MarketYourIndie
Everything an indie dev needs to market and launch a game
A friend of mine was finishing his first game and asked if I could help with the marketing side. I said yes without really knowing what I was signing up for.
The job turned out to be mostly spreadsheet archaeology. Open Steamworks, download a bunch of CSV files, paste data into a sheet, and try to work out whether the week went well. So I started by making a simple tool to read Steamworks data. Over time it grew as we needed more tools or tried to tackle repetitive tasks. Ultimately it became what is now MarketYourIndie.
What it grew into is a dashboard for the business side of a launch: marketing, wishlist and traffic intelligence, revenue projections that update each week, pricing and discount planning against comparable games, competitor tracking, an outreach CRM with Steam key distribution, finance and legal work document generation and a contract analyzer for when a publisher finally emails you. Every one of those exists because Juani hit the problem and there was nowhere to send him.
For people using MarketYourIndie, spreadsheet work was the first thing I wanted to kill. You paste in a Steamworks API key once and the data comes to you instead, pulled every night and backfilled so you have the all time history.
But there was still an issue remaining: All of this is still just data, and even if you research on what to do with your game, you'll just find mostly general advise, based off general numbers, together with some success and failure cases.
What should you do in your particular case? Googling "How should I price my game?" gets you a checklist anyone could have written. Ask an AI and it has no idea who you are or where you're at. Much less that other games in your subgenre cluster at $19.99, or that your visit-to-wishlist rate is running under what similar pages pull. How would it. It doesn't know that the advice is generic because the numbers that would make it specific are locked in a dashboard nothing else can read.
So I built the missing piece. MarketYourIndie runs an MCP server over your own data. You connect it once from settings, and from then on Claude (or any MCP client) reads your live game data directly: wishlists, traffic, projections, pricing, discounts, competitors, content plan and CRM.
Which means you can ask whether your wishlists actually reacted to a viral post or whether that was the baseline trend continuing. The one I keep going back to is asking for a situation report as if it were my marketing lead. Same conversation you were already having with an AI, except grounded in your real numbers instead of averages from a 2019 blog.
You can have a free trial in marketyourindie.com/register :)
I built it because I watched a friend spend two years making a genuinely good game and have no idea how to launch it.
His game is called Iris Dissolution. It's a retro survival horror, the kind of project that takes everything you have. Juani built it alone, learning as he went, putting real craft into every system and every scene.
When it came time to think about launching, the same thing happened that happens to every indie dev: the game was ready, but the business side wasn't. No system for tracking wishlists, no framework for press outreach, no understanding of what Steam Next Fest actually required, no way to know if the revenue projections made any sense.
So I started building tools to help him. A tracker here, a spreadsheet there. Then I realized the problem wasn't specific to Juani. It was structural. The indie dev ecosystem has world-class tools for making games and almost nothing for launching them as businesses.
Every studio has a marketing team, every publisher has a financial model, every legal department has templates for contracts and EULAs. The solodev has none of that. They have a game, a Steam page, and a lot of hope.
MarketYourIndie exists to close that gap. Not as a consulting service or a course or a newsletter, but as a system. Something you can open on Monday morning, load your Steamworks data into, and walk away knowing exactly where you stand and what to do next.
Iris Dissolution is still in development. This platform exists so that when it launches (and it will) Juani has the same clarity that a funded studio would have, and so does every other dev building something worth playing.
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The timing worries me more than the product: indie devs are broke for the two years they need this and flush for about a month after launch, which is the worst possible shape for a subscription. I would price against the launch event itself, or sell to devs who already have wishlist momentum, since a wishlist count is the closest thing to proof they will actually ship and spend. Also, Iris Dissolution launching well is worth more than any feature you could build this quarter, because "I took this game from zero to X wishlists" is the only credential this audience trusts.
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You're describing the exact tension I keep running into. The cash-flow shape of an indie dev is inverted from what a subscription wants: broke while building, flush for a month post-launch, then back to broke.
Two things I'm doing about it. First, the qualifying signal is wishlists, same as you say. Someone with real wishlist momentum has already proven they'll ship and that they have a launch worth managing. Someone at 40 wishlists 18 months out doesn't need a dashboard, they need to make a better game. So the top of funnel is deliberately aimed at devs who are 3 to 9 months from launch, not day-one hobbyists.
You're right about Iris Dissolution being worth more than any feature. I know it and it's uncomfortable, because I control the roadmap and I don't control the launch. Best I can do is make sure the tool is actually driving the decisions there, so whatever the number ends up being, it's a real case study and not a logo.
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good games
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The bit about building it from helping one friend launch Iris Dissolution instead of starting with a business idea made this feel a lot more grounded. You can tell the tools came from actual problems not guesses.
It also feels like this could be getting a lot more organic traffic than it probably is right now. Since you're still shaping it around real indie dev workflows that would be a pretty valuable place to be.
Have you had that same thought yourself?
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Yes, and it's the one thing I've actively bet on.
The reasoning was: this audience asks very specific questions ("what should I price my game at", "how many wishlists do I need", "do I need an LLC to publish on Steam") and the existing answers are a decade of scattered forum posts and blog articles with no data behind them. That's a gap you can fill with actual numbers instead of opinions, which is also the only kind of content I can write honestly, because I have the data pipeline anyway.
So I built a guides section that runs off the same comparables data the product uses, with sources cited inline. It doubles as proof the tool knows what it's talking about.
What would you recommend specifically to improve organic traffic?
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I like the direction you're taking. From what you've shared, I can already see a few opportunities around search intent, topical coverage, and how some of those data-backed guides could bring in much more qualified traffic over time.
Rather than dumping a long comment here, feel free to reach out at mumar [at] growwithmumar [dot] online and I'd be happy to share a few ideas. No pitch—just some observations after reading your post and reply.
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The jump from helping Juani manually to deciding the problem was structural is the interesting part.
What did you see beyond his situation that convinced you indie devs need a system for the business side, rather than better guidance at a few specific launch moments?
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What convinced me was that every single thing I did for Juani manually was a thing he could have done himself if he'd known it existed, and none of it was hard. It wasn't a skill gap, it was a "nobody told me this was part of the job" gap.
Concretely: he had no idea what price to set, so he was going to guess based on two games he liked.
Those aren't launch-moment problems. They're the same problems every indie dev hits, in the same order, with the same wrong defaults, and the guidance for them is scattered across forum posts, Steamworks docs, and lawyer blogs. That repetition is what made it feel structural rather than personal. Better guidance at a few key moments helps someone who already knows the questions to ask. The devs I'm building for don't know the questions exist, so the tool has to surface them.
Whether that justifies a system versus a very good checklist is a fair challenge, and honestly the checklist version is what I'd have shipped if the data side hadn't turned out to be the hard part.
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Appreciate you taking the time to unpack that.
I'd like to continue this conversation outside the thread. What's the best email to reach you on?
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