indie.md

Use when planning a launch, picking distribution channels, or answering "where do my first users come from?" Synthesizes seven distribution lessons plus two related mindset lessons from indie founders: distribution beats product, ride existing platform waves, stack authority backlinks from Blogger and Wikipedia and YouTube, publish to app stores for link juice, tell stories on Reddit instead of sales pitches, and when to prefer influencers over ads. Includes the "Twitter and ProductHunt are slow for unknown founders" warning so you stop waiting on channels that will not work for you yet. Do not use for retention, pricing, or paid-search bidding.

Use when the user is stuck on a project, over-polishing code that could already ship, avoiding the customer-finding work, defining "done" for launch, or debating whether to keep grinding on channels that are not producing. Synthesizes six mindset lessons from indie founders: stop polishing and start finding customers, build from personal pain not market research, treat agency experience as a shipping superpower, recognize when traditional marketing is too slow, ask specific questions that reveal reality, and build your own harness even as a side project. Do not use for technical debugging or pure architecture discussions.

Use before setting a price, writing a pricing page, choosing tiers, or answering "how much should I charge?" Synthesizes seven pricing lessons from indie founders: discover the enterprise budget, price on-prem for support reality, benchmark against cost of mistake, never discount, add premium tiers based on real asks, unlock hidden revenue with tiered pricing, and when to price for zero friction. Do not use for paid-acquisition bidding or unit-economics modeling.

Use when scoping a new product, choosing what to build next, or cutting v1 scope. Synthesizes nine product lessons from indie founders: build the simplest version first, remove all friction, start with a spreadsheet instead of a SaaS, treat manual curation as a moat, build from real client problems not speculation, check keyword demand before building features, set up analytics before scaling, record videos with your face in the corner, and build for a practice everyone agrees is right but nobody does. Do not use for architecture decisions, tech stack selection, or post-product-market-fit roadmapping.

Use before drafting a blog post, launching a landing page, or writing an SEO plan. Synthesizes fourteen SEO lessons from indie founders who have grown products to meaningful organic traffic without a marketing team: check keyword demand before writing, publish one article per day, write for "how to" intent, ship FAQ schema on every page, build an internal link graph, ride news cycles, and republish on Medium and dev.to with canonical links. Do not use for technical SEO audits, paid search, or Core Web Vitals tuning.