Library · 30 tactics
Tactics.
Concrete moves from the indie and growth canon — not slogans. Filter by stage and channel, then open a card for the steps.
Stage
Channel
Niche · Think
Scratch your own itch
Build the tool you already pay for, hack together, or complain about. The niche is you plus people like you — which is the only audience you can describe without a survey.
Pieter Levels, countless indie makers
Niche · Before
Talk to 100 buyers
Before writing code, speak to a hundred people who have the problem. Count how many will pay — not how many say it is 'interesting'.
Noah Kagan
Niche · Before · After
Audience first, product second
Build a public point of view until a crowd gathers. Then sell the thing they already ask you for. The product is a consequence of attention, not the other way around.
Arvid Kahl, Justin Welsh, Daniel Vassallo
Niche · After
Own a keyword
Find a search phrase people already type with money in their pocket, then become the canonical page for it. Niche = the query you can rank for and convert.
Patrick McKenzie (patio11), Pieter Levels
Niche · Think
Build for a community you already belong to
Do not pick a vertical from a listicle. Pick the group where you already have Slack invites, in-jokes, and trust. Embedded beats adjacent.
Arvid Kahl — The Embedded Entrepreneur
Niche · Think · Launch
Surf a platform wave
When a new capability (AI image models, a social network, a regulation) creates a job that did not exist last year, wrap it in a paid product before the wave gets crowded.
Danny Postma, Pieter Levels, Greg Isenberg
Niche · Think · After
Sell picks and shovels
Instead of competing in the gold rush, sell the boilerplate, templates, and distribution tools the rush needs. Your customer is the maker, not the maker's customer.
Marc Lou, Indie Hackers tooling wave
Think · Launch
Ship the ugly MVP
If it looks like a weekend project and charges money, it is done. Design, refactors, and 'real architecture' wait until strangers pay.
Pieter Levels, Marc Lou
Think · Before
Price before you build
Write the price, the promise, and the refund rule on a page. Collect payment or a strong intent. Then decide whether the build is worth it.
patio11, Noah Kagan, Rob Walling
Before · Launch · After
Build in public
Post the metrics, the bugs, the stack, and the revenue. The feed is the funnel. Transparency is not branding — it is a daily distribution habit.
Pieter Levels, Marc Lou, the Indie Hackers era
Before
Waitlist as a conversation
A waitlist is only useful if it segments intent and starts a dialogue. Vanity counts of 10,000 emails with no replies are a costume.
Superhuman-style queues, indie waitlists done right
Before · Launch
One-promise landing page
A landing page is a single sentence with proof. Headline = outcome. Subhead = for whom. CTA = the next five minutes. Everything else is decoration.
Classic conversion craft, used by every paid-acquisition hacker
Before · After
Email from day zero
Capture the address before you capture the follow. Social is a billboard. Email is an asset you can still reach in five years.
Rob Walling, Noah Kagan, almost every durable indie
Launch
Launch on X, not just Product Hunt
For indie tools, a clear Twitter thread with a live URL often outperforms a PH lottery. Your existing audience is the launch channel. PH is extra oxygen, not the plan.
Pieter Levels, Marc Lou
Launch
Show HN / Reddit where the nerds already are
Put the work in front of a skeptical, technical room. Hacker News, specialized subreddits, and niche Discords punish hype and reward a working demo.
Patio11, Levels, the classic maker circuit
Launch
Product Hunt as a spike, not a strategy
Use Product Hunt when you already have hunters, a demo GIF, and a reason to be first that day. Treat the traffic as a test, not a business model.
The PH-native maker wave, Danny Postma, Marc Lou
Launch · After
Paid ads on a sharp outcome
When the promise is visual and the unit economics are obvious, buy the click. Creative is the product screenshot. Landing page is the checkout.
Danny Postma, later Levels on PhotoAI
After · Think
The must-have survey
Ask users: how disappointed would you be if this disappeared? If 40%+ say 'very disappointed', you have a must-have. If not, you have a nice-to-have — stop scaling.
Sean Ellis
After
Pick a North Star and ignore vanity
Choose one metric that means a user got the value (a file shared, a job applied, a photo downloaded). Report that. Follower counts are not a company.
Sean Ellis, Brian Balfour, Andrew Chen
After · Think
Design a growth loop, not a funnel
Funnels leak. Loops refill: output of usage becomes input of acquisition (referrals, user-generated SEO, network invites). Build the loop into the product.
Andrew Chen — The Cold Start Problem
After · Launch
Two-sided referral
Reward both the inviter and the invited with something that increases product value, not a coupon for a thing they do not want.
Dropbox (Drew Houston / growth team), PayPal's earlier cash test
Launch · Before
Do the unscalable channel first
Manually put the product where the customers already transact — even if you have to do it by hand, one listing at a time.
Airbnb's Craigslist play, Paul Graham's essay, every early marketplace
After · Launch
The artifact that carries your name
Every output of the product should be a tiny billboard: a footer, a watermark, a 'made with', a public page. Usage becomes acquisition.
Hotmail's 'PS I love you' footer — the original growth hack
Before · After · Niche
A personal content system
Turn one worldview into a repeating content machine: a hook, a story, a lesson, a CTA. The person is the media company. The product is the store.
Justin Welsh
Think · After
Small bets, not a single swing
Ship many inexpensive offers. Let the market pick. Kill quietly. Double down only when strangers keep paying without a launch ritual.
Daniel Vassallo
Think · After
Start small, stay small
Refuse venture theater. Build a profitable, boring product, keep the team tiny, and let compounding do the drama. Marketing is email, SEO, and being around for ten years.
Rob Walling
Before · After
Teach the craft, sell the tool
Give away the method in public. The product is the faster way to do what you just taught. Students become customers because you already changed how they work.
Adam Wathan / Tailwind adjacent, patio11 essays, maker-educators
After
A family of products that advertise each other
Once you have one audience, the next product is a feature that escaped. Each launch mails the last product's users. CAC for product n is nearly zero.
Pieter Levels, Marc Lou
Niche · Before · After
Community, then product
Gather people around a scene. Listen for the software they still duct-tape. The community is the moat; the product is how you charge for a job the scene repeats.
Greg Isenberg, Indie Hackers itself, Small Bets
Before · Launch · Think
Sell the outcome, never the stack
Nobody buys React, a model, or a dashboard. They buy the bingo cards, the appointments, the headshots, the first customers. Copy is the product's true UI.
patio11 — 'don't call yourself a programmer'