Annie Yang

your favorite indie hacker on X.

Building ViralFarm - 1 link, 30 viral posts

Ex-quant dev@Hedge Fund, @columbia @uofwaterloo

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

Day 1 of #marketinpublic (and day 10 of #buildinpublic)

My challenge over the next 30 days:
> Choose ONE channel (mine is Reddit)
> Choose ONE specific ICP (mine is consumer founders with <$50K lifetime revenue)
> Choose ONE Goal (mine is 1 paying user)
> Report what you've accomplished ONCE per day

Rinse and repeat every 30 days but 10x your paying users each month. Keep going until you've built a billion dollar company.

Comment if you want to join this challenge and keep yourselves accountable with me 🤩 i'll create a discord or something

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@begade_suhas @X @ravikiran_dev7 @devsDefaulter congrats!! you got this

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@jananadiw Love it

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

clocking into work everyday as an indie hacker = posting on X

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@KevinFengX Great way to think about it

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@abdolamunir less building more tweeting 😅

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@QuietFSoftware haha yess

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@beatsentropy 💯

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@i_mika_el I do too but I think that’s an issue 🤣

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@helperone_ai hmm not sure what you mean by that

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

300+ users, 150+ waitlist signups within 24 hours, and 10s of user interviews from Reddit

here's my full guide so YOU TOO can start getting users from Reddit

To start, you should treat each subreddit like a community, instead of just a way to promote your tool.

This way you’ll be able to find creative ways to connect with each subreddit to get what you need

Here are my tips:
1) speak to a painful problem: you should be intimately familiar with the pain point you're solving, and be able to write passionately about it.

For example - I was a quant dev, and i was building a compensation transparency table for high finance/quants. i was able to speak a ton to this problem (no salary transparency, wildly different bonuses, nothing solved this problem currently) and this helped me get 300+ people to fill out a form before i even started building the website

The other time i did this, i was building an automated job application tool for people who were having trouble finding a job. I talked about the amount of time it took to apply to each job, and how people had to apply to hundreds of jobs in this economy. I posted something along these lines to a few different groups and i got 150+ waitlist signups within 24 hours.

you should speak about the problem as passionately and intimately as possible

2) offer a TON of value: Create posts or respond to comments with pure value (do NOT promote your tool). Then when people respond, you can message them privately and continue the conversation from there. Not everyone will respond to your DM, but some will. Linking your tool directly will likely get you banned from many subreddits. Reddit has gotten stricter with this in the past few years

3) offer your tool as a service:
you have to get pretty creative with this. you can take the premise of the tool you're building and offer it as a personal service you want to provide, and ask the community where you should go to find clients. a ton of users (if you're building something people actually need) will comment that they would like to work with you, and from there you can private DM each user and get user interviews from there. I was able to gauge interest and get a ton of user interviews by doing this a few times.

3) Pretend you're doing research:
put out a survey and offer a $5 gift card as a reward to anyone who is willing to do an interview. this works because people will come in to the zoom meetings ready to answer your research questions, but don't expect these ones to convert to paying users and treat this as informational only. you may still be blocked for this but it worked for me.

it is VERY important it does not sound like you're promoting a tool you've already built and are trying to profit from unless it's in subreddits like r/sideproject etc. Redditors respond a lot better when questions are phrased more as research/need advice.

i would treat reddit as a place where you can look for problems people are having, discuss, and get your INITIAL users from, not as a way to repeatedly scale

Hope you try this out and hope this can help you find your first users! :D

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@sri9s sameee and every terminal command

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@MeetAiqi I love this use case 🤣 gotta try it sometime

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

just curious:

what’s the most useful thing you use AI for today?

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@CaptainInsightX become a farmer

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@0xPrajwal_ omg new form unlocked

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@dprophecyguy Nice creative use of AI - what app did you use?

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@natan_RIAL Which llm do you use?

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@PKodmad Samee

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@theindiebuild Thanks! Following already :)

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@JustJerry121 It’s hard for me to compare since they were for different websites but I learned from a lot about user behavior from both

The service offer post brought in more hair-on-fire people where if I forgot to respond they would message me again to remind me.

[Annie Yang @annieqyang]

@tunguz Still have no idea what they do