Allen repeatedly submitted new founder interviews to Hacker News over many months, testing different titles and framings to see what the HN audience would upvote; not every submission landed.

“I've made a ton of submissions in the past 8 months and experimented with various combinations of stories/titles that the HN audience might like”

Requiring every interviewed founder to share real revenue numbers gave each story the kind of concrete, provable detail the HN audience specifically wanted, which is also what got Allen the idea for the site in the first place.

“an essential element of Indie Hackers is that I require companies to share revenue numbers, because it really adds context to their stories”

A weekly newsletter recapping new interviews, sent every Thursday, with a subscribe call-to-action added at the bottom of each interview.

“It has really great open (53.5%) and click (21.3%) rates, so it drives a good amount of traffic to the site every Thursday.”

Allen grew both his personal Twitter following and the @IndieHackers account in parallel with the newsletter, explicitly as an owned-audience channel he could control.

“In addition to the newsletter, I've also been growing my Twitter audience, where I recently broke 1,100 followers on”

Allen admits he had essentially no SEO strategy at this point and had done little to promote the small amount of blog content he'd written.

“I barely know anything about SEO yet, I've written only a tiny amount of content, and I've done very little to publicize it.”