As a solo/indie maker, what are your go-to tools for building and growing your product?
Tools like:
• app builders
• emailing
• Sales/outreach
• analytics
• automation
• SEO/mktg
And why? (friendly prices/reliable support/easy to use)
Working on a little something, and need your input 😊
Thank you!!
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Edit: Thanks so much for all the replies! I listed all the recommandations, and realized it would benefit lots of other makers too.
So I decided to launch the Solo Maker Stack, a weekly digest with the most useful tools to build, and grow your product with the following criteria:
🤑 Friendly prices
⚒️ Easy to use (not bloated with too many features)
💬 Reliable support
Every tool you mentionned will be added for the newsletter! I'm launching the FIRST issue this week, and I'd love love your feedback! 🥳
Here it is: https://www.thesolomaker.com
For SEO: I like Ubersuggest. I love the simplicity of it. It's not bloated with a ton of other features that you don't need as a solo founder.
For email: ConvertKit. I run my newsletter on ConvertKit. I've tried them all. Ghost, Beehiiv, etc. and I like ConvertKit the most. It has the most robust features but it's still easy to use.
For outreach: I use Lemlist. I've used Mailshake and others in the past. Lemlist is a bit pricey but I like the features. I've also read it has the best deliverability compared to many others. Their warm up tool Lemwarm is a bit of a pain but once you get it working, it's helpful.
For analytics: I love Plausible.io. It's easy to install on your site and it's really easy to navigate. It only shows the most important metrics so you don't get bogged down filtering through like Google Analytics.
For editing: I use Descript. If you're doing video scripts, etc. you can just easily cut out words in the transcript and it'll auto edit the video too which is wild. I wrote an article on how my agency uses Descript if you'd like to check it out:
https://www.danmarzullo.com/10-tips-to-turn-a-podcast-episode-into-a-blog-post/
Super useful, thank you! It's funny because I use alternatives for each,
Thanks for your reply!!
Analytics: Plausible
Uptime/Monitoring: Uptimefunk
Emailing: Sendgrid
Project Management: Asana
Payment Processing: Paddle
I built my most recent project, https://www.trendingpositive.app/, entirely with the T3 stack. Using trpc feels better than even GraphQL. Development velocity is really really hard to beat with this stack
SEMRush for SEO
I'm curious, why Semrush and not ahrefs? I think Semrush is more expensive no?
I have a lifetime memebership to UberSuggest. I was a little expensive at first, but now it's free.
most of things I built my self when I needed it so here are somethings that will be useful for you guys.
If you guys looking to automate seo and trend research for business bloggings I would recommend you guys to use creativeblogtopic.com.
You just need to specify your what your business are and who you target customer are.
From that it will check the best keywords and topics based on google trends and suggest you the best blog title for your business.
It is still free for trail so I would suggest you guys to try it out.
Nice, that's actually very cool! I would love to add my site's link, and get a recommendation from that.
Also, when you get recos, I'd like to have more info on what the % means? Even more granular details on which keywords I'm targeting, their Keyword Difficulty, and their volume - I'd love that.
As someone who like to write but not doing seo and keyword research, I use https://creativeblogtopic.com/ to automate keyword and seo research for business blog.
I just need to think about what to write with the given topic
Talk-to-ChatGPT: Assistant/Mentor
Midjourney: Images
Canva: Design
Loom: Video Messaging
Notion/Asana: Project Management
Google Meet: Video Meetings
Systeme: Funnels
Prototype: Figma
Hi my name is RK Lokesh I'm from India.
I'm new to Indie hackers and this is going to be my first comment on this platform,
I came here with a goal of learning and sharing my own journey of building a one person solo business :)
I run a 1 person funnel agency which is a service based business however I've planned to turn it into a productise service (more on that maybe later on) currently all my tools are free only expense in my agency is probably internet.
