Compare/Strategy

The Indie Hacker's GTM Playbook

Ship products. Get customers. Stay indie.

You know the indie hacker playbook: find a problem, build a solution, launch, iterate. You've read the success stories on Indie Hackers, r/SaaS, and Twitter. But there's a step most success stories skip over: the part where you actually get paying customers.

It's not the launch that's hard. It's the Tuesday after the launch.

The indie hacker distribution problem

Here's the typical indie hacker GTM "strategy":

  • Post on Indie Hackers, Product Hunt, Hacker News
  • Build in public on Twitter
  • Write SEO content
  • Wait for word of mouth

These can work — eventually. But they're slow, unpredictable, and they don't compound until you hit a critical mass that most indie products never reach.

Meanwhile, direct outreach works on day one. You don't need an audience. You don't need domain authority. You just need to find 50 people who have the problem your product solves and start a conversation.

Why indie hackers avoid outbound

Be honest — which of these is you?

  • "I'm a builder, not a salesperson"
  • "Outbound feels spammy"
  • "I don't know who to contact"
  • "I'd rather build another feature"
  • "I tried cold email once and it didn't work"

All valid feelings. All solvable problems.

The Selda approach for indie hackers

Selda was built by founders who had the exact same resistance to sales. Here's how it works:

  1. Paste your product URL. Selda reads your site and understands your product better than most landing page copy does.
  2. Get audience segments. Not "SMBs" — specific niches like "Shopify stores doing $500K-$2M that need inventory analytics."
  3. Selda finds and researches prospects. Real companies, real decision-makers, real context from their websites.
  4. Personalized outreach across channels. Email, LinkedIn, Reddit, Discord — wherever your niche hangs out. Every message is individually crafted.
  5. Replies handled, meetings booked. You show up and have conversations with people who are interested.
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The indie hacker math

Most micro SaaS products need 20-50 customers to be life-changing. Not 10,000. Not 1,000. Just 20-50 people paying $50-200/month.

If you have 30 real conversations with qualified prospects, you'll likely close 3-5 of them. That's your first $500/month. Run it again next month. Now you have $1,000/month. That's not a side project — that's a business.

Stop building. Start selling.

Your product is probably good enough. The thing it's missing isn't a feature — it's customers. Every hour you spend coding instead of selling is an hour spent guessing instead of learning.

Paste your URL. Start conversations. Learn what your market actually wants. That's the real indie hacker playbook.

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