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

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

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Revenue screenshots always do well on Twitter. But if you supplement your screenshot with a little comment that you achieved this while spending $0 ads, you have a sure winner of a tweet.

In the indie maker world, not spending money on ads is seen as a badge of honor.

Every tribe needs an enemy and the indie maker tribe’s natural enemy are VC-funded startups.

They routinely burn through millions of dollars in ad spend.

So if you’re able to build a revenue-generating business without spending money on ads, you become a hero in the indie maker world.

And for a long time, I did buy into that narrative.

I too was annoyed seeing the same YouTube ad by some VC-funded startup for the hundredth time.

I’m looking at you MONDAY DOT COM.

The indie maker mindset is also definitely closer to my natural tendencies.

I’m quite frugal in my personal life. So being frugal when it comes to my business ventures came naturally to me.

But I’ve started to seriously question if this is really that smart of an approach.

Yes, it’s definitely cool if you build something so awesome that it just naturally blows up and keeps growing ever after.

No one exemplifies this story better than Pieter Levels.

He was able to tap into the digital nomad and remote work trends at the right time with the right kind of story, which was quickly picked up by major news outlets.

There was a huge initial spike in interest that resulted in the explosion of his personal brand and a large number of strong backlinks to his projects Nomad List and RemoteOK.

So he never had to spend serious money on ads. Thanks to the large number of backlinks and the rapid growth of his personal brand, there has been a solid stream of traffic to his projects coming through Google and Twitter ever since.

That’s the indie maker playbook in a nutshell.

Pieter’s story is awesome and continues to inspire thousands of aspiring indie makers every year.

But here’s the thing.

What if none of your projects ever takes off as Pieter’s did?

That’s, in fact, the reality for most indie makers.

Most are only able to drum up a little bit of attention and grow their personal brand to a moderate level. They might be able to make it to one of the top spots on Product Hunt or the front page of Hacker News.

But none of that is enough to build a sustainable stream of traffic to their project.

The playbook only really works if that initial spike of attention also results in backlinks from sites with solid authority or an explosion of your personal brand. Otherwise, your traffic numbers will quickly be back to zero.

Another thing worth noting is that the landscape has changed quite a bit since Pieter started out.

Pieter was able to launch every single new feature as a new “product” on ProductHunt. This allowed him to get another attention spike almost every month.

You’re no longer allowed to do that.

Also the Twitter algorithm has changed significantly, with only a small percentage of your followers seeing your tweets. This makes it a lot harder to leverage the platform effectively as a founder.

And of course, a much larger number of people are nowadays trying to do the same thing. Buildi...

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