A friend asked me to help market his game. I ended up building the thing I wished Steamworks had.

A friend of mine was finishing his first game and asked if I could help with the marketing side. I said yes without really knowing what I was signing up for.

The job turned out to be mostly spreadsheet archaeology. Open Steamworks, download a bunch of CSV files, paste data into a sheet, and try to work out whether the week went well. So I started by making a simple tool to read Steamworks data. Over time it grew as we needed more tools or tried to tackle repetitive tasks. Ultimately it became what is now MarketYourIndie.

What it grew into is a dashboard for the business side of a launch: marketing, wishlist and traffic intelligence, revenue projections that update each week, pricing and discount planning against comparable games, competitor tracking, an outreach CRM with Steam key distribution, finance and legal work document generation and a contract analyzer for when a publisher finally emails you. Every one of those exists because Juani hit the problem and there was nowhere to send him.

For people using MarketYourIndie, spreadsheet work was the first thing I wanted to kill. You paste in a Steamworks API key once and the data comes to you instead, pulled every night and backfilled so you have the all time history.

But there was still an issue remaining: All of this is still just data, and even if you research on what to do with your game, you'll just find mostly general advise, based off general numbers, together with some success and failure cases.

What should you do in your particular case? Googling "How should I price my game?" gets you a checklist anyone could have written. Ask an AI and it has no idea who you are or where you're at. Much less that other games in your subgenre cluster at $19.99, or that your visit-to-wishlist rate is running under what similar pages pull. How would it. It doesn't know that the advice is generic because the numbers that would make it specific are locked in a dashboard nothing else can read.

So I built the missing piece. MarketYourIndie runs an MCP server over your own data. You connect it once from settings, and from then on Claude (or any MCP client) reads your live game data directly: wishlists, traffic, projections, pricing, discounts, competitors, content plan and CRM.

Which means you can ask whether your wishlists actually reacted to a viral post or whether that was the baseline trend continuing. The one I keep going back to is asking for a situation report as if it were my marketing lead. Same conversation you were already having with an AI, except grounded in your real numbers instead of averages from a 2019 blog.

You can have a free trial in marketyourindie.com/register :)