Growth May 16, 2019

How would you market this?

Rosie Sherry @rosiesherry

One of the biggest challenges I see indie hackers face is growth.

So here is your chance to help and get help!

You can post details of your product AND/OR provide some ideas on how indie hackers could market their product.

What is your product? And who is your target market?


  1. 3

    My Product is SecretFlightDeals a Flight Deal Newsletter, My target market is anyone that loves travel and is budget minded. Would love some ideas. I have tried FB, Instagram ads so far but found it to be too costly at $3/ Free Signup.

    1. 2

      – Try twitter ads for the followers of travel bloggers. It is cheap and allows you to target an engaged audience.
      – Create a form where people can enter their latest travel and price for the ticket and you check in your database if they could've had a better deal.
      – Blog articles on how to find cheap deals. I found that most Americans don't know how to search for cheap tickets and just blindly overpay on the company website.

    2. 1

      What did Scott Cheap Flight do to promote their stuff? I'm not saying you copy them, but it's worth having a look to see who is talking about them where. It might give you inspiration of where you can be promoting things.

      I would suggest trying to participate in Reddits, Quora and Facebook groups. Anywhere that likes to talk about deals, financial independence, travel.

  2. 2

    Thanks @rosiesherry for this question.
    I need ideas to reach out to small shopkeepers/food outlet owners in any country.

    1. 1

      What is your product? And what do you want to communicate to these people?

      1. 1

        The product is based on online ordering. An alternate to call ordering.

  3. 2

    My product is for makers - for $12 you can ask 100 people a question, then follow-up based on how they answered and even interview them!

    Honestly, I've been having trouble finding great growth channels myself. Here's what I've been trying though:

    1. Posting on forums like IH
    2. Answering questions on PH/Reddit/Facebook groups/Linkedin Groups associated with startups. Problem & challenge with this is that it's essentially self-promotion which comes off super toxic to those communities.
    3. Guest blogging - I regularly get 5-10K views on my articles on Medium, so I insert a plug at the end of the articles to drive people to my site.
    4. Newsletters - expensive, and hasn't really paid off in terms of direct ROI.
    5. Cold emails through startups's sites via their support channels (not much luck here)

    Would love any thoughts anyone else has, I've had decent success ($800 rev last 30 days) but not amazing. Hopefully this can help some folks and potentially I can get some help too! :)

    Thanks @rosiesherry!

    1. 2

      Hi @Chkrlee I just checked out your landing page. However I thought I'd comment on the lead on from my mobile browser. Your lead on appears to be from a negative point of view and while I'm someone who would also have started with text like that because it's how I think I've learned that people don't convert (usually) as well with that kind of language. I think you should consider less text and more aspirational. "Build better, build lean and build fast". Basically flip it around and imply "when you succeed you'll have done so much better using my tool". It's true the value you offer in your current text is critical, but you can guide people there after they sign up with a section that guides them to how to craft their first questions.

      1. 1

        Yea we’ve actually had that comment a few times now. Going to rewrite it, thanks for the feedback!

    2. 2

      I signed up to try it.

      (1) If I'm signed in, I can't visit your landing page it redirects me to /dashboard.

      (2) The tip after signing up (just before creating the question) was nice. At first I didn't understand the worth of 12 credits and dismissed it but once I got to the section where I see the credit to dollar ratio, I suddenly wanted it back. I couldn't.

      (3) The payments page froze. I thought I didn't hit the submit button properly and hit it again. Ended up buying 24 credits instead of 12.

      (4) I asked a question that can be answered with a Yes or No, but I chose short text answer instead of a choice. I didn't ask an open ended question (let's call it an experiment)

      Now I am waiting... I'll update this post in seven days with my thoughts.

      1. 1

        Hi there! Thanks for giving it a shot!

        1. What did you want to see on the landing page after you logged in? Wondering if this is a matter of just putting landing page info accessible while logged in or you actually want to go back to it.

        2. Ah, I just added that tip today because I had a few folks ask to actually pay for what's essentially just some quick pointers on how to get started. Will put the credit-$ ratio in. thanks for letting me know.

        3. That's terrible, I'm really sorry about that. I'll refund the second payment and redact the extra credits.

        4. Your choice! Let me know how it goes either way :)


        1. 1

          @Chkrlee scoops is very good. I just got results and I was satisfied with what I read.

