How do you promote a side project with no audience?
With no audience, promotion is a compounding game, not a launch game. The tactics that work are the ones that keep paying after the day you do them: pages that answer real searches, links between everything you’ve built, free side tools, and genuine presence where your users already talk. Launch spikes are a bonus on top, never the plan.
What actually works when nobody knows you?
Four things, roughly in order of return per hour. First, answer pages: one page per question your users actually type into Google, answered directly in the first paragraph. A handful of these outperform fifty thin posts, and they keep collecting visitors monthly while you sleep. Second, interlink your own work: every project you’ve ever shipped should point at a hub listing all of it, so the trickle each one earns pools instead of evaporating. I wrote up the math in why launch traffic dies after two days. Third, free side tools: a tiny free utility adjacent to your paid thing earns links, ranks for its own search intent, and funnels the right people to the main product; it’s the closest thing indie hackers have to a repeatable playbook. Fourth, be a real person in the two or three communities your users inhabit. Answer questions without pitching. The pitch is your profile.
Should you launch on Product Hunt and Hacker News?
Yes, once, with calibrated expectations. A decent launch brings a spike of traffic, a few hundred signups if you’re lucky, some backlinks, and a badge of legitimacy. What it does not bring is durable traffic; the chart goes flat within days for almost everyone. Treat launches as amplifiers of the compounding work above, not substitutes for it. And launch each meaningful update or side tool separately; the platforms allow it and each one is another spike feeding the same pool.
How does cross-linking your projects actually help?
Three ways. Referral: every visitor to any project is one click from the rest, so your best work recruits for everything else. Search: internal links between your properties pass real signals, and a hub page about you can rank for your own name, which matters more as people start checking who made a thing before paying for it. Identity: repeated exposure to the same name across projects is how strangers become followers. The mechanical version of this is a small badge on every site linking to one hub; the whole system is three lines of static HTML per site, and BuiltByBadge exists to make placing it automatic. But the principle stands with or without the product: connect everything you ship, or every launch starts from zero.
What about paid ads, cold outreach, and social?
Paid ads on an unproven product mostly buy you expensive lessons; wait until something converts organically first. Cold outreach works if it’s ten genuinely relevant people with a personal note, and fails as spray. Social builds slowly and compounds if you show the work honestly, screenshots, numbers, decisions, and mostly wastes time if you post announcements into the void. Building in public is the highest-leverage social strategy for indie makers precisely because the process is the content.
What’s the minimum viable promotion system?
One hub page listing everything you’ve made. A badge or link on every project pointing at it. One answer page per month targeting a question your users search. One community where you’re a known helpful name. One launch per meaningful release. That’s a system a solo founder can run in a few hours a week, and unlike a launch, every part of it is still working a year later.
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