He shipped the product on Product Hunt the same weekend he built it and recruited a fellow Product Hunt member with about 1,000 followers to hunt it, since he had no audience himself.

“I tweeted at a fellow PH member who had around 1K followers to see if he would by chance hunt my product.”

He attributes the durability to the Product Hunt related-products section: once the launch did well, DesignJoy kept surfacing next to other design products and kept converting years later.

“Although my product was featured 2.5 years ago, PH still continues to drive conversions for me, and I assume it always will.”

He submitted the DesignJoy landing page to every landing page inspiration site he could find, and resubmitted after every significant redesign.

“I made sure to submit my landing page to every landing page inspiration site I could find.”

Both versions of his landing page ended up as all-time most popular on Land-book, which is what kept the referrals coming. He is explicit that the channel only works if the page itself is strong.

“both iterations of my landing page have been featured as the most popular of all time”

He sent cold emails through HubSpot's free CRM and used it to track opens and clicks and to run follow-up sequences.

“I use Hubspot’s free CRM to send these cold emails.”

He rates it as a modest but real contributor rather than a growth engine, and puts the result down to how the intro email is written and who inside the company it goes to.

“Although I don’t see tremendous success from this strategy, it has no doubt driven thousands of dollars in revenue”

He built small free side projects in a day or two, linked them back to DesignJoy, and launched those on Product Hunt and the inspiration sites as well. Scribbbles passed 20,000 downloads.

“For example, I built scribbbles.design in 24 hours.”

The side projects gave him a second thing to launch and to get featured with, so they pulled in referral traffic he would not otherwise have had.

“even though I’m not promoting DesignJoy directly, I receive a fair amount of referral traffic from these side projects”

A Webflow site he built for Dave Gerhardt, then a well known marketing figure, led Gerhardt to promote DesignJoy to his network, and the leads did not stop.

“Recently had the privilege of doing a Webflow site for the great Dave Gerhardt, former CMO of Drift.”

He ties word of mouth directly to output quality rather than to any promotional tactic.

“word-of-mouth marketing is no.freakin.joke. Do good work and people will be busting down the doors to work with you”

He posted revenue updates and answered questions on Indie Hackers rather than running any paid acquisition, and clients came out of those threads and out of recommendations elsewhere on the site.

“My clients come from recommendations on sites like Indie Hackers”

He notes the effect held even though he posted only occasionally.

“Most clients actually find me right here despite the fact that I don’t post a whole lot!”

He reached the Hacker News front page in May 2020 and counted it among the events behind that year's growth. He does not break out what it delivered.

“In May of this year, I was fortunate enough to make it to the front page of Hacker News.”

He joined Twitter in early 2022 and posted a behind the scenes look at running a one-person agency, in the build in public style.

“I've taken the "build in public" mentality over to the network and it seems very well perceived.”

The transparency itself generated the demand; within six weeks it outranked every channel he had used before, and the overflow forced him into a waitlist and a price increase.

“It's quickly become the biggest lead generating source to date, no question.”

He formalised the referrals he was already getting into a self-serve affiliate program on Rewardful in December 2020, so affiliates could sign up without going through him.

“Just this month I officially launched an affiliate program, and the same day I did I made over $1,500.”