          Three things I'd like to leave as feedback:

          Use something like vale to lint your content. Do this for every piece of content that's on the website. Your tone/message seems a little off at place.

          Reduce the amount of questions you ask in the feedback form i.e. the typescript one to either one or two. You'd get a lot more feedback that way.

          Information on Bias and clustering which you've written on your blog could be on your front-page. As someone who does ethnographic research, explaining why its different to just looking at qualitative or quantitative data and how open ended questions leave room for inference always piqued my clients interests.

          1. 1

            Great to hear, and thanks so much for the feedback! Much appreciated. If you enjoyed the service, do you mind filling out our 2 question typeform here

            We're trying to raise money, and every metric counts. It'd really help us stay afloat and continue to better the service for you!

            Appreciate it,

        2. 1


          The landing page contains information I want to see about the product but the only way to get to that document is to either log out or open it in incognito because of the forced redirects.




  4. 1

    @rosiesherry my product is which is a next generation VPN provider.

    We operate on quite a low margin, we also want to give our users a heavily discounted or free month to begin with at $5 cost to us!

    Our target market is nomads travelers, and privacy enthusiasts.

    I would love to get some sort of viral component going, so I added a share now get 90% off button!

    Any ideas on how to improve our landing pages and make our call to action more obvious?


  5. 1

    I run, which is a no-code calculator builder
    So far tried some sub-reddits and direct contacting prospects

  6. 1

    My (new) product is an MVP called Hailtum (, an online bank platform that helps people to save and organizes their money. My target audience is basically people who want to partition their funding with many segments. Which helps them fulfill future investments.

    I'm focused on my own country first and then build from there.

  7. 1

    my product is and target market is development teams using agile/scrum process

  8. 1

    I offer coaching for beginning tech managers. I've been doing it for quite some time in the company I work for as an engineering manager and now want to have it as a side project
    Being a technical person myself, I'm not very good at sales and promoting what I do.
    What I've tried is blogging, answering relevant questions on relevant subreddits. I run a generic meetup on coaching which hasn't bring me any clients (though I still enjoy it a lot) and soon I am going to start a meetup group specifically targeting the pains of my audience.

  9. 1

    I am currently about 85% done a side project for sending encrypted files to anybody without requiring them to sign up for anything. We will have an MVP to market by the end of the month. How would you market that? I find myself being really bad at digital marketing.

    My ideal customers are people who need to send their personal information to their loan officer or real estate agent in a secure way, or the real estate and LO folks who need to send secure documents to their clients for signing and returning etc.

    1. 1

      I like the idea! Been wanting something like that on a few occasions. Hit me up at hello[at] when you have it live, would love to try it out and give feedback.

      real estate and LO folks
      One way to get started on marketing might be focusing on a very specific niche, and it seems like you found one here ^

      When focusing on real estate agents for instance , you can talk directly to them using their language and things they care about throughout all your communication (landing page, ads, social media, etc). I've found it to be much much easier for people to identify with your product if you're talking to them directly like this.

      Figure out the types of websites they use, and online communities like facebook groups and subreddits, etc. Watch them interact with each other, talk to them and see how they feel about your product.

      Some niches might not be very tech-savvy so be careful with the language that you use when talking about the product with them. It might be the case with real estate agents for instance. If they're not already looking exactly for the solution your product provides, you might have to spend some time explaining why sending files encrypted is important at all for instance, even though that might sound obvious to us. So this is something to take into consideration when looking for a niche.

      Once you feel like you know how your niche talk and what they care about, create some targeted ads on those websites and communities your niche frequents using that information you learned about them and see how they perform. From that you take what worked better, improve on it, and repeat.

      I found Start Small, Stay Small (book) to be a very good read for learning about niches and how to market to them. You don't need to stay small of course, this might just be a very good entry door anyway. The Mom Test is also worth checking out to help you learn how to communicate with your customers.

  10. 1

    I'm building a product with my wife as a sales funnel to her freelance interior design business.

    The premise for the product is to provide professional grade mood boards (like this for both free and paid.

    There will be a collection of free boards that anyone can download. There will be a paid tier - at this point priced at somewhere between $25-50 - which is a once off payment which gives you access to all current and future boards.

