Indie Hacker Diaries #18: The Anti-Launch Strategy

I’ll kick this one off by letting you know that earlier this week, I shipped Parrot. It’s live. You can go sign up now with your Github account.

I’d appreciate it if you signed up for a subscription or snagged some pay-as-you-go tokens and took it for a spin (to sweeten the deal, use the code IHD1825 to take 25% off your first month from now until September 27th).

If you have feedback on how it can improve or features you’d like to see, just hit reply on this email (if you’re reading on the website or listening to the podcast, send me an email: ryan@codewithparrot.com).

“Wait, this is how you’re launching Parrot?!”

Yep. And that’s what this week’s letter is about.

Since I started out on my own in 2011, I’ve had the opportunity to launch several projects. Early on, like most people, I thought about “launch day” as being it.

Either I grabbed people’s attention on day one, or I didn’t.

But, as I’ve gained experience, I realized—really, accepted—that even though you as a creator think your thing is important and cool, most people are busy. Even worse, as social media has gotten its tendrils into all facets of our lives, people are overwhelmed.

I remember when sites like Product Hunt had a few posts per week. Now? Every single day there’s something new. Everybody is building and launching something.

On Twitter/X, it’s the same thing. New. New. New.

Even if somebody likes you and your work, it’s become extremely difficult to get attention for your thing out of the gate. Not for lack of care or interest, but because “the feed” is saturated. There’s just too much stuff.

But, all hope is not lost. If you’re an indie hacker soloist type like myself, while hype is difficult to build up before you launch (after all, you do have to focus primarily on building the thing), after you launch is a different story.

Once your thing exists, it’s much easier to get people to check it out, take it for a test drive, and most obviously: become a customer.

The thing that’s easy to forget when you’re in the building phase is that getting your v1 built and shipped is only the first step. After that, you have to improve the product, continue to market it, support customers, etc.

If you want your thing to succeed, that is.

If you’re selling software, it’s better to think in terms of gradual growth. If your bubble is going to be burst because you didn’t get a flood of people on day one, you’re really going to struggle long-term.

Arguably, too, you don’t want a flood of people on day one.

In addition to being tired from having built and rolled the thing out, now you want to deal with bug fixes, servers getting overwhelmed, handling customer support emails, and responding to people online?

I can’t think of anything more stressful.

In fact, a few hours after launch, I noticed some bonehead bugs that needed to be fixed in Parrot. Stuff that, in the flurry to ship the app, I missed.

Had I been dealing with a flood of people on top of getting that fixed?

Oh boy.

Being the center of attention may sound nice, but that level of stress is a great way to burn yourself out and prevent yourself from persevering long-term.

And unless your goal is to be a flash-in-the-pan star, you really don’t want that to happen. Instead, you want to find yourself in a situation where you develop interest over time, grow your revenue at a steady pace, and cultivate a desire to keep going.

So, how do you actually do that?

First, think of your release as a gradual roll out. Instead of queueing up everything for day one, think about your launch like how waspy, 30-something Millennial women have turned their birth day into their birth week or (God help us) birth month.

For example, I “launched” Parrot on Wednesday, but all I did was send out a few tweets and post on LinkedIn. That was it.

Next, I focused attention on one of my longer term strategies around SEO. Because Parrot is great at generating code, I decided that using AI to do what I’ve done since the early days—teach people through tutorials—was a great way to drive traffic. Using Parrot to help me get that done at scale is a way to demonstrate how well the product works while also driving traffic.

Beyond this, I’m also thinking about the features I jotted down notes on while getting v1 ready. After a little breather, I’ll be experimenting with those ideas and seeing what it will take to roll them out.

At some point, I’ll take a swing at the typical posting to Product Hunt, Hacker News, Reddit, etc. I’ll space these out so the traffic is manageable (and I don’t annoy people having to see me “spamming” all over the place).

Another focus will be on ads. During development, I had a funny idea for an ad campaign involving a sassy parrot character. A little teaser to set the tone:

Beyond this, I’m also going to start doing direct outreach. I’ve accepted that in order to kickstart things, I’ll need to “put in the hours” doing promotion. There’s no way around it if I...excuse the pun...want Parrot to take flight.

Hopefully what I’m getting at is clear.

The approach I’m advocating for isn’t a one-and-done attack plan, but rather, multiple strategies working together over the long-term toward a common goal.

Right now, my focus is on getting people to sign up for Parrot and start using it. To do that, I need to build a steady flow of traffic—anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand people per day over the next three months.

From that traffic, my goal is to grow revenue from $0 today to a stable income that will allow me to focus more on Parrot and other products.

While it’s great to be able to launch something new to an existing audience, I’ve learned from experience: it’s very difficult. Not impossible, but definitely difficult (and something that requires a massive investment of time and effort up front which may or may not be something you’re willing/able to do).

Instead, as you build, I’d encourage you to think about your own long-term strategies beyond just posting online about your idea.

• What ways can you drive traffic to your app/site that you can develop over time?
• What sort of things would be a good compliment to your product (e.g., “mini” tools that you could host on the marketing site for your app that will drive SEO traffic)?
• Is there a short e-book you could write pertaining to your product’s focus area that might help people to warm up to your idea?

Post up at a coffee shop for a few hours with a notebook and really think. I can guarantee there’s stuff that hasn’t come to mind yet that will be a real “aha” for your own product.

That’s it for today.

I’m going to leave you with something that I just thought about while I was writing this that I saw way back in the Ye Old Times of 2013. Rand Fishkin of SEOMoz did a great video on “Building a Marketing Flywheel” that I think really encapsulates what I’m getting at.

Give it a watch:

Ryan