Indie Hackers is a good place to find clients if you sell to founders who build and run their own products: developers, designers, copywriters, marketers, accountants and software tools. The method is to read what founders post, qualify them by whether they have revenue, help in public with specifics, write one genuinely useful post of your own, and reach out only to people who described a problem you solve. Expect small, slow first wins and a lot of price-sensitive buyers. Below is who buys there, what to read for, what to say, and when to leave.

Who buys here, and who does not

Many people on the site are founders at the start: a side project, a first product, a few customers. Plenty of them post their numbers openly, which helps you. A founder who writes "we passed $4,000 a month in revenue" can pay for a $1,500 project. A founder who writes "pre-revenue, building the MVP" probably can't, and probably shouldn't. Treat revenue as your qualifier. It saves you from spending hours on a thread that will never turn into an invoice.

Services fit better than you would expect. Founders hire a developer for a feature they can't build, a designer for a landing page, a copywriter for an onboarding email series, a bookkeeper when the numbers get untidy. Tools fit when they solve a problem the founder just posted about. Enterprise software and anything with a long procurement process doesn't.

What to read for

Spend the first week reading, not posting. Skim the main feed and the groups that match your trade. You are looking for four kinds of post:

  • A direct ask: "Looking for someone to build X," "Does anyone know a good copywriter?"
  • A stuck point: "Our signup-to-paid rate is 2% and I don't know why," "Our emails keep landing in spam."
  • A launch coming up: "Launching next Tuesday, would love feedback." Launches create a short list of tasks that are due on a date.
  • A milestone: "Just hit our first 100 customers." Revenue arrives, and with it come problems that cost money to fix.

Keep a sheet with the founder's name, the product, the post link, what they need and the revenue they've mentioned. Ten rows a week is plenty. Layouts and features on the site change, so look at how it is organized today, not at an old screenshot.

Help first, in public

Take Noor, a made-up freelance email deliverability consultant. A founder posts that their welcome emails land in spam. Noor does not reply "DM me." She writes:

Three things I'd check first: whether your sending domain has SPF and DKIM set up (your email provider's setup page will tell you), whether your welcome email has more than a couple of links, and whether you're sending from a brand new domain with no history. A new domain that sends 500 emails on day one often gets filtered. Warm it up slowly. Happy to look at a header if you paste one with your address removed.

The answer teaches something, asks nothing, and shows how she thinks. Founders remember the person who gave a real answer, and the next time they have a related problem they click her name. If you do it five times a week for a month, you will have 20 answers and a few conversations without ever sending a pitch.

Write one post that is actually useful

After a few weeks of answering, write a post about something you did. The structure that works: the problem a founder had, what you did, the numbers before and after, what you would do differently. Use real numbers from real work, and ask the client for permission before you name them. If you have no client work to show, write about your own product or a teardown of a public example.

Keep the ask to one line at the end: "If you want me to look at yours, say so below." Communities like this one tend to dislike obvious ads, so read the recent top posts to see what the tone is, and match it. A post that teaches gets saved and shared for months. A post that sells gets ignored.

Reaching out to one founder

When a founder has asked for help, or told you about a problem you fix, reply in the thread first. Then, if the conversation is going well, ask: "Want to take this to email?" Many founders list a contact email on their product's website. A first message can be:

Subject: your welcome emails

Hi Sam, I answered your question on Indie Hackers about emails landing in spam. If it's still a problem, I can do a 30-minute teardown of your sending setup for $250 and send you a one-page fix list. If you'd rather fix it yourself, the three checks above are the place to start. Want me to take a look?

A small fixed-price first job suits this crowd. It's easy to say yes to, easy to price, and it shows you can finish. After the teardown, the larger project is a natural next step. More on writing the email itself is in cold email opening lines.

A weekly rhythm

  1. Monday, 20 minutes: Read new posts in two or three groups and add rows to your sheet.
  2. Tuesday to Thursday, 10 minutes a day: Write two good answers.
  3. Friday, 20 minutes: Follow up on any thread where someone replied, and send at most two emails to founders who have asked for help.
  4. Once a month: Publish one post.

When this is not the right place

If your buyers are companies with a purchasing department, not individual founders, Indie Hackers will mostly send you people with no budget. If three months of answers produce no emails or calls, stop and try a place where your buyers are, like X, LinkedIn or Discord. For what to do when you have the founder's attention and need the meeting, see how to get meetings with decision makers.

Not every founder posts, and the ones who do are not all the ones you want. For the rest, Rocketship starts from a plain description of who you sell to: it finds those buyers by name, emails them from your own Gmail, and follows up. A 7-day free trial shows you the list before you commit, and a card is required to start.