1,944 channel plays, honest outcomes included
Most channel advice only counts the wins. These journeys document the losses too: per channel, how many documented attempts worked, how many explicitly did not, and the founders' own words on why.
Based on 462 documented journeys · data regenerated 2026-08-31
Success rate by channel
Share of resolved plays that worked (attempts still running or abandoned early are excluded from the rate, shown in the counts):
The paid ads problem
Paid acquisition is the clearest negative result in the dataset: 140 documented plays, 40 explicit failures, a 40% success rate on resolved attempts. The founders who tried it, in their own words:
“Paid ads without a clear funnel are just donations to Google/Meta”
Alexander Belogubov, RefgrowIndie Hackers: "How I got my first 33 paying customers for my SaaS" (AlexBelogubov)“I don’t run paid ads, nor am I particularly active on social media”
Eric Alli, LayeredCraftMy Road To 20k MRR: Combining Digital Products with Productized-Services (Eric Alli's personal Medium post)What working looks like
“via word of mouth more people start using the tool, and some percentage of them become customers.”
Adam Wathan, Tailwind CSSIndie Hackers AMA: "I'm Adam Wathan, I created Tailwind CSS and built a multi-million dollar business around it. AMA!"“what i care about is getting links from high authority sites to boost my domain rating and help all my content rank”
Adam Enfroy, AdamEnfroy.comAdam Enfroy YouTube: "I published 85 guest posts… here's how"“We reached the #1 spot within the first 5 minutes for at least 9 hours.”
Adriaan van Rossum, Simple AnalyticsSimple Analytics blog — "How we hit our $30k ARR milestone"“the biggest thing we had going for us was the trust in the community we built when leading up to launching Refactoring UI”
Adam Wathan, Tailwind CSSIndie Hackers AMA: "I'm Adam Wathan, I created Tailwind CSS and built a multi-million dollar business around it. AMA!"When each channel gets used
Plays by funnel stage. Channels are not interchangeable across time: communities and launches dominate early, compounding channels take over at scale.
| Channel | Pre-launch | Launch | First customers | Scaling |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Word of mouth | 18 | 39 | 37 | 191 |
| SEO / Content | 18 | 20 | 16 | 181 |
| Communities | 44 | 113 | 46 | 90 |
| Twitter / X | 37 | 72 | 25 | 83 |
| Product Hunt | 1 | 91 | 7 | 22 |
| Cold outreach | 11 | 7 | 31 | 25 |
| Paid ads | 7 | 13 | 20 | 100 |
Shifting channel mix
Primary-channel share among journeys starting 2020 or later, against the older cohort:
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