Hacker Playbooks / Hackers / Pieter Levels Make what you need, put it on the internet the same week, charge money, and stay small enough to keep shipping. Distribution is a daily habit, not a department.
The best marketing is a product that exists. Most people are still writing the deck.
Model Solo
Engine SEO + X
Stance Ship ugly Products
Nomad List City data for remote workers — started as his spreadsheet Remote OK Job board that ranks for the query it is named after PhotoAI / InteriorAI Rode the image-model wave with a paid outcome Across the five stages
How they actually operate. 01
The niche is a life he is already living. Digital nomads, remote jobs, AI portraits — each product is a public version of a private spreadsheet.
01 Start from a problem that already wastes your Tuesday.02 Ignore TAM until strangers pay. Demand is a receipt, not a slide.03 Name the product after the search query when you can (Remote OK).04 If you would not use v1, it is not a niche. It is a costume.02
Architecture is a delay. PHP, a VPS, a price, a URL. If it makes money, it gets to live. If it does not, it gets to die without a post-mortem theater.
01 Cap the first build in days, not quarters.02 Charge on the first honest version.03 Keep the stack boring so shipping stays cheap.04 Parallel small products instead of one cathedral.03
There is almost no 'coming soon'. The build is the pre-launch. Followers watch the sausage get made and show up when the URL does.
01 Tweet progress as if the product already has users.02 SEO pages go live early so Google can crawl while you still look amateur.03 No fake waitlist numbers. A live checkout is the waitlist.04 Repeat the origin story — new people did not see last month.04
A Twitter thread, a Show HN, a working demo. Launch week is a peak in a graph that already existed, not a cold open.
01 Lead with the artifact and the price.02 Reply to every serious human for 48 hours.03 Do not bet the year on a Product Hunt lottery.04 If it flops, post the flop. The next product uses the same account.05
Compounding is SEO pages, a family of products, and staying solo so decisions stay fast. Ads only when the unit economics are obvious.
01 Let directories and city pages print traffic while you sleep.02 Cross-promote sibling products to the same human.03 Publish revenue. The dashboard is marketing.04 Kill or park products without a committee.