Why the indie maker playbook is dead (or how I learned to spend money on ads)

You hit the nail on the head.

Many people falsely believe that there are only two ways to create awareness for your product (free vs. paid traffic), but the truth is more complicated than that.

The reality is there is no such thing as “free traffic.” The more accurate term is “organic traffic,” which is paid for with time / energy (and sometimes even money if you've hired an employee, agency, or contractor to do the work for you).

Sadly, time is the ONLY non-renewable resource. Once it’s spent, it’s gone for good.

So, that begs the question, “which option is right for you?”

Here’s a framework I use to help my clients decide:

1. How quickly do you want results? If speed is a priority, then paid options like Search Engine Ads, Social Media Ads, Display Network Ads, or Affiliate Programs are the best option for you.

2. How would you like to pay for awareness? If you want to spend more time than money, consider organic options like Content Marketing, Search Engine Optimization, or Community Building.

3. How important is control to you? One of the benefits of paid traffic is it can be turned on, off, up, or down within minutes. Organic traffic, on the other hand, has a much longer turnaround time.

4. How important is gathering and acting upon data to you? Paid traffic platforms offer you much more data than their organic alternatives. For example, with Facebook Ads, you have a lot of targeting options (location, demographics, interests, and behaviors) and tight attribution windows. This allows you to test ideas quickly and iterate towards success in real-time.

In short, neither option is right or wrong.

But you’re always PAYING for awareness, either with time or money.

I’m looking at you MONDAY DOT COM.

Lol

That is my thinking exactly. I just read MAKE and it's not that good really. Some of the idea validation parts via adds you've mentioned are pretty well covered in 4-hour work week. Whatever you think about Ferris, he did a great job with his side business handbook. And it was not only software-focused which I loved (apart of the sketchy supplements part).

I do still like building in public especially when building something alone.

The idea of diminishing returns of traction channels is super real.

The best traction channels are where people aren't yet but will be.

I wonder if some idea of trend forecasting + dashboarding would be helpful here.

Great post, it's packed with insights and I love it. This is seriously "giving away" some of the hardest things to learn as an indie maker -- hope people are reading this and taking in the lessons.

One thing I didn't see covered is that we're in a sort of "sweet spot" for ads. Assuming you're an indie maker even in this downturn, you're probably seeing the cheapest ads and your ad dollar is going farther since there are so many startups that are cutting advertising/marketing spend.

Here's an interesting idea -- how could you get visibility into the "inflation"/"deflation" of dollars of ad spend?

The only reason why they’re not doing it is the general negative sentiment towards ads in the indie maker community.

That was 100% what was holding me back.

Really glad I never got into this mindset. I guess balancing "indie making" with MicroConf & My First Million insulated me from this.

I'm a purist about certain things, but outside of not breaching your ethics, business is not the time to be dogmatic.

$500 is a significant amount of money for me. But would I be willing to spend $500 to avoid wasting a month of my life on an idea that has no legs?

Another thing about this mindset -- it only works if you value your time at zero. Even if you valued your time at $10/hour, running that experiment saves you way more than 50 hours of development, thinking, marketing, advertising, and sales time for a likely-to-die idea

I mean I absolutely value my time at zero when I'm spending it so I never think that clearly but just saying.

Hey Jakob -- big fan of this post, and this echoes some of my own experience. The days of "build it and they will come," or benefiting massively from Twitter and PH, are long gone. Much harder to build an audience for your product now -- which just means that marketing as a skillset is way more important than it ever has been.

As the consolidation of discussion forums continues, avenues for "organic" promotion shrink. It is only a matter of time before your account gets banned for spamming any given community, so paid promotion becomes more dominant. Sad

Great Share !

Spot on.

This falls in-line with what I've been feeling too.

Ads + growth loops (powered by) is the most powerful way to grow.

Look at Canva for example.

Theres a reason VC spends tons of cash on ads.

Nice one. Also you're blog looks great, signed up for newsletter.

Great writeup Jakob, thanks for sharing this. I've been experimenting with paid ads, and they've been great for getting my first (potential) users.

