[dstick]

Correct me if I'm wrong but unless you're already an established brand that people actively seek out, or part of the first X listings in a category of a thing everyone wants (i.e. SEO, Ads, accounting for webshops), wouldn't you already be too late on these market places?

[melomal]

This is the definition of an indie hacker. They take established products/tools and then strip them to improve one area and sell it onto other indie hackers at an 'affordable' price which requires you to sell your soul for $8 per month.

Imagine having 10 paying customers giving you $80 per month. You need to provide some level of support, deal with charge backs which can get you MATCH banned so payment processing becomes near enough impossible, update the product and market it too.

[mattmanser]

The point is to have a few hundred, or thousand. If it's so niche it only appeals to 10 customers, then see if you can charge $800 p/m or move on.

[melomal]

The trouble with a few hundred customers is the customer service side of operations. Indie hackers are lean machines and having to support a large customer base requires more tasks. Managing churn is also another problem area as you grow which generally requires product development. You quickly lose the indie hacker feels once you get to 50 customers I would say.

[mattmanser]

One product I made had roughly a hundred companies using it, I got one email in 3 years.

So, um, no.

One of my present products has over 10,000 users (b2c rather than b2b), we get a support email every couple of months.

Really depends on your product I guess, or you've never actually done it and are pulling figures out of your ass.

[khuknows]

There could be categories of things people want without many solutions in some marketplaces. For example, in the Hubspot marketplace, there are many WhatsApp widgets in their marketplace. Someone made one for the Pipedrive marketplace and it’s doing very well. There would be similar missing apps for Pipedrive, or there would be other platforms where a WhatsApp widget could do well.

[kbos87]

This! It isn't hard to look at what is successful in, say, the Salesforce App Exchange and apply that concept for HubSpot. Huge opportunity there.

[wim]

Yes, this is definitely something to keep in mind. Especially when bootstrapping (what the post seems to be aimed at), building integrations with a marketplace can be a significant time investment, at the expense of working on other marketing or product improvements. Established marketplaces for popular categories are going to see diminished returns pretty quickly.

For example, we were one of the first to integrate with the Google Workspace Marketplace when it launched many years ago (called Google Apps Marketplace back then). It brought us a lot of leads in the early days. Today, discoverability has become a real problem. The "luck"-component in being featured in any search result or when browsing the marketplace is now so large that I'm not sure if for new products it would still outweigh the work of building the integration and keeping up to date with inevitable breaking API changes.

Overall it can be an amazing channel for growth though, so it's mostly about carefully picking one where customers might find you, rather than just going for something that looks promising because it's big. There's a big first-mover advantage when launching on a newish platform (and as the list proves, there's many new ones).

[danlugo92]

Go find an unsolved problem that doesn't affect fortune 500 companies but smaller ones, solve it, get paid.

[albertgoeswoof]

Better to be number #25 in a product category with millions of dollars in spend / customers than #1 in a category with nothing

[heyoo]

No. I created an app in one of these (a year ago). I have 5 serious competitors. Each are decent apps that have been in the game longer than mine - mine is not necessarily better, just with a slightly different angle.

It has about $3.5k MRR, is still growing and I spend maybe 5-10 hours a month on it.

Also, I had no brand before that.

[randomchars]

Sounds cool! Mind sharing what are you working on, or at least the rough space you're in?

Also, how did you start marketing it/getting your first users?

[cosmodisk]

Not necessarily. Also, there are lots of big players that don't care about small clients with their 'minimum 50 licences' approach. That's where the opportunities are.

[callamdelaney]

Not necessarily. A good example is myspace / facebook.