Here are the tools I use
This is basically my entire lean agency :)
hope you find it helpful 😀
Quick reply as i’m on the move, but here are my mostly used tools for the use cases you presented:
Tools like:
• app builders: no-code builders are my go-to as i’m a marketing & creative, no coding for me. I prefer Webflow, Bubble, Framer & Wordpress.
• emailing: for newsletter only i use Beehiiv. For marketing campaigns and automation i’d opt for ActiveCampaigns. But honestly so many good solutions nowadays so depends your needs.
• Sales/outreach: heard a lot of good things about PostPilot, haven’t tried myself.
• analytics: google analytics, social media analytics depending on goal and channels.
• automation: email automations through ActiveCampaigns, other automations through Zapier.
• SEO/mktg: copywriting is 80% of the work in SEO, using plugins and chatgpt for optimization. For marketing there ain’t one specific channel, if you have any specific marketing related questions feel free to share in comments. Happy to help!
You mentionned you were in marketing/creative, curious to know, what are you building? :)
I use ChatGPT for everything, but in particular for building.
It does at least half of my coding. I just give it interview coding style questions and we iterate from there.
For all the other categories you listed it is also good at giving suggestions.
Since my product is mobile app, I rely on App Store optimization and spreading the word through Reddit groups.
There's a great tool called F5Bot which notifies you every time someone mentions some keyword on Reddit, could be helpful to see what are people writing about your competition which helps you can analyze their users pain points.
Yes! I've actually heard of F5Bot from Marko Saric, Plausible's co-founder, and I found it pretty cool too for social listening. It's free, and efficient. Great reco!
And did you use any other tools to build your mobile app?
I'm a solo builder. I have been using Webflow, Linked In, Product hunt, and direct emails. Also have been sharing my projects with friends and coworkers to help share out.
www.emailemu.com
A year ago I started to write on my blog which is about startups and some dumb but make-sense ideas I have. And I was just doing that for fun and I never thought I would make it monetize.
But Recently I've been getting a lot of requests for guest posts and collab.
It may have happened bc I used to post my ideas in subreddits.
Build: React, TypeScript, Go, GraphQL
Host: Zeabur for hosting everything, my frontend, backend and database services can be hosted together.
Email: Resend is really great!
Monitoring: Uptime Kuma
Thank you!!
I've used Sendgrid for product emails, what do you think vs Resend?
Hii
Okay, besides cloudflare, I didn't know any of them! Thank you!!
• app builders - Vercel/Nextjs
• emailing - resend
• Sales/outreach - Social media ads
• analytics - vercel analytics
• automation - Sentry for error reporting
• SEO/mktg - NextSEO
I use these tools for their easy of use/integration based on my skillset.
I'm bootstrapping my own business and relatively new. Pl share your stack especially what do you do for marketing?
Hey! very curious about NextSEO, could you share the link? I'm not sure I found the right one!
Yep, so I'm building woodyjobs.com, a job site for product & designers. For marketing, I used:
And I'm looking for tools to help me do programmatic SEO as well.
It adds up quickly ahah
Good luck on your product! Currently, I'm using Google Analytics for general user stats and event notifications, and Hotjar to see what the user is seeing. Hotjar offers recordings of users interacting with your site and heatmaps of their clicks, which is useful for optimizing your website for your users.
Thank you!!
Yes I used Hotjar at the begining, which was very useful. Not sure why I stopped but I
think it was impacting my site performance a little
• Sales/outreach: Chili Piper is good if you're building a SaaS, but above Woodpecker really helps you get those leads.
So I'm torned about this, I did tons of research for sales. And ended up choosing smarleads.ai (for warm up + sales compaigns) + apollo (for list building). What do you think of this combo?
Thank you! :)
I was using either lemlist or some custom zapier solution depending on the task. Will give Woodpecker a try, thanks!
I bookmarked this so I can also get the advice. Thanks for asking!
Hope it helps! I thought it was pretty useful, so I decided to share a weekly newsletter with the best tools to build & grow your product: solomaker.fyi.
Would love to count you in and get your feebdack 😊