A few months ago, a friend of mine — a solid backend dev — showed me a SaaS tool he'd been building for almost a year. Clean code, solid architecture, genuinely useful. I asked him how many users he had.
Twelve.
Twelve users after a year of work. Not because the product was bad. Because nobody knew it existed.
That conversation stuck with me, because I see this pattern constantly. As someone who works in digital marketing, I talk to a lot of developers and indie hackers, and the story is almost always the same: incredible engineering, zero visibility. So I wanted to share a few things I've learned that actually move the needle — no fluff, no "growth hacking" nonsense.
- Your GitHub README is a landing page
Most devs treat their README like documentation. Treat it like a pitch. The first three lines should answer: what does this do, who is it for, and why should I care — before anyone scrolls to installation steps.
- SEO isn't about tricking Google, it's about answering a question
If your tool solves a real problem, someone is already typing that problem into a search bar. Write one honest post that answers it directly. One good "how to fix X" post outperforms ten vague "top 10 tools" listicles.
- Ship in public, but ship the why, not just the what
"Added dark mode" gets a like. "Added dark mode because 40% of our users were complaining about eye strain during late-night coding sessions" gets a conversation. People connect with reasoning, not changelogs.
- Distribution is a skill, not an accident
Nobody stumbles into 10,000 users. The founders who get traction usually spend as much time thinking about where their users already hang out as they do writing code. Reddit threads, niche Discords, dev.to itself, Hacker News, newsletters — pick two or three and actually show up consistently.
- Your personal brand compounds
Every post, comment, and answer you put online is a small deposit. A year from now, someone will trust your product faster simply because they've seen your name attached to good advice before. That trust is free, and most devs leave it on the table.
None of this replaces good engineering — it just makes sure people actually see it. I write about this kind of practical marketing (stuff that's actually useful to builders, not agencies) over at https://thenasim.com/ if you want to dig deeper.
Would genuinely love to hear how other dev's here handle marketing their own projects — do you outsource it, ignore it, or try to DIY it like the rest of us?
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