people are building something together you need to be a productive participant before you can make fart jokes or complaint about your hangover. Accademic forums often had zero tolerance for bullshiting in serious topics. If your reply gives away you didnt read the article you deserve a warning.

That depends. If you are just saying "use my product" that ruins the internet. However if you give detailed helpful responses to questions in general that can be helpful.

I would like to add Programmatic SEO and doing Organic TikTok / Reels if you're in the B2C space. These things compound fast and don't take as much time as long term SEO and can be as effective as paid media with luck and persistence.

Of course it'll not be easy so expect to put in effort and reps.

This is advice for how to never build a big company and and just do the indiehacker thing building indiehacker tools for other indiehackers (which is fine!).

But if you have bigger ambitions -- you might actually have to talk to humans and look into this weird thing called "sales” and this other weird thing called “human relationships.”

Remember, a vast vast majority of money paid for software and value to be created solving problems with software comes from organizations (businesses, governments, etc). Not consumers or other indiehackers, which are the folks you'll find using the playbook OP mentioned above. Indiehackers might sound like a fun customer base, but be aware they are also the people who will loudly complain "THREE DOLLARS A MONTH FOR THIS??" when you do your show HN post.

You need to crawl, walk and then run. I would argue that talking to users on reddit/twitter is also selling. If you cannot sell a $3 dollar widget then selling a $1000 widget is even more difficult. Enterprise sales has a long sales cycle which is very difficult to do without significant runway.

In fact it's far easier to sell ten $1000/m subscriptions than it is to sell 3,333 $3/m subscriptions (the equivalent).

But you don't learn this until after you've tried the latter.

Also, it's usually far easier to support ten customers vs 3,333.

In my experience, it’s easier to sell something for $1000 than it is to sell something for $3.

one good high-paying client is much easier than 1000 little clients. in every single aspect ;)

As long as you don't only have 1 client. Then you are a basically a consultant and have to do what they say.

> But if you have bigger ambitions -- you might actually have to talk to humans and look into this weird thing called "sales."

that's the step after sufficient revenue generated or funding received to hire ans scale sales team probably. But the question is for solo hacker at the beginning of the journey.

It might amaze you to know there are thousands of $million revenue software companies that never posted on Reddit and never wasted months trying to pump a fake-successful launch on product hunt.

so, what is your suggested trajectory for solo hacker? Do cold "sales" calls?

> there are thousands of $million revenue software companies that never posted on Reddit and never wasted months trying to pump a fake-successful launch on product hunt.

do you have a chance to give some ideas how did you collect such insights? How did you find there are thousands companies which never posted, etc, and how they found first customers?

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