You’re not stupid, and your constraints are reasonable and fine. However; if you want to succeed based on the strength of your product then your product has to be amazing. You only get consistent word of mouth marketing if your product blows people away by how good it is.
You don’t have to play stupid marketing games, but you do need to have a website where you explain what your product does and you need at least a little traffic. That means you have to create some kind of marketing content that is actually valuable to people because it helps them better understand the problem your software solves.
To be clear, doing almost zero marketing is clearly suboptimal if you want to grow fast, but presumably you know this. Just don’t believe people who tell you that you have to spam and create clickbait content in order to survive.
But that’s the problem. I haven’t used any of Tony’s products, but it’s hard to believe that each and one of them—is outstanding.
And this is the missing part. I see a lot of people on twitter, who build all kind of products. None of them are the next Facebook, and yet some of them are able to generate pretty nice MRR. But I rarely see people talking about how they promote their products.
It’s always one of two: (1) people use click bait and “beating the algorithm” tactics, or (2) they come up with an explanation of their success, after they already succeeded (I.e. I posted everyday, and based on survivorship bias I came to a conclusion that you need to post X time a day, interact with Y people, and your first comment should be a link to your product).
Tony does a ton of marketing. Hours every day. And twitter is the logical place to market a twitter poweruser product. When you’re an indie developer selling to other indie developers just being visible on twitter /is/ marketing.
You don’t have to play stupid marketing games, but you do need to have a website where you explain what your product does and you need at least a little traffic. That means you have to create some kind of marketing content that is actually valuable to people because it helps them better understand the problem your software solves.
To be clear, doing almost zero marketing is clearly suboptimal if you want to grow fast, but presumably you know this. Just don’t believe people who tell you that you have to spam and create clickbait content in order to survive.