Why Every Indie Dev Needs a Marketing Autopilot

Why Every Indie Dev Needs a Marketing Autopilot

Building is the easy part. Getting people to care? That is the real challenge.

I've shipped multiple products at this point. KOAP, a cooperative management platform. Savaged.us, a TTRPG toolkit. Year Zero Hero, a companion app for tabletop RPGs. SparkForge, a game engine. Every single time, I hit the same wall. The product works. It solves a real problem. And almost nobody knows it exists.

It took me way too long to figure out that the "build it and they will come" mentality is a lie. A comforting one, because building is what we're good at. But a lie nonetheless.

The Visibility Problem

Here's the pattern. You spend months building something. You pour yourself into the architecture, the UX, the edge cases. You ship it. You post about it once on Twitter. Maybe you tell a few friends. Then you sit back and wait for the users to roll in.

They don't.

So you go back to building. You add features nobody asked for, because that feels productive. You tell yourself the product just needs to be better and then people will find it organically. Meanwhile, some guy with a half-baked landing page and a solid marketing strategy is getting more signups in a week than you've gotten in six months.

I've been that guy sitting in his code editor, wondering why nobody cares about his objectively useful product. With KOAP, I built a genuinely good tool for co-op and HOA boards to manage their communities. The tech was solid. The onboarding was clean. But for the first few months, my growth chart looked like a flatline EKG.

The problem was never the product. The problem was that I treated marketing like an afterthought, something I'd "get to" after the next feature was done. Spoiler: the next feature is never the last one.

Why Manual Marketing is a Trap

At some point I realized I needed to actually market my stuff. So I tried the obvious approach: just do it manually. Post on Twitter a few times a day. Write a blog post every week. Engage in communities. Share on Reddit. Cold email potential users.

This works, technically. For about two weeks. Then reality hits.

You're an indie dev. You're also the designer, the sysadmin, the support team, and the accountant. Adding "full-time social media manager" to that list is a recipe for burnout. I tried it. I'd spend my morning writing tweets instead of fixing bugs. I'd lose half my afternoon crafting LinkedIn posts instead of shipping the feature my actual users were asking for.

The math just doesn't work. If you're spending 2-3 hours a day on manual marketing, that's 15+ hours a week you're not building. And the moment you stop posting, the traffic stops too. There's no compounding effect. You're on a treadmill.

The worst part? The guilt cycle. You feel guilty when you're marketing because you should be coding. You feel guilty when you're coding because you should be marketing. You end up doing both poorly.

I needed a different approach. Something that would keep the marketing machine running without me having to babysit it every day.

Building Marketing Systems

The realization that changed everything for me: marketing is just another engineering problem. And engineers solve problems by building systems.

Automated Social Posting

This was the first piece I tackled. Twitter's API pricing is absurd for indie devs, and most social platforms actively discourage automation through their APIs. So I did what any reasonable developer would do. I built a Playwright-based system that posts to social media through the browser, just like a human would.

The system loads a real browser profile, navigates to Twitter or LinkedIn, composes a post, and hits publish. It even scrolls around and does some light browsing between posts so it looks natural. Posts are spaced 15-20 minutes apart, not fired off in a rapid burst like an obvious bot.

I keep a queue of content, scheduled through cron jobs, and the system works through it on a daily cadence. I can batch-write a week's worth of content in an hour on Sunday, and it drips out naturally throughout the week. That's maybe 1-2 hours of marketing work per week instead of 15+.

SEO Content That Compounds

Social media posts have a shelf life of about 6 hours. A well-written blog post? That thing can drive traffic for years. This is one of the highest-leverage marketing activities you can do as an indie dev.

I write articles about problems my target users actually have. For KOAP, that means posts about co-op board management, HOA meeting best practices, community governance tips. For Year Zero Hero, it's TTRPG content, game master guides, session prep advice. Each post targets specific search terms that my potential users are actually googling.

The compounding effect is real. My oldest blog posts still drive more traffic than my newest social media posts. Every article is a little worker bee that keeps bringing people to my products long after I've forgotten I wrote it.

Analytics Without the Creep Factor

You can't improve what you don't measure. But I refuse to hand my users' data to Google. So I self-host Umami for analytics. It's open source, privacy-focused, and gives me everything I need to know: where traffic comes from, which pages convert, what content resonates.

I pair this with UTM parameters on every link I share. Every tweet, every LinkedIn post, every forum comment gets tagged so I can trace signups back to their source. This is how I learned that my blog posts convert 3x better than my social media posts. Without tracking, I would have kept grinding on Twitter and ignoring the blog. Data changes your strategy.

The Cron Job Backbone

The whole system runs on cron. Blog posts publish on schedule. Social media posts go out at optimal times. Analytics reports get generated weekly. Content queues get replenished from templates.

It's not glamorous. It's a bunch of shell scripts and Python files triggered by crontab entries. But it runs every single day without me touching it. That consistency is worth more than any viral moment.

The Tools

One thing I'm proud of: this entire marketing stack costs me exactly $0 in SaaS fees. Everything is self-hosted and open source.

  • Playwright for browser-based social automation. It's fast, reliable, and handles all the weird JavaScript that social platforms throw at you.
  • Umami for analytics. Self-hosted on my cluster, tracks everything I need, respects user privacy.
  • Cron for scheduling. Old school? Sure. Reliable? Absolutely.
  • ComfyUI for generating video content and images. AI-generated visuals for social posts without paying for stock footage or a designer.

The total infrastructure cost is whatever fraction of my existing server I'm using for these services. For me, that rounds to zero since they run alongside my other projects on the same Kubernetes cluster.

What Actually Moves the Needle

After running this system for a while, here's what I've learned about what actually works.

Original content beats reply farming. I see indie devs spending hours replying to big accounts hoping for scraps of attention. It's not worth it. One good original post with a real insight or a funny take on a shared experience will outperform a hundred "Great thread!" replies.

Humor and relatability beat sales pitches. Nobody wants to follow an account that just posts "Check out my app!" over and over. Talk about the actual experience of building stuff. Share the funny bugs. Complain about the same things your audience complains about. Be a person first, a product second.

Consistency beats viral moments. I've had a few posts blow up. The traffic spike lasts about 48 hours and then it's back to baseline. You know what actually built my audience? Posting useful stuff three times a week, every week, for months. The compound effect of consistency absolutely destroys the occasional viral hit.

Writing about problems beats writing about solutions. When I write "Here's how to run a better co-op board meeting," it gets way more engagement than "KOAP helps you run better meetings." People search for their problems, not your solutions. Be the answer to their question, and they'll find your product naturally.

The Bottom Line

If you're building something worth using, you owe it to yourself (and your potential users) to automate telling people about it. Every hour you spend on manual marketing is an hour you're not building, and every hour you spend building without marketing is an hour your product sits invisible.

Marketing isn't some mystical dark art. It's a system. And building systems is literally what we do. Set up automated posting. Write content that compounds. Track what works. Cut what doesn't. Let the machines handle the repetitive stuff so you can focus on what you're actually good at.

Your product deserves to be found. Build the system that makes it happen.