But I don't have anything to compare my numbers with. I don't really know if they're average or if I'm on to something. I don't know what my CPC, CTR, ROAS, sign up rate and trial conversation rate tell me to continue building or if I should rather stop trying.

As IndieHackers we should come together and share our results, so we can compare. If there's any interest in this, we can slap together a tool where we can do just that.

you hit the nail on the head

Great post.

My marketing skills are atrocious - I know this from experience. I ran an experiment at the beginning of last year using (Google) Ads to drive traffic to a landing page. It seems a better model for me - rather than hoping for a post to get viral. But it is a skill that need to be worked on. I personally learnt the following lessons:

• Getting the "right" keywords is essential;
• Monitor spending & the ads algorithm;
• Have your indicators in place to monitor the effectiveness of ads.

Thanks, interesting read!

It might just come down to the fact that running ads is a skill and the investment might be scary if you don't know what you're doing or how to read the results.

this is realy awsome post.

Great article @jakobgreenfeld , thanks for sharing.

One thought/question I had was: it's hard to do paid advertising well, so how do you know your product validation ended in failure rather than your advertising strategy or tactics? For example, I have a friend who started a business that is entirely dependent on adwords for traffic, but it took them like 15,000GBP to learn what worked - their service offering didn't change in that time, purely the advertising campaigns. If they'd spend 500 pounds and quit they wouldn't have a business now.

Great read! It also took me a while to find out that ads are not evil.

My newsletter This Week In React now grows faster (just reached 10k subs!) thanks to ads.

I was inspired by others (TLDR, Refactoring...) and decided that it's better to invest money in ads than invest time spamming obscure Facebook groups. Now I spend at least 200€/month on ads and plan to increase that budget once I figure out how to minimize my acquisition cost.

I think that depending on the kind of industry your service is for, you might need some sort of paid advertising.

People who use Pieter's path as the definitive one, might be forgetting that his audience might have naturally been inclined to reject ads.

For people interested in success stories about the effectiveness of paid advertising for problem validation (even as an IndieHacker) might benefit from listening to @csallen's interview with @jtmarino on IH Podcast. Here is excerpt from the transcript:

"Daehee started an advertising campaign on Google and then within the first 15 minutes we had an attempt to purchase this product that had not yet existed, but we didn't end up capturing the funds. We set it up so it wouldn't it wouldn't fully process but there was our cue that we were on the something and then we shut our site down. We quit our jobs and we got working on starting Tuft & Needle."

https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/061-jt-marino-of-tuft-&-needle

i added this post to my newsletter https://preview.mailerlite.io/preview/431445/emails/87621836905383513

thanks for sharing it!

The indie maker playbook is dead. Spending money on ads is no longer a taboo. It's time to embrace new strategies for success in the ever-evolving business landscape.

There is another problem.

There is a limited number of forums on which you can post.
There is a limited number of times you can go viral.

Ads, however, are scalable.

I agree with the author that the indie maker playbook of relying solely on organic growth and avoiding spending money on advertising may not be as effective as it once was. The landscape has changed significantly with the rise of social media algorithms and the increased competition in the market.

That is so on point! The PPC market is so cheap and easy to enter nowadays that it's just stupid to brag not spending on ads! I mean, with 5 dollars a day you could validate ideas faster and "cheaper" than studying the trends before trying to write a keyword stuffed blog post in the hopes of going viral!

Also, when the time comes, hire an specialist to make your campaigns, it's cheaper than you might think and could make a LOT of difference! The advertising world and tools have a lot of little stuff that only the people that are there everyday spending thousands of dollars for costumers really know about!

For example, I'm a brazilian working in the booming PPC (on-line ads) industry and 200 dollars a month, when converted to brazilian currency, is a good deal of money for a contract to manage, say, 500~1000 dollars/month in ads!

Advertising is the "safest" way to generate traffic without having to RELY on organic traffic, and having a professional looking to the paid part you can have the time and peace to try and do some nice organic content and generate even more traffic!

The most worst thing I hate advertisers they create monopoly and we end up having few options only. I also feel there are lots of fake clicks on ads because of hackers and it completely waste your efforts.

Podcast guesting is one of the best ways to get attention on a new product.

