Indie Hackers is a community where founders post products, revenue, milestones and questions in public. People use it to find early users who like seeing how a small company is built. It is not a directory that ranks you for your category keyword, and a single post is not a launch strategy.
What is worth posting
- A milestone with the number and what you did to get it. “We launched” with no detail gets skipped.
- A specific problem you hit: pricing, the first ten users, a failed channel.
- A product link after the story, not instead of the story.
Read the current posting guidelines on Indie Hackers before you drop a link. Communities punish a drive-by pitch. Spend a week replying to other people first if you have never posted there.
What to pair it with
Indie Hackers traffic spikes and leaves. A listing and a page you own stay. Put the product on a directory your buyers can find later, and write one guide that answers a query those buyers type. The first 100 users guide is the wider plan. Launch on FoundrList if you want a product page that is still there next month.
What Indie Hackers is
Indie Hackers is a public community where founders post products, revenue, milestones, and questions. The brand search is large because people are looking for the site itself. A page on another domain will not outrank indiehackers.com for the name alone. What you can rank for, and what this page is for, is how a SaaS founder uses the community without betting the launch on a single post.
Posts that get read
- A milestone with the number and the steps that produced it.
- A specific failure: a channel that did not work, a price that did.
- The product link after the story, not instead of it.
- Replies to other people before you arrive with a pitch, if you have never posted there.
Read the current guidelines on Indie Hackers before you drop a link. A drive-by pitch gets ignored. Traffic from a good post spikes and leaves. A listing and a page you own stay. Put the product on a directory and write one article that answers a query those buyers type. The first 100 users guide is the wider plan. Launch on FoundrList if you want a product page that is still there next month.
What not to copy from the community
Do not invent revenue. Public numbers get checked, and a fake milestone is worse than silence. Do not treat a post as an SEO asset on your domain. Their pages rank on their domain. Your site still needs its own pages if you want to rank for the problem you solve. Pair Indie Hackers with BetaList if you are pre-launch, and with a directory if you need the URL to last.
Questions people ask
Is Indie Hackers only for bootstrapped companies?
The culture favors founders building in public, including small SaaS products. You do not need to be profitable to read or to post something useful.
Will an Indie Hackers post rank on Google?
Their pages might. Your post is on their domain. Your own site still needs its own pages if you want to rank for the problem you solve.
Should I share revenue?
Only if it is true and you are comfortable with it being public. Invented numbers get you called out and they are useless to the next founder.
Will an Indie Hackers post rank my startup on Google?
It can rank on Indie Hackers. It does not rank your domain. You still need pages on your site for the queries you want to own.
Is Indie Hackers only for bootstrapped companies?
The culture favors founders building in public, including small SaaS products. You do not need to be profitable to read or to post something useful.
