There's a specific moment most indie builders hit. The product works, you've shipped it, and nothing happens. No signups, no traffic, no feedback. The build was hard but at least it was legible: you knew what to do next. Distribution isn't like that. It looks like a hundred possible actions with no way to tell which ones matter.
This guide organizes that into a sequence. Not because marketing is linear, but because most builders are stuck at a specific stage and the wrong advice at the wrong stage is worse than none.
Start where you are.
You shipped and nothing happened
The first question is diagnostic, not tactical. Why Nobody Uses Your App (And How to Fix It) and App No Users? Here's What to Do Next both work through the usual causes, which are more often positioning than promotion.
Built an App, Now What? A Distribution Plan is the practical follow-on: what to actually do in the first weeks after shipping.
Figuring out who it's for
Most distribution problems are audience problems wearing a costume. If you can't name the person who needs this, no channel will work.
Find Target Audience for Your Indie Product is the starting point. Smallest Viable Audience argues the counterintuitive case for going narrower than feels comfortable, and Niche Audience Finder gets concrete about locating where those people already gather.
Customer Interview Template is the one most builders skip. Talking to ten users will tell you more than any amount of analytics.
Saying it clearly
Positioning is what makes the same product easy or impossible to sell.
Product Positioning Framework covers the fundamentals, and Distribution-First Positioning makes the case for choosing your positioning based on where you can actually reach people.
Then the landing page, which is where positioning becomes concrete: Landing Page Positioning, Landing Page Copy Template, Landing Page Conversion Guide, and Landing Page Teardown: What Indie Builders Get Wrong.
Planning the work
Distribution Strategy Template and Marketing Plan Template for SaaS turn the above into something you can execute against.
Bootstrap Marketing Strategy, Side Project Marketing, and Micro SaaS Marketing each handle the same constraint from a different angle: no budget, no team, limited hours.
SaaS Go to Market Strategy is the fuller version for products with revenue ambitions.
Launching
Product Launch Checklist is what to have ready. SaaS Launch Strategy covers sequencing, and Product Hunt Launch Guide handles the specific mechanics of the platform most builders try first.
A launch is a spike, not a strategy. It works best when there's something underneath it.
Getting users, one at a time
How to Get Your First 100 Users is the manual, unscalable work that nearly every successful product started with. Cold DM Strategy covers doing outreach without being the person everyone mutes.
Audience Building Tools That Actually Work covers the tooling, and the social scheduling tool comparisons go deeper if you're choosing between specific products.
Keeping and charging them
Traffic that bounces isn't distribution. SaaS Onboarding Checklist covers the gap between signup and activation, which is where most indie products quietly lose everyone.
SaaS Pricing Strategy covers charging money, and specifically charging enough.
Playbooks for your product type
The guides above apply broadly. Channel selection doesn't, and it changes a lot depending on what you built. The distribution playbooks by product type break that down across twelve product categories.
The shortest version of all of this
Know exactly who it's for. Say it clearly. Go where they already are. Do it consistently for longer than feels reasonable.
If you want that mapped to your product specifically, the free Stride audit reads your landing page and your X account and comes back with where your users actually are and what to fix first.