How makers stay productive

Consistency and patience. That's pretty much the basis for building anything.

I've not yet released my first "startup" or whatever we call it now… But here's a list of things I've taken note of to keep in mind when the time comes:

✅ Submit your product to Product Hunt ✅ Have a mailing list and send out emails (Monthly) ✅ Notify family and friends ✅ Share your product on your own Social media platforms ✅ Be active in relevant Social Media groups ✅ Reply to people on Reddit looking for a product like yours ✅ Find bloggers who can spread the word for you ✅ Journalists

(The formatting looked nice when I posted it, don't hate me please)

Oh, yeah. Formatting sucks on Discussions. I need to fix it :P

This is the biggest struggle I'm seeing with indie hackers and growing their startups. I'm not sure there is any defined way to be successful, part of it is luck, part is knowing the right people, part of it is the product itself. I was just talking to someone else this morning about this issue, with like Product Hunt (and similar), you get that 1-3 day spike in traffic but then traffic tends to drop like a rock after that. I see people take 3-4 hours and launch and get tons of traffic and I see people who take months to build something, spend lots of money and get no traffic. So I go back to it's 90% luck and 10% standard marketing practices.

Once you have a few users, talk to them! Talk to every new user you get if you can. Get them on chat or even the phone. Find out what they like, dislike, and whether they'd recommend it to friends. This seems obvious but it's really easy to put this off because it can be awkward and feels slower than going for another traffic boost via social media. Way easier to build something that a tiny group of people love and then have word of mouth kick-in than keep grinding for new users by promoting online.

I agree so much with this @gabemake. That's the main strategy I've used for Makerlog - just be human. Do things that don't scale. :)

I've had the pleasure of trying to grow a paid SaaS in the podcasting niche, and it's been tough convincing users on the value of the service.

The one definite thing that we've learned is to listen to our current customers since they are telling us exactly what their pain points with the service are, so implementing those bugfixes and features keeps current customers around and makes the service better for new ones.

Obtaining new signups has definitely been harder, but I believe it's a combination of hitting up the right audience on social media and seeing what optimizations you can make to your landing page. We've already reworded our tagline/description, added a features section, and replaced the confusing RSS input with a search. The final plan is to make it where you can basically go from search to having a fully published site.

It's definitely a learning process, and I agree with what's already been said above.