What’s the Best Way for Indie Hackers to Get Their Products Discovered After Launch?

The channels that consistently work: niche communities before broad platforms, SEO content answering specific problems your product solves, and targeted personal outreach. The key insight is "discovered" happens faster when you show up in conversations where the problem already exists, rather than announcing in spaces where nobody is actively searching for solutions. What's your product?

I think the biggest challenge is finding the right channel rather than simply finding more channels. I’m currently launching my own SaaS, and I’m realizing that a small number of genuine conversations can be much more valuable than a big launch spike. I also really like the point about tracking what happens after the initial click — that’s where the real signal is.

Not an answer, a data point on the paid option, because I looked into it this week and the numbers surprised me.

Google's App campaigns, the ones that buy app installs, are fully automated. You cannot choose keywords. Google's own documentation says to set a daily budget of at least 50 times your target cost per install. At a $3 target that is $150 a day, plus 7 to 14 days before the numbers stabilize. Roughly $1,000 to $2,000 for one readable test.

Below that threshold the algorithm never exits its learning phase and spends more or less at random. Which means buying Android installs is simply closed to anyone bootstrapping, no matter how good the creative is.

Apple Search Ads is the opposite: you pick the keywords yourself, it works at $5 a day, and it reports which word produced which install. For a small budget it is the only paid install channel I found that isn't a guaranteed waste.

Neither is cheap per user. Mine works out to roughly $8-12 per signup, which is far worse than any free channel. But at least the second one is measurable at a budget a bootstrapper actually has.

The thing that surprised me when I actually went and checked: most of the
"submit here after launch" directory lists are stale in ways that matter.

I took a popular list of 5 recommended launch sites and pulled each one myself
last week. Two domains were dead and parked. One had gone fully paid, and even
the paid listing linked out as rel="noopener nofollow" through a 301 redirect.
One was rel="ugc nofollow". Exactly one of the five gave a real dofollow link.
Nobody goes back and updates those lists when a site dies or quietly switches
to nofollow.

The one that surprised me the other way was just writing on Dev.to. New posts
get noindex+nofollow for a few days, which reads like bad news until you notice
it's a cooldown and not permanent — a post from a few days earlier on the same
account had neither. After it lifts, links in the body are plain
rel="noopener noreferrer". That's a better link than 16 of the 19 directories
I checked, and I was writing the posts anyway.

None of which is discovery, to be clear. My own search console is 188
impressions and 5 clicks over six days, so I'm in no position to tell anyone
what works. But if you're about to spend a weekend submitting to 20
directories, it costs one curl to check the rel attribute on a listing that's
already live there. Doing that took an afternoon and killed most of my list.

I've seen the same thing with people I know who work exactly this way right now - not a one-off announcement post banking on a spike, but genuine participation in threads where the question is already real. Too early to talk about retention/referral, but the reaction to a comment that's actually on point in a live discussion is noticeably different from a link, or a generic AI-generated comment.

Curious what the actual discovery mechanism is here beyond the free listing — is it algorithmic surfacing based on category/tags, a curated "editor's pick" rotation, search, or mostly relying on people browsing the full directory? That's usually the difference between a launch board people visit once during their own submission and one people come back to when they're actually shopping for a tool. What's driving traffic to the browse pages themselves right now?

To get first customers after launch, don’t optimize for broad discovery yet. Pick one niche, list 20 people who already feel the problem, and send each a short note referencing their context plus a 10-minute question. Offer a manual pilot to 3; turn objections into the next page or product change. A practical prompt/workflow starter: https://promptworks-storefront.vercel.app

The hard part isn't the launch spike - it's measuring which channels keep users returning. Launch lists give 1000s on day 1 but 0 retention. A 50-person indie forum where 8 of them stick around and refer friends is worth 10x more. Measure post-launch: which discovery channel has the highest return rate and referral rate at Day 7, Day 30? That determines where to focus next. Most teams kill the channel that actually compounds.

Launch lists give a spike, but it fades in days. The compounding channel is showing up in threads where people are actively looking — answer their question, earn the click. Did this for our Chrome extension: first 10 users came from one reply in a live Threads discussion, not from launch sites.