Two Years of Indie Development: Building and Marketing

I think my exploration of indie development officially began when I received a job offer from a big tech company. That was almost exactly two years ago. If I include the time since I switched from economics to programming in my second year of graduate school, I have been in this field for three and a half years. In fact, from the very first day I started programming, I hoped that I would eventually become an independent developer.

I think almost every indie developer goes through a “garage startup” phase.

The phrase comes from those famous Silicon Valley founding stories.

Hewlett-Packard began in a Palo Alto garage, where two Stanford engineers worked on audio oscillators. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak assembled the Apple I in a family garage. Larry Page and Sergey Brin rented Susan Wojcicki’s garage as they started Google.

The stories follow a similar pattern: a few technical enthusiasts, a modest workspace, some seemingly impractical ideas, and years of hard work that eventually produce something that changes the world.

I believe many indie developers are initially drawn to these stories. The appeal can be especially strong for an introvert. Rather than running around meeting people, you can find a quiet corner, shut the door, open your computer, and build a product with your own skills and ideas.

But you soon realize that polishing a product never ends. At what point is a product good enough to count as an MVP? There rarely seems to be a clear standard. Even when you feel it is ready to launch, another problem appears: you have no idea how to promote it.

Sometimes you finally struggle through writing a post and publish it with high hopes, only to discover that perhaps nobody cares about what you have made.

Then, because promotion stalls—or because there was never any marketing in the first place—the product slowly goes quiet.

It is not only the product that dies. The enthusiasm and conviction you had when you started disappear along with it.

If you stop to reflect, you begin to understand a phrase that has been repeated almost to exhaustion over the past couple of years: Build in Public.

1. Indie development involves more than building

In a way, the label “independent developer” makes it easy to overlook everything that running a business involves.

Every business venture carries both development costs and marketing costs. You have to build the product, but you also have to help people discover it, understand it, and ultimately become willing to pay for it.

I often think that marketing is, at its core, a process of building power. As an indie developer, you need to bring your product into people’s field of view, shape how they think about it, and perhaps establish a voice within a particular niche.

To gain that kind of power, you usually have to begin by working within society’s existing power structures. For consumer products, one of the most important is the way platforms control traffic.

Platforms and capital undoubtedly control the largest share of that traffic. Platforms set the rules of distribution and hold users’ attention. Capital can buy traffic through advertising, test conversion, and quickly scale a business model that has already proved itself.

Independent developers obviously do not have that much capital.

Still, there is no need to be too pessimistic. The age of independent media gives ordinary people opportunities to build an audience. You can gradually build a recognizable personal brand around your product, yourself, or both. By consistently creating content, sharing your development process, and showing your product’s value, you can help some people get to know you, trust you, and become early users.

If the product is good enough, paid advertising can amplify those results and create a growth flywheel. But buying traffic is fundamentally a use of capital. For an indie developer, even testing whether a channel can deliver meaningful conversions can be expensive. You pay not only for the advertisements, but also for the trial and error.

So, rather than buying traffic directly, indie developers may need to find sources of traffic that cost less and can accumulate over time. Building products, developing a personal brand, and consistently creating content are all attempts to do this.

Of course, attracting traffic does not always require years of audience building. Another approach is to stay alert to changes in the market. You might notice a rapidly growing keyword, identify an unmet need behind it, and quickly build a product to capture that demand.

In other words, if long-term audience building is difficult, you need to make the most of a first-mover advantage.

2. One foot on building, the other on marketing

To make a profit, an indie developer needs one foot on the development pedal and the other on the marketing pedal. The bicycle only moves when both feet get to work.

With AI, the development pedal has become easier to push. A programmer with some experience might be able to build a genuinely usable product in around ten days.

The marketing pedal is not so simple.

The difficulty lies not only in marketing itself, but also in constantly switching between two ways of thinking. You have to consider features, technical implementation, and delivery quality, while also thinking about content topics, user psychology, distribution channels, and conversion.

To some extent, independent developers need to move comfortably between these two modes—and sometimes keep both running at once.

At the same time, you have to keep asking: How can I reduce the costs of both development and marketing even further?

For programmers, reducing development costs comes relatively naturally. We are used to abstraction, reuse, and automation, and to looking for better tools and workflows. Marketing costs are a different matter.

You have to work out how to keep producing content and how to distribute it, and encourage it to spread, at a lower cost.

If you can create only one piece of content a day and publish it to only one channel, that is not very efficient. A better question is:

How can one piece of content create more value?

Could you break it into different formats? Create versions suited to the habits of people on different platforms? Turn a long article into short videos, illustrated posts, social updates, or even a series of materials you can publish over time?

The idea is to turn content production and distribution into a workflow that can be reused, automated, and scaled.

3. A shared challenge for independent professionals

While exploring indie development, I have gradually come to realize that almost every independent profession faces these same two problems: creating the work and marketing it.

Take illustrators, for example.

A character might take many days to conceive, design, and refine. But once it is finished, the next questions are: How do you introduce it to more people? How do you create interesting content around it? How do you adapt that content into different forms so the character keeps attracting attention?

These problems are remarkably similar to those faced by indie developers. One person delivers software; the other delivers visual work.

Whether you are an independent developer or an independent creator, you seem to face the same question:

How do you turn your professional skills into a product, and then turn that product into content and traffic that can keep reaching people?

4. Building influence beyond an organization or job title

Finally, as someone with a humanities background, I often find myself thinking about how hard it is to find a job.

I switched to programming because finding a job with an economics degree was so difficult. And I originally chose economics because finding a job with a philosophy degree was difficult too.

Over time, though, I realized that even being lucky enough to find a job does not mean you can stop worrying.

Depending on an existing power structure means living with the uncertainty that comes when that structure changes. Once it shifts, the advantages and position you relied on may disappear as well.

After going in a long circle, I have come to feel that, whatever you study and whatever work you do, you eventually return to one question:

How can you build influence that exists independently of any one organization or professional identity?