Indie Hackers: How Many Users Do You Have?

• Working on Indie Hackers! 👋
• Around 11,000 people have signed up for the community in the past year and a half, but I generally ignore that number and focus on weekly active users (approaching 1,000).
• My best user acquisition strategy has been content marketing (via text interviews and a podcast) on sites like Hacker News and Reddit, combined with a regular newsletter that sends out valuable links and brings people back to the site. Retention is just as important as acquisition, especially early on.
• My worst user acquisition strategy so far has been SEO. Granted, I haven't spent much time on it, so maybe that doesn't count. I also used to spend considerable amounts of time trying to manually get the word out about IH content on sites like Quora and Reddit, but it never moved the needle compared to HN, so it was mostly a waste of time.
• The strategy I've been working on in recent weeks is to put the community first! I think a sufficiently energized community forum not only has the potential to grow faster than any content marketing strategy, but is also much more valuable and useful to people than just passively consuming.

Andy here, co-founder of Tettra.co: a friendly and usable knowledge sharing system for growing teams.

How many users do you have?

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We really only measure active users internally, but we've had 17,492 unique people try Tettra across 5,931 teams.

For MAU:
~1,200 people creating pages and ~2,400 people viewing pages (our North Star Metric)

What are you working on?

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Right now we're working on generally improving the product's performance and UX, along with trying to do way more to load the top of the funnel through acquisition. My personal goal this month is to publish 75 pieces of unique content. It's... hard, to say it simply. Our bigger pieces this month are:

• Org Uncharted Episode #1: Our new podcast for people who empower other people to do great work. The first episode went live last week and episode 2 is coming out next week. Would love feedback if you can give it a listen https://tettra.co/culture-codes/episode/champion-leaders-with-michael-brenner/

• Creating a Culture of Learning at Patreon: An exclusive interview with Patreon's VP of Operations, Tyler Sean Palmer https://tettra.co/culture-codes/interview/creating-a-culture-of-learning-at-patreon/

• Recognize-Diffuse-Scale: The 3 Processes for Scaling Organizational Culture https://tettra.co/culture-codes/interview/recognize-diffuse-scale-the-3-processes-for-scaling-organizational-culture/

... and lots of other stuff like social promotion, email promo, etc.

What strategies did you use to get your current users?

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This is the rough breakdown:

• Organic search and unknown: 85%
• Slack App directory: 8%
• Capterra ads: 2.5%
• Other (Quora, social, mentions, etc) - 4.5%

My piece of advice would be to work on getting one persistent acquisition channel that provides you a steady stream of new users you can learn from to make the product better.

Which strategies were the most effective and which were the least effective?

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• Getting listed in the Slack App Directory extremely early
• Optimizing our entire site around one organic search term "wiki for slack"

What new strategies do you plan to try next?

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• Building a long-term brand through high-quality content production like CultureCodes.com

I'm working on Scramble: a platform for organizing sports and fitness meetups. I currently have about 78 users, most of whom are family and friends I informed by word-of-mouth. I'll begin organizing and attending community meet-ups and workout sessions to help people meet fitness goals while creating an awareness of the platform. I'll be looking to try other strategies that "don't scale" :)

Passive learning app called Harvest https://harvest.li/

400 total users
83 monthly active (logged in)
54 monthly engaged (created notes)
2 monthly sharing (shared notes publicly)

What are you working on?
Working on AlfaData, a football stats portal. Registered users just above 300. Monthly active users on the website just above 1000.

What strategies did you use to get your current users?
Reddit posts on soccerbetting sub, engaging with betting community on Twitter/Facebook, a blog (huge impact) and recently a newsletter.

Which strategies were the most effective and which were the least effective?
Writing a blog post in December and posting it on reddit drove 500 users in a day to the website. Huge increase.

What new strategies do you plan to try next?
I think more of the same. Especially more blog posts.

• Already +500 account created, about 10 daily user. The app isn't finish at all, I'm working on adding social features to smartmob.co
• sent press release + product hunt
• Product hunt was quite effective, had press coverage
• I've no idea what to plan next but I'm here to learn

Maker of Bar Roulette. All of my users come from organic app store searches because my app comes up first for "bar hopping." I'm at ~200 MAU and not doing anything to grow it. I was thinking about testing out Facebook ads, but my in-app-purchase hasn't converted that well so I'm worried about wasting a bunch of dollars on ads...

Working on Web Maker - https://webmakerapp.com
50000 active installations per week.
500 active daily usages.
Have promoted on Product Hunt, codrops. Was featured on Chrome webstore homepage.
Next up, paid advertisements.

Working on: a new project for affiliates. More on that later :)

Already in our portfolio:
https://www.wecamgirls.com/ - a B2B community for adult webcam models. 13K members, mostly word of mouth.

https://www.quizlet.nl/ - a community for Dutch teens. 85K members, mostly word of mouth and SEO

https://www.singlesplace.nl/ - free Dutch datingsite. 20K members, all SEO

Different projects require different approaches to attract new members. I want to do some SEM, but I find it difficult to start.

• I'm working on (off and on) Outpost: a project efficiency tool for teams
• The only thing I've done so far to get users is create an Upcoming Product on Product Hunt (during the November Hackathon), and a few tweets.
• What I've done so far has not been very successful. About 100 people subscribed on PH, and I have just under 30 Users on the app. The good news is with analytics and Hotjar, I've seen how new Users are going through the registration flow and when they tend to drop off. So, I have a few ideas how to make that better.
• Work on user on-boarding. Ping the PH subscribers for Outpost. Turn the Upcoming Product into a post. No clue what my other methods will be.

Working on headsetapp.co. currently 7.3K total and 4K AMU. So far, I've got one PH post that lead to many other mentions online. All through word of mouth, mostly. Next, I'm thinking about a referral program where users can get a discount by sharing their experience on twitter/facebook.

• Working on https://shelf.bike 🚲! Still trying to work out the actual active users count.
• A combination of a certain feature request thread, manually emailing and private messaging cyclists, Reddit "soft" launch thread and promoted Instagram posts.
• Facebook and Google ads aren't converting very well. Since I have a pretty niche product, I really need to dial in the keywords and demographics.
• My next strategy is to work on creating content for the blog and social media. I really need to dial in proper content to balance out the value of the site and why the content will help lead users into using the site.