My distribution strategy is just being genuinely present where my customers already are
I don’t have a marketing budget. No ads. No SEO agency. No growth hacker on retainer.What I have is this: my ideal customer is an indie SaaS founder. And indie SaaS founders live on Indie Hackers. So that’s where I am. Every day.
What this actually looks like
Not posting about my product constantly. Not dropping links in every comment. Not treating every conversation as a sales opportunity.Just showing up. Reading what founders are struggling with. Leaving comments that add something real to the conversation. Asking genuine questions. Answering the ones I actually know something about. Some days I comment on 5 posts. Some days I reply to replies for an hour. Some days I just read. Right now I have zero paying customers. I also have real conversations happening with real founders who are thinking about the exact problem my product solves. That’s not nothing.
The insight that changed how I think about this
Most founders treat distribution as a separate activity from community. You build the product, then you go find customers somewhere else. But what if your customers are already somewhere you genuinely want to be? I built ReleaseLog for indie founders who want to keep their users informed. The people who need that most are active on Indie Hackers right now posting about their products, struggling with churn, wondering why their users don’t engage. I’m not advertising to them. I’m just here. Having the same conversations they’re having. Building in the same place they’re building. When the moment comes up naturally I mention what I’m working on. Most of the time it doesn’t come up and that’s fine too.
Why this works better than ads for where I am
At zero customers and $0 in revenue I can’t afford to test ad campaigns. And even if I could the trust gap between a paid ad and a genuine community member is enormous. Someone who has seen my name in 10 different comment threads over two weeks already has a relationship with me before they’ve ever visited my landing page. An ad gets one shot at a cold stranger. The community member gets ten warm touchpoints for free.
The honest part
This is slow. Some days the silence is uncomfortable. You comment, you post, you engage — and the metrics don’t move in any obvious way. But I keep coming back to one thing: every founder I have a real conversation with here is a potential customer, a potential referral, or a potential supporter on launch day. None of that comes from running ads. Two weeks in. Zero customers. Still here every day. If you’re building something and trying to figure out distribution without a budget — I’d genuinely love to hear what’s working for you. ReleaseLog is live at tryreleaselog.com — changelog, roadmap and feature requests for indie founders. Start free, paid from $12/mo.
See what your custom changelog / roadmap page could look like here https://tryreleaselog.com/p/releaselog-building-in-public
I'm doing this for the first time today, partly out of necessity and partly because every other channel I've tried to think about has a reason why it won't work for me right now. Reading this on day one of actually trying it is useful. The uncomfortable silence you describe after commenting is already familiar and I've only been at it a few hours.
Hey! I just launched on product hunt, if you have the time to check it out that would be really appreciated https://www.producthunt.com/products/releaselog?launch=releaselog
Day one silence is the hardest part because there's no feedback loop yet. It gets easier around day three when the first real reply lands and you realize the conversations are actually happening. Stick with it, what are you building?
Just One Step — a procrastination tool. You tell it something you've been putting off, it gives you one small specific action. No leaderboards, no streaks, no daily pressure, etc. Still looking for the first real testers if you know anyone who's tried the other productivity apps and found them more overwhelming than helpful.
The anti-feature positioning is the right call "no leaderboards, no streaks, no daily pressure" tells someone exactly who it's for before they even try it. The people who burned out on Todoist and Habitica are a real audience and they're exhausted by the category. One small specific action is the kind of thing that sounds too simple until you're staring at a task you've avoided for three weeks. Launching on Product Hunt tomorrow, will be a bit heads down but if you want a tester who's perpetually avoiding something, I'm your person. tryreleaselog.com if you ever want to keep your users in the loop as you build.
Good luck on Product Hunt tomorrow. And yes — hold me to that tester offer.
When you come up for air: justonestep.app
To get the best experience, add it to your home screen:
iPhone: Open in Safari → tap the share icon → "Add to Home Screen"
Android: Open in Chrome → tap the three dots menu → "Add to Home Screen"
Just added it to my home screen Good luck with Just One Step, the home screen install mechanic is smart, that's where habits actually live.
See you on the other side of tomorrow. Will report back with honest feedback after the dust settles.
This is probably the least glamorous distribution strategy, but it compounds if you treat it like relationship building instead of drive-by posting. The hard part is staying useful when there's no immediate CTA or clean attribution, so I'd still track which communities and conversations turn into real calls, signups, or referrals.
