How Indie Hackers got its users
Founder interviews with their real numbers. The data nobody was publishing became the reason to show up.
Confirmed. The team said it publicly, or the signals leave no room for doubt.
You could start this on Monday. No budget, no audience, no permission needed.
- A direct line to the people your audience follows
- Content that cannot be generated
- Access to founders, so a reason for them to answer
- Publishing consistency
Editorial SEO in 2026
The channel most damaged by AI answers. It still works if you bring data or an opinion, not a summary.
Everything on this channel →The play
4 steps, in the order they ran them.
- 1
Interview the people your audience admires and publish what they say nowhere else
- 2
Structure every interview identically so they become comparable
- 3
Open a forum so the interviewees stay
- 4
Publish the numbers. That is the part that travels
The product itself
read from indiehackers.com, liveRun this against your own product
Carries the play above, and is written to tell you no when this channel is out of reach for you.
The same twelve channels as an agent skill. It reads your repository and eliminates what you cannot run. Open source, MIT.
curl -o ~/.claude/skills/howtodistribute/SKILL.md https://howtodistribute.com/skill.md
How big it got
Acquired by Stripe within eighteen months
What else they ran
The evidence1 checkable
They ran the same play
Want this verdict on your product?
Describe it. You get back the channel I would run in your place, the 30-day plan, and the number at which you stop.