    My current ideas for marketing this are:

    • Facebook/Instagram/Pinterest ads targeting what we know is our target demo - 35-44 yo women in, primarily focused on Australia and US
    • Content marketing which explains benefits of using mood boards, and then more generally just about particular styles.
    • I want some way to integrate Ikea or something to do with Ikea into the mix as this was a very common theme from when we did a send (@Chkrlee)

    I would welcome any other insights about what we can do and how we can even expand this to help build my wife's brand and sales funnel.

    Thanks so much.

  11. 1

    Almanax: a place to draw, search and visualise graphs:

    Currently I am trying to sell it to (security) consulting agencies (EY, DXC, ...)
    My biggest problem is finding customers that are willing to pay.

    1. 1

      I land on the website and I literally have no idea what it is about. I'm not your target market, but some kind of clarification would be helpful.

      1. 1

        True, I mostly link to this page:

  12. 1

    Our product is We help companies build AI-based features and products. Target audience is small to medium sized SaaS companies. But we also target geeks, hobbyists, and hackers. We've just launched so still exploring all the possible channels. Any suggestions are welcomed!

  13. 1

    My product is It is a SEO software tool that targets website owners, bloggers, marketers, digital agencies, and SEO professionals.

    I have multiple signsup but rarely from conversion to paid signups.

  14. 1

    My product is - it is focused on sending post purchase emails after a customer of Ecommerce store buys an item. The emails open up to custom landing pages designed to engage with the customer, to increase their purchase experience.

    My main target is e-commerce stores, and probably more specifically the head of marketing in e-commerce companies.

    I am currently creating content for inbound, sending cold emails and starting to try to really bring high quality value in e-commerce forums.

    Would love some more ideas :)

  15. 1

    This is a really great post!

    Here's my prototype/mvp

    It's an Internet Privacy Simulator and trying to increase awareness about this stuff. I think people with data privacy background are my target market.

    I am planning to do a paid ad soon but I would need validation if I will hit the right community.

    I created a subreddit to build my community.


  16. 1

    My product is that helps solo entrepreneurs get social media content on-demand for their brand. The cost per post is $2 so they can create a content strategy for relatively affordable rates compared to hiring a full time social media expert.

    I have been experimenting with the following growth channels:

    1. Indiehackers because I think companies with small teams can benefit from this.
    2. Cold emails to small businesses/bloggers.

    Looking for some more ideas. Any help would be appreciated :)

    1. 2

      I'd suggest doing some searches for [social media for small businesses] or [social media automation] and then approach the top ranking pages with an email suggesting that you might be a good addition to their post for their readership. Depending on your bandwidth, setting up an affiliate relationship or offering a trial could also improve conversion there.

      Podcasts are also always looking for sponsorship and are relatively inexpensive in the niches.

      There are some good slack channels for marketeers, e.g., and I expect a few dedicated to social media.

      Search has lots of angles too, but fully unpicking options is a huge topic. A couple of things I'd recommend looking into are [barnacle seo], [PPC testing for SEO] and [HOW TO INCREASE YOUR KEYWORD FOOTPRINT] (

      Good luck!

    2. 1

      I think it would be helpful to be clear about what it would cost on the website, I can't see a reference to that.

      Perhaps also giving an actual example of what has been produced in the past. A screenshot of a Tweet or Instagram post, for example.

      My primary concern about this, as a user, is signing up and getting poorly written/created stuff back.

  17. 1

    This comment was deleted 10 months ago.

  18. 2

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 1

      Hey, David. Here's some feedback on the landing page... with only a 7 day trial, I think credibility is key. The page has a "Featured In" block that lists Forbes, Observer, Fast Company and a couple of others but none of those logos are linked to an article. Google search also turns up zero results for the following queries: "grow your clicks" "David Delahunty" "grow your clicks" "David Delahunty" "grow your clicks" "David Delahunty"

      I'm not claiming you weren't featured in all of those publications, but with no links and Google turning up no results, it actually decreases credibility to have that section in the landing page. I'd strongly advise linking that social proof up!

      I'm actively looking to grow my audience for a profitable online business and I regularly invest in courses and training in general, so I should be right in your target audience. However, the combination of the offer being unfamiliar, having a super short refund window and having no special credibility has made me hold back. Hopefully this feedback is useful!