Day 649 - Updated indie hacker playbook? - https://golifelog.com/posts/updated-indie-hacker-playbook-1665453031370
What's the classic indie hacker's playbook?
- Pre launch a landing page or build a scrappy MVP to validate interest
- Build in public, sharing progress and revenue updates
- No paid marketing, no ads
- Little to no SEO content, all organic reach by going viral
- Obligatory launch on Product Hunt
- Bootstrap your product to ramen profitability, without investor funds
Tweet Hunter's success story is pointing to a new indie hacker playbook in the making. [Ayush wrote a great article](https://www.listenupih.com/tweethunter/) summarising their story, and many of the growth hacks are more uncommon to indies:
- Partnering influencers by giving equity to the startup, pairing technical chops with marketing fitnesse
- Growth hacking through building viral side projects that bring attention to the main projects
- Acquiring smaller projects with good traffic from other indies to redirect attention to the main project again
- Micro equity partnerships with 12 other influencers, where they each get tokens from a pool, and will get returns if Tweet Hunter gets acquired in future
- Use of ads on Twitter to market the product
- SEO content
- Organic reach through founders' Twitter accounts
It's really just a mix of startup tactics with indie methods, isn't it?
These methods had always been around, just not often used by indies because it can be costly (e.g. ads) or just too difficult (influencer partnership assumes you got something worth partnering with). There's also the back story context where the founders had a lot of experience starting startups and failed a lot as well, so the classic 10 year grind had paved the foundation here.
Despite their huge success, I wouldn't go so far as to say go replicate their approach for your indie product.
But it definitely does open up new thinking, new distribution channels and growth opportunities where I would have previously shrugged off simply because it's not in the "indie hacker playbook".
Whatever that means.
- Pre launch a landing page or build a scrappy MVP to validate interest
- Build in public, sharing progress and revenue updates
- No paid marketing, no ads
- Little to no SEO content, all organic reach by going viral
- Obligatory launch on Product Hunt
- Bootstrap your product to ramen profitability, without investor funds
Tweet Hunter's success story is pointing to a new indie hacker playbook in the making. [Ayush wrote a great article](https://www.listenupih.com/tweethunter/) summarising their story, and many of the growth hacks are more uncommon to indies:
- Partnering influencers by giving equity to the startup, pairing technical chops with marketing fitnesse
- Growth hacking through building viral side projects that bring attention to the main projects
- Acquiring smaller projects with good traffic from other indies to redirect attention to the main project again
- Micro equity partnerships with 12 other influencers, where they each get tokens from a pool, and will get returns if Tweet Hunter gets acquired in future
- Use of ads on Twitter to market the product
- SEO content
- Organic reach through founders' Twitter accounts
It's really just a mix of startup tactics with indie methods, isn't it?
These methods had always been around, just not often used by indies because it can be costly (e.g. ads) or just too difficult (influencer partnership assumes you got something worth partnering with). There's also the back story context where the founders had a lot of experience starting startups and failed a lot as well, so the classic 10 year grind had paved the foundation here.
Despite their huge success, I wouldn't go so far as to say go replicate their approach for your indie product.
But it definitely does open up new thinking, new distribution channels and growth opportunities where I would have previously shrugged off simply because it's not in the "indie hacker playbook".
Whatever that means.