Thanks Jakob, that's exactly what I needed to hear. I am currently working on something that makes the validation part easier but I always had this clash in my head between "Bengin, you don't want to spend money for ads, you want to do everything by yourself" and "Spending money on ads would be so much easier for validation purposes".

really nice article! food for thoughts :-)
i just subscribed to your newsletter for more articles like this one

Whenever I see the statement, "look what we achieved and $0 spent on ads!" I always shake my head. You might have been able to achieve even more if you didn't consider ads verboten. Ads are all about ROI. If you can spend $1 on ads and get $1.50 in revenue...do it all day long. Ads are a tool and can be used for good and bad.

However, the devil is in the details. Ads showing above your already highly ranked organic search result might cannibalize your organic traffic. E.g. an ads show above your organic search result and the user click on the ad, but would have clicked on the organic link. Also, you must track conversions. Just click is not enough since a lot of that traffic can be bad, meaning they don't ever convert.

Always experiment. Try ads, watch closely the ROI, and don't be afraid to turn them off for a bit to see if revenue changes.

I agree that spending money in ads is not necessarily a bad thing. The issue I personally faced is that very early on it's quite difficult to find the correct medium to spend the ads money on. Facebook or Google ads can very easily give a false impression that thousands of people aren't interested in a product idra, but perhaps the real problem was in the targeting of the ads. I think it's much a better to find initial organic audience who are genuinely interested in the idea and are willing to provide feedback loop. Only after a certain PMF is reached, ads can be effective, I personally feel

I'm saving this post so I can go back and reread it 2–3 times.

But individual Indies often don't have the money to advertise

Never thought about it this way, but it clicked for me when you mentioned how GymShark blew up solely through influencer marketing several years ago, which would be practically impossible in 2022. Diminishing returns on marketing strategies is very real.

It's one of the most useful change in mindset we can have. Stop seeing ads as bad, and instead as just a tool in our arsenal. Great post.

I think that methods change over time. There can not be a single technique that would work infinitely. All the interested parties trying to milk it would optimize it into oblivion. This does not mean that, in general, non-paid methods wouldn't work.

For example, I run an email software project EmailEngine, and all the traffic I get for it is "free." I have not paid a single cent for ads. Instead, I have published many successful open source projects over time, and now I include links to my main project on the pages of these projects.

For example, nodemailer.com alone sends about 2.5k unique visitors to emailengine.app in a month. This traffic is relevant (people building email projects), and even if the conversion is low, it is still more than 0. I have no idea how much I would have to pay for ads to get the same numbers.

yes, nice

@jakobgreenfeld good post - bit long but well written. There is also another alternative, i.e. https://skilledup.life - free talent for tech startups

If you can afford £30/month (if your revenues is less than £10k for the last 12 months), then you can build a number of teams of volunteers to support you.

Assuming you have a functional product, I would suggest the following:

1. Get a HR Volunteer to help source all others team mates you need
2. Build user/customer acquisition team
3. Build support team that can convert as well as support your users/customers
4. Once you have built the above successfully, start thinking about building more teams, e.g. Product Team

Do reach out [email protected]

I've never spent on adverts, but there is nothing wrong with finding channels that work for you. All the best.

If you think about it, it’s even one level beyond that. He discusses how he made money by selling a book about making money by teaching how to make money in a book about making money.

Crazy..

Good insights in this article. I agree that what works today is different from yesterday. It is however worth noting that using ads to test demand has been a tactic for a very long time for indie makers.

You're being a little pessimistic IMHO but I see some validity in what you're saying:

✨ Times are changing as the market gets more saturated.

My 5c:
🔴 Not every product can be "built in pubic"

🔴 Not every indiehacker product should be just launched on twitter/product hunt

✅ Bootstrapped businesses that succeed are usually building off real problems in real-life, for example I made 40K building a clone of typeform for a specific industry (that eventually got killed by covid but that's another story)

✅ I think real indie hackers can adapt to changing times and mix any approach, being indie doesn't mean being stupid and being blind to what works and what doesn't

Loved this part:

"And I can now see that many things I did in the past were sophisticated distractions I came up with to avoid doing more uncomfortable things like, for example, spending money on ads or facing the reality that some of my projects are dead in the water."