Starting a blog to document my journey as an indie hacker

A lot of people who document their startup stories on personal blogs also make posts here and on similar entrepreneur communities like reddit, dev.to, etc.

For example, @lynnetye posted a similar journey story here on Indie Hackers[1], on dev.to[2], and on reddit[3], and gained a good bit of attention on each platform. Now, she's hit certain impressive milestones already that might seem to make this kind of thing easier, but there are also examples, like @leandro, of indie hackers blogging about their journeys[4] before they've even "accomplished" anything (in my opinion, committing to a project in public is an accomplishment in itself) and sparked some curiosity and interest.

In terms of how much work you need to put in, there's no "right" answer, though it would probably help to commit to some regular interval that you forecast in advance, and publicly, so that you feel some pressure to keep moving forward.

[1] https://www.indiehackers.com/@lynnetye/how-i-went-from-indie-lurker-to-indie-hacker-d1042ffa5f
[2] https://dev.to/lynnetye/how-i-stopped-procrastinating-learned-to-code-and-launched-my-first-product-2i1
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Entrepreneur/comments/732o23/lurking_to_launching_my_story_about_leaving/
[4] https://www.indiehackers.com/@Leandro/our-first-product-launch-follow-our-journey-part-3-b0070ca612

Nice, I did the same thing about six months ago! https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/post/-KgNe4vEnLdN9egV51jy

To answer your specific questions:

What are the best platforms to expose my blog so that people actually read it?

Medium publications have been great for me. Obviously places like IH and HN as well.

In your experience, would doing something like this dramatically help with user acquisition?

It depends on your product. If you're specifically targeting entrepreneurs then it hopefully should. In my case I ended up building something for a totally different market (weddings) so it didn't really. That said - blogging and cross-publishing has been a great source of SEO juice for my site so it still has indirectly helped with user acquisition.

How do you build an audience for something like this starting from zero?

Start with your social networks. Then post in relevant places, IH, subreddits, etc. Like I mentioned, Medium was a good channel for me. Make sure you have an email capture from day 1 so you can send people newsletters to come back when you write new things.

How much extra work per day do I have to do to keep this kind of thing running?

Like Channing mentioned, it really depends. In my experience it takes anywhere between 4-8 hours to produce one piece of polished, "quality" content, and then I spend maybe another hour or so (often less) posting/promoting on various channels. But it depends how naturally it comes to you and how much effort you want to spend. Blogging can be a full time job and it can also take 0 time in steady state. I find it's nice to be able to scale up / down my blogging efforts depending on whether I'm learning anything at that moment and also what else is going on in my life.

Finally some advice that you didn't ask for: think about why you're doing this.

I found blogging hugely helpful for working through ideas and, later, SEO. But that whole "build an audience and then you'll profit from it" thing didn't work out at all for me - largely, I think, because I didn't do it strategically and because I didn't build something that targeted my audience. So I'd encourage you to take a moment and articulate to yourself the goals of why you're blogging, and that might help inform what you write about, and where you try to promote it. Hopefully you'll be more successful than me!

You can see my journey here if you'd like: http://www.coryzue.com/writing/ (sorry, couldn't resist the plug)

What are the best platforms to expose my blog so that people actually read it?

Start with Indie Hackers

In your experience, would doing something like this dramatically help with user acquisition?

I don't know about dramatically but definitely yes

How do you build an audience for something like this starting from zero?

Add a profile pic so we can understand the mantis behind mantracker

How much extra work per day do I have to do to keep this kind of thing running?

A few hours a month max

• My favorite blogging setup is Jekyll because I like to own the domain, but Medium and Linkedin are good for increased distribution. (See this list for many more options).
• If your target market is small business owners/indie hackers that would read your personal journey, then maybe yes.
• Just start writing consistently, share on social media, here, reddit, etc. You might get lucky with a few posts. Have an email subscribe list ready so people can continue to get updates.
• Depends. I've run a personal blog that gets hundreds of visitors per day and I write less than once per week. That said, it's been up for years. It takes time to build content, so if this project doesn't make sense as a long-term strategy, ditch it now and save yourself the time.

This comment was deleted 9 years ago