How to do marketing as a Solopreneur

As a solopreneur, you’re probably at the stage where you’re realizing that a maniacal focus on product and engineering isn’t enough. You’re probably realizing that marketing and distribution is what’s going to get your business off the ground. In this article, we’re going to walk you through some of the ways in which you can get started marketing your indie hacker or solopreneur product. So how does one do solopreneur marketing?

Identify Customers

Before you start marketing your product, you have to understand who your target audience is. As an indie hacker, you’re not going to be able to target large enterprises right from the beginning. You’re also going to have a hard time targeting a generic audience, like all business owners over the age of 25.

So the first key tip is identifying who exactly you want to target as your initial set of customers. This could be AI Email SaaS businesses or E-commerce stores selling shoes. Be as specific as possible since it’ll be much easier to find your customers.

Identify Competitors

After you’ve found a set of customers, the next step is figuring out who your competitors are. This is important because you have to know who your competitors are to understand how they are reaching your customers. You can Google keywords like “companies selling email software” but Google only looks at keywords, rather than the semantic meaning of your company.

You can find a better list of competitors here for free. It uses AI to understand what your company does and then uses AI algorithms to find companies that solve the same problem.

Initial Marketing Strategies

There are numerous books and podcasts detailing a multitude of techniques you can use to market your startup. The best book on this topic is probably Traction by the founder of DuckDuckGo.

To simplify things, I’d recommend starting with the following few tactics:

1. Build in Public

You must’ve seen founders on Twitter/Reddit/Hacker News posting incessantly about their startup journey. You might think it’s cringe (trust me, I was there), but honestly, they do it because it works. People don’t look at your company once and think let’s go ahead and buy your product.

Rather, people are social creatures and learn to build trust over time. If someone sees you pouring hours into your product and engaging with others online, they are more likely to try your product out and convert. For a good tutorial on how to build in public, check out this blog post.

2. SEO/Writing Content

You’ve probably heard about SEO and might be thinking it’s something you should get onboard with. To make things really easy, here’s the TLDR of what SEO is:

1. Find what your customers are searching for (Keyword Research)
2. Write blogs/articles/content about those topics (Content)
3. Improve website rating by getting backlinks (Link Building)
4. Optimize your website (Technical SEO and On-Page SEO)

So how do you go about doing this? To find keywords your customers are looking for, you can do two things:

• Think about what your target user is thinking about that could lead to your product, and the figure out what they will type
• Learn which keywords your competitors are ranking for and find similar keywords

The second part is where Competitor Research can help you. In the Pro version, you’ll get the entire report where all the keywords your competitors are ranking for are displayed with the number of clicks from each. You won’t have to pay for monthly subscriptions and spend 10s of hours going through irrelevant keywords.

Before you write content with these keywords, use Google Keyword Planner to find keywords with high volume and low keyword difficulty.

3. Direct Marketing

Finally, direct marketing involves reaching customers directly. This can include Google Ads, Social Media Ads, Cold Emails and many other approaches. Each of these is it’s own science so you’ll have to devote time to understanding how to master them. Here are some resources to help you get going:

• No-code customization: Allow easy configuration without developer resources.
• AI/automation capabilities: Reduce manual workloads through intelligent automation.
• Open APIs/integrations: Seamless connection with other software small businesses rely on.
• Mobile apps: Enable work from anywhere for teams on-the-go.

Conclusion

To wrap up, we discussed very briefly how to do marketing as a solopreneur or indie hacker. The first step is to identify your target customers. Then find your competitors. And then implement your initial marketing strategies. Competitor Research is here to help you find and then research your competitor’s tactics so you can grow your business and get more users. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to us on the support page. Onwards and upwards!