What Actually Worked (and Didn’t) When I Tested 6 Content Distribution Channels as a Solo Founder

Over the last year I’ve been trying to answer a simple question:

If you’re a solo founder writing content, which distribution channels actually bring users?

Not impressions.
Not likes.
Actual readers who click through and sign up.

I tested a handful of channels in parallel while publishing the same type of technical / founder content on my own blog.

Here’s what I learned, channel by channel.

1. SEO (slow, but the highest quality users)

SEO is boring. It takes months. And at the beginning it feels completely broken.

But the people who come from search are different.

They arrive with intent.
They read longer.
They convert more often.

Two lessons here:

First, SEO only started working after I already had distribution elsewhere. Early backlinks and mentions mattered more than perfect on-page optimization.

Second, category choice mattered more than keywords. Writing about problems founders actually search for (“how to track experiments”, “how to distribute blog posts”) outperformed generic startup advice.

If you can wait 3–6 months, SEO is still the best long-term channel I’ve found.

2. Medium (surprisingly good, but easy to mess up)

I originally ignored Medium because I assumed it was saturated.

That was wrong.

When a post gets picked up by the recommendation engine, it can quietly send steady traffic for weeks.

The catch is workflow.

Manual cross-posting almost never sticks.
Most people forget after 2–3 posts.

And if you don’t handle canonical links correctly, you can accidentally hurt your own SEO.

Once I treated Medium as a pure distribution layer — not my main blog — it became one of the most consistent secondary channels I’ve used.

Best for: founders, engineers, creators writing long-form.

3. Indie Hackers (high signal, low volume)

Indie Hackers won’t give you spikes.

But it gives you something better:
the right audience.

Posts that worked here shared three traits:

• Specific lessons, not advice
• Numbers or concrete experiments
• Honest failures

Anything that sounded like a launch or a pitch died instantly.

The best performing posts for me weren’t about products.
They were about mistakes, channels that failed, or workflows that saved time.

Traffic volume is small, but conversion quality is very high.

4. Reddit (huge reach, fragile channel)

Reddit is still one of the highest-ceiling channels.

It’s also the easiest way to get banned.

Two things mattered more than anything else:

First, never lead with a link. Lead with an experience or a breakdown.

Second, subreddits behave completely differently. Some love case studies. Some hate founders. Some only allow comments.

When it works, it really works.
One good post can bring more traffic than months of SEO.

But it’s unstable.
I never treat Reddit as a core channel anymore — only as an opportunistic one.

5. Twitter / X (branding more than acquisition)

This surprised me.

I expected Twitter to drive users.

It mostly didn’t.

What it did do extremely well:

• Build relationships
• Attract collaborators
• Create long-term brand memory

Almost no one clicked links.

But many people later recognized my name, replied to posts, or reached out privately.

I now treat Twitter as a credibility layer, not a growth channel.

6. Newsletters (small list, highest ROI)

My smallest channel by far.

Also the highest converting.

Email subscribers:

• Open more
• Click more
• Convert more
• Come back more

The hardest part was getting people onto the list in the first place.

Once someone subscribes, email becomes the only channel I fully control.

If I had to start again, I’d invest in newsletter capture much earlier.

What Changed My Thinking About Growth

The biggest shift for me wasn’t choosing better channels.

It was realizing that distribution systems matter more than individual posts.

The channels that worked long-term shared two properties:

• Low friction to publish
• Automatic or repeatable distribution

Anything that depended on motivation died.

Anything that ran in the background compounded.

Final takeaway

If you’re early stage and writing content, my current ranking looks like this:

Best long-term:
SEO + Email

Best secondary amplifier:
Medium

Best high-signal community:
Indie Hackers

Best opportunistic spikes:
Reddit

Best branding layer:
Twitter / X

Curious what others here are seeing.

Which channels have actually brought you real users recently?