Indie Maker W27 | On Marketing, Goals, Social Density, Running, Noticing Yourself, and One Recommendation

Today is day 193 of my one-person company. This Indie Maker column is where I record my own growth and how the business is going. I hope you find something useful in it.

Marketing and publishing

Half a year into building indie products, the point I keep repeating is that "the hardest part is always marketing and growth." This section is about how my own thinking around it has shifted.

With content, what matters most is whether you're actually executing — whether the volume and the cadence are there. The worst thing you can do is publish and then keep refreshing the numbers, or keep asking why it didn't take off.

Day to day, whether a topic will land is a hard thing to judge. I seem to have developed some feel for it lately, but the most I can do is roughly say "this one probably won't take off." I can almost never say with certainty that something will.

Getting into the habit of not checking the numbers after publishing is so hard — but the moment you look, you fall into anxiety about them. The reframe I keep coming back to: as long as you made the content with care, every post is a positive deposit, and every impression is another chance. Thinking about it that way makes the marketing work a lot more sustainable.

From that, a principle: never delay publishing because you're afraid the post won't get traffic. Publishing doesn't guarantee reach, but not publishing guarantees no one hears about you.

On small goals

I've been talking with a lot of friends lately, and one question keeps coming up: now that you build your own products, how do you manage yourself? Thinking about it, I still work backwards from a relatively long-term goal to figure out what to do in the short term. Here's what that looks like in practice.

At the end of June, I set myself a small goal, and for the entire month of July every product, marketing, and growth decision was oriented around it. What was the goal? For an indie developer, I think the one that matters most is product revenue — and from there you work backwards to conversion rate, user count, and the rest of the core metrics.

The revenue goal I set at the end of June wasn't especially ambitious, and by July 29th the month's target was met — on the last day it even came in slightly above.

The day I hit July's goal, I set a harder one for August. "Harder" is only how it looks to me right now; the past few months have taught me that hitting goals in indie development often isn't linear. Lay the groundwork and the growth can arrive all at once. Making the wish here, then putting in the work.

Social density

As an introvert, I'm constantly managing my social density and frequency, because every interaction with the outside world costs something (even though people never believe I'm an introvert).

This Thursday was different. Normally Thursday means going out to some event. This time I woke up and just worked at home, fully absorbed, all day. It felt completely different — a kind of deep focus I hadn't had in a while.

That's roughly my social pattern: when the frequency feels too high, I dial it back and recover through immersive creating and time alone.

Running rhythm

Three runs this week, under 14km total. I'm planning to increase both mileage and overall training load. A few things I noticed while running:

Running laps on a ~1km park track gets boring fast — I'm usually done after 3km. But running along a road or a river, I can generally go much further. Why? One reason is that an open route is more interesting and less predictable. The other is that when you run outside you end up far from home, and at some point you have no choice but to cover another 5km-plus just to get back.

My legs have also felt noticeably heavier lately, which is exactly why I want to train more: I'm heavier than before and training less hard than before, and both of those show up in how the running feels.

Recommendation of the week

Most of my free time goes to podcasts. My favorite this week was episode 596 of 无聊斋 (Don't Panic), on 欧阳夏丹's 27 years in news. What stuck with me most was her talking about her own period of burnout, and how she thinks about fate and chance. I won't spoil the details — worth a listen if that sounds interesting.

That's it. See you next week.