What are your biggest (marketing) challenges as an Indie Hacker?
First up - this post is research for my own project: I'm a user experience and go-to-market strategist looking for ways that I can help small businesses and IndieHackers.
I'd love to hear what the IH community view as your biggest challenges - particularly when it comes to marketing, customer experience, building engagement, user feedback, etc.
Is it finding product-market fit, building an audience, finding the right users etc.? It would be great to start a discussion here and get a sense whether other IHs feel the same.
Let me know in the comments - my plan is to start by writing article in response to the biggest topics, and potentially host online workshop sessions and other activities depending on the level of interest.
Trending on Indie Hackers
posting things and no interaction
There you go 😄.
Finding the time to dedicate to writing and designing
Traffic without big budgets.
I'd say as a first time founder, knowing where to start. I ask myself questions like "Do I send cold emails? Or do I look for other options?" stuff like that.
I saw some people here is writing blogs or articles and it would be perfect time to share my now free tool, creativeblogtopic.com . This tool is an automated seo tool specific to find the best blog titles and keywords to use for your specific niche and target customer.
It is still in testing and I am currently building a better version of the tool. Let me know what you guys think
At the beginning you have to do "things that dont scale", its what everyone preaches.
If you have to cold DM and cold email to get your first customers then do it. Once you have a few customers, you will know if you have product market fit. Ask your users questions and engage as much as you can. If you have PMF then you can start implementing things that scale like ads, influencer marketing, etc.
For me the cold start problem is the hardest, so outside of the things I mentioned above, what other specific tactics can we use to get our first customers?
I would say the biggest challenge is finding the right clients or audience and getting them to interact.
Finding earlyvangelist and validating product market fit
Find the right idea to move forward with
Finding the right audience that will obtain your first paying users, the time it takes to engage on socials with your hopefully target audience and then hoping that the time you’re spending is in the right areas!
Yeah I agree, all this is pretty tedious work imo. I'd rather focus on building, but obviously without marketing no one's gonna know about your product. You should check out my product (from my profile) MyTargetUsers
I agree with you. It's very difficult to get the right audience that will eventually get to the first paying users. And yes, spending time on social media, if its even worth it. Have usually seen just a fair rise of similar products instead of getting users.
My struggle is I'm just lazy to do any kind of marketing.
I know some seo stuff. But doing the other stuff like building audience on social media, cold outreach etc. It might work or might not but haha I'm just so lazy to do this. I just wanna build things since I'm a developer.
Hope I can overcome this lazyness somehow.
Not knowing who to listen to, where to learn, and how to start. I think the biggest challenge is the mindset that believes that as long as your product is good enough, you will have customers. Oops, not really.
I'd say finding the "right audience" is the biggest challenge.
Yup I hate this part lol I'd rather focus on building. You should check out my product MyTargetUsers (link in my profile)
For me, it's figuring out how to attirbute your time best. Which marketing/distribution channels should you test and in what depth.
I was really struggling in the beginning with this question and a framework like the bulls eye framework by Gabriel Weinberg helped me a lot.
Find the best channel to reach your audience. That's it. ARPU over CACs + COCs