Distribution Is the Product: 5 Channels Indie Hackers Actually Win On

Shipping is the easy half, and you already know that, which is why the advice to "do marketing" lands so badly. It is not a thing you can start on Monday.

Here is what it actually looks like: five channels a solo founder can work with no budget and no audience, ordered by how fast each one pays back. The order matters more than the list. Every one of these works eventually, and picking the slow one first is how six months disappear with nothing to show.

1. The communities where the problem is already discussed

This pays back fastest, and almost nobody does it properly.

Not founder communities — the ones where the job gets done. If you are building for freelance designers, you want the place freelance designers go to complain about scope creep, not the place founders go to talk about building things for freelance designers. Those are different rooms and only one of them contains your customers.

The method is unglamorous. Answer questions about the problem for a few weeks without mentioning your product at all. Not as a growth tactic — as research. You will learn the exact words people use, which is the single most valuable input to every other channel on this list, including the ones you will pay for later. Then when somebody describes your problem precisely, you say what you built, once.

The reason this is first is that the audience already exists. You are not building attention; you are borrowing a room where it has already assembled. That is also why it does not scale: it costs your hours, and your hours do not compound.

Circles are organised by role for this reason — the practitioner rooms, not the founder lounge.

2. Integrations and marketplaces

A week of work, and then it runs without you.

If your product touches a tool that has a directory — a Slack app list, a Shopify or Figma marketplace, a Zapier integration, a WordPress plugin — you are looking at a distribution channel with an audience that has already pulled out a credit card for something in your category. That is the whole advantage. These people are not browsing; they are solving.

The catch is that it only exists if your product genuinely connects to something. You cannot invent this one. But founders routinely skip it because building an integration feels like feature work rather than marketing, and it is the only item on this list that keeps paying after you stop touching it.

Check the directory before you build the integration. Some are saturated and some have nine listings in your category, and finding that out takes twenty minutes.

3. Search

Slow, and then suddenly not. A page you write this month may do nothing for a quarter and then bring people every week for years.

The mistake is writing for the phrase a vendor would use. Nobody searches "workflow automation platform." They search the sentence they would say to a colleague: how do I stop manually copying this every Monday. Those searches have less competition and far more intent, because somebody typing a frustration is closer to paying than somebody typing a category.

Write the page that ends the search. If a reader has to visit a second page to finish the job, you have written an advertisement rather than an answer, and the ranking follows the answer.

This one has an unfair advantage for a solo founder: you have done the work yourself and you can write about the actual problem with specifics that a content agency cannot fake.

4. Build in public

This compounds, and it compounds slowly.

The honest version: it works for people who would be posting anyway. It rewards consistency over months, the early returns are close to zero, and treating it as a tactic usually ends in quitting after three weeks with a handful of likes and a bad taste.

What makes it work is not revenue screenshots. It is showing the decision behind the work — what you tried, what broke, what you chose and why. That is the part other people cannot copy and the part they remember you for. A number is forgotten by Friday; "the person who worked out how to do X" lasts.

If you do it, pick one place and stay there. An audience split across four platforms is four small audiences, none of which reaches the threshold where anybody recognises your name.

5. Launch days

Last, and deliberately. A launch is not a channel — it is a day.

The traffic is real and it is mostly people who browse launches, which is not the same as people with your problem. The spike ends. Founders plan for months around a launch and then find the week after indistinguishable from the week before, and conclude that distribution does not work.

What actually survives the day is worth having, though: a permanent backlink, and the first ten users who will tell you what is broken while they still care enough to write it down. Both of those feed the four channels above.

So launch — just know what you are buying. The launchpad runs weekly, which means you do not have to hold a finished product for three months waiting for the right Tuesday.

What to do this week

Pick one. Specifically, pick the first one: find the three rooms where your users complain about the problem you solve, and read six months of back posts before you write anything.

That costs an evening and it changes the other four channels, because every one of them depends on knowing the words people use. The founders who say distribution did not work for them almost always skipped this and started at number five.