Hey! I just launched on product hunt, if you have the time to check it out that would be really appreciated https://www.producthunt.com/products/releaselog?launch=releaselog
The attribution problem is real and it's the reason most people abandon this approach before it compounds, you can't point to a spreadsheet and say "this comment caused this signup." The way I'm thinking about it is leading indicators rather than direct attribution. Which conversations generated a follow-up question. Which founders remembered my name in a later thread. Which people I've had three or more real exchanges with. Those are the ones most likely to show up on May 13th and the ones most likely to refer someone eventually. Clean attribution would be nice but waiting for it means missing the window. What are you building?
Building a distribution engine through consistent community engagement is essentially debugging your market-fit one conversation at a time. This approach prioritizes long-term trust over the high-churn risks of cold advertising, ensuring that your first users are those who already recognize your value. Your strategy transforms every helpful comment into a warm touchpoint that builds a more resilient foundation than any paid campaign could provide.
What specific topic or struggle has sparked the most meaningful connection with another founder during your daily threads?
The conversations that go deepest are almost always about the gap between building and telling. Founders who are shipping constantly but whose users have no idea what changed that thread runs through almost every meaningful exchange I've had this week. The Max/Flowly conversation about the cost of a missed update becoming concrete only after someone churns. The Dylan/Flashlog conversation about silent failures vs visible ones. Different products, same underlying problem. The struggle that connects most is the one nobody talks about publicly because zero customers doesn't feel like a story worth telling yet. Turns out it's the story people most want to read.
I completely agree with you. We all want to succeed, but deep down, we're even more eager to learn about the failures that pave the way to that success. It's so important to prepare for potential pitfalls in stages we haven't reached yet, or before we even take that path.
It’s been a very similar story for our team. Before we built and launched our product, I never thought we’d be openly talking about our failures. But after actually stumbling and sharing those missteps with others, it completely shifted our mindset. By simply opening up and empathizing with one another in everyday conversations, we've been able to build the most meaningful connections with other teams.
Just like the meaningful connection you and I are building right now.
Exactly the shift from hiding failures to sharing them openly is the one that changes everything not just for distribution but for how you think about the work itself. The meaningful connections aren't a side effect of that honesty, they're the direct result of it. Nobody connects over polished success stories. They connect over the messy middle that everyone's actually living. Glad this one landed that way, and excited to continue to follow each others journey.
I’d love to stay tuned to your progress and see where your journey takes you. I realized I’ve replied to your posts quite often by chance, and I’ve really enjoyed our interactions you seem like a wonderful person. Thanks a lot!
Same here it's been one of the more genuine back and forth exchanges I've had on IH and I don't think it was by chance. People who are thinking carefully about the same problems tend to find each other. Looking forward to watching Bunzee grow. See you around.
super relatable.
"Not posting about my product constantly. Not dropping links in every comment. Not treating every conversation as a sales opportunity.Just showing up. Reading what the founders are struggling with. Leaving comments that add something real to the conversation. Asking genuine questions. Answering the ones I actually know something about."
when i first started marketing my product, i was dropping links left right and center. but i am slowly realising that it won't work. this isn't a short game by any means. it's a very long game. and for that you need to be genuinely helpful rather than pretending to be.
good luck for your journey :)
Hey! I just launched on product hunt, if you have the time to check it out that would be really appreciated https://www.producthunt.com/products/releaselog?launch=releaselog
upvoted it :)
Thank you so much, really appreciate it
The link dropping phase feels almost inevitable, like you have to go through it to understand why it doesn’t work. You can read advice about being genuine all day but it only lands when you’ve actually watched a conversation die the moment you dropped a URL into it.
The long game framing is the right one. Harder to measure, harder to stay patient with, but it’s the only one that actually builds something.
What are you building?
yes 100 % it’s one of those things where advice doesn’t stick until you’ve seen a conversation die in real time.
i’m building a small mac app around file/screenshot organisation. does a few things
a) searches your mac locally using images/files (like google image search for files on your machine)
b) auto-organises screenshots into folders and remembers where they came from (app / url)
The screenshot organisation problem is one of those things that sounds small until you've spent ten minutes hunting for a file you know exists somewhere. The "remembers where it came from" piece is the most interesting, provenance is the thing every file system ignores. Have you had any luck finding users?
yeah, got some inital traction, it's currently being used in 12+ countries, got some traffic from reddit.
but my biggest beef at the moment is figuring out how to make user acquisition repeatable (and ofc, more paying users).
it's just that organic marketing, creating content takes a lot of effort. figuring out how to make it scalable in a way that i don't burn out.
Nice! That shows the demand is there at the very least. The burnout risk with content is very real too, I think over time as you become a known brand and users start referring new users is really when it becomes non manual