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1.) Build an audience (~6 years) 2.) Build your business (a few months...) That's the winning formula. I wrote about this at length regarding Ryan Hoover & Pr

1.) Build an audience (~6 years) 2.) Build your business (a few months...) That's the winning formula. I wrote about this at length regarding Ryan Hoover & Product Hunt: https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s-rise-d49249a1a2c0 https://medium.com/@theunixbeard/product-hunt-s-rise-d49249a... The title was "Product Hunt's Rise: An overnight success 1,834 days in the making"... Same exact story here except growing Indie shuffle took closer to 2,190 days!

deepGem 10y ago
Cannot allude to this more. Building an audience is the toughest part of any business. Not just SasS or PH. People get swayed by perceived overnight successes and attempt to replicate the same.
erikb 10y ago
It's funny how this blog post probably explains quite well how the indiehackers (the site this article about indie shuffle is hosted on) guy builds his community.
- theunixbeard 10y ago
  Quite meta! Would be nice to hear csallen's thoughts on it. Once big difference I think is that csallen is focused on writing specifically for the Hacker News audience as a way to bootstrap traffic from an existing large audience. Product Hunt didn't really use that strategy from what I can tell. Similarly to Indie Hackers, I wrote my Product Hunt article with the aim to bootstrap off of Ryan Hoover's large existing audience (40K twitter followers at the time, compared to my paltry 100). He was the first to tweet about it after I brought it to his attention and it spread organically from there (26K views currently). My next Internet Archaeology article is already in the works and I plan to use the exact same strategy as before (bootstrap off of my subject's existing audience).
  - erikb 10y ago
    Sounds good. I love your archeology work. Saves me a lot of time.It was a little too long for a coffee break read and now I'm behind my work schedule, though. Maybe you can split one article into smaller chunks, which may also increase your overall traffic. ;-)

deepGem 10y ago

Cannot allude to this more. Building an audience is the toughest part of any business. Not just SasS or PH. People get swayed by perceived overnight successes and attempt to replicate the same.

erikb 10y ago

It's funny how this blog post probably explains quite well how the indiehackers (the site this article about indie shuffle is hosted on) guy builds his community.

theunixbeard 10y ago
Quite meta! Would be nice to hear csallen's thoughts on it. Once big difference I think is that csallen is focused on writing specifically for the Hacker News audience as a way to bootstrap traffic from an existing large audience. Product Hunt didn't really use that strategy from what I can tell. Similarly to Indie Hackers, I wrote my Product Hunt article with the aim to bootstrap off of Ryan Hoover's large existing audience (40K twitter followers at the time, compared to my paltry 100). He was the first to tweet about it after I brought it to his attention and it spread organically from there (26K views currently). My next Internet Archaeology article is already in the works and I plan to use the exact same strategy as before (bootstrap off of my subject's existing audience).
- erikb 10y ago
  Sounds good. I love your archeology work. Saves me a lot of time.It was a little too long for a coffee break read and now I'm behind my work schedule, though. Maybe you can split one article into smaller chunks, which may also increase your overall traffic. ;-)