Marketing channels for a solo founder

TL;DR

• Most of Marc Lou’s channels were free; paid channels (Meta ads, generous affiliate commissions) only made sense after a product already converted.
• Fastest money with no audience: cold email (one $199/month customer per day from 20 emails). Best long-term ROI: a personal brand.
• Launch channels (Hacker News, Reddit, Product Hunt) give spikes; free tools and programmatic SEO give compounding traffic.
• Pick the channel that does not feel like marketing to you — Marc burned out in 2018 doing cold email; free tools, pSEO and fun launch videos kept him going.
• Judge fit quickly: after ~1,000 visitors he says he can tell whether a product has potential.

Details

Marc Lou says he tried every channel he could find while broke and audience-less; ten of eleven still bring revenue.¹ His own scoring (cost / effort / ROI) and evidence:

Channel	Cost / effort	Marc’s evidence	Best for
Cold email	~$0 / low-medium	~$80k for a 2018 SaaS, no ad spend	B2B with findable owners → Cold email outreach for a small B2B SaaS
Free tools	$0 / low	LogoFast (3-day build) → $10k+ for his course	Anything → Free tools as marketing for a paid product ("engineering as marketing")
Affiliates	commission / low	$50k+ across products	Products that already sell → Setting up an affiliate program for a SaaS or digital product
Hacker News	$0 / minutes	25,000+ visitors total	Dev tools, trendy tech → Launching on Hacker News (Show HN) and Reddit
Cold calls	$0 / high	—	Learning sales psychology
Programmatic SEO	$0 / medium	50,000+ visitors	Searchable intent → Programmatic and content SEO for indie products
Meta ads	significant / significant	~$1.4k spend, ~$48 per purchase, ~$6k revenue in a month	Converting products only
Personal brand	$0 / lots of time	Twitter 160k → 2nd traffic source after direct	Long term → Building in public — personal brand and live-coding streams for solo founders
Reddit	$0 / low	one post → 50,000 visitors in a day	Stories, free tools
Directories	$0–paid / low	20+ Product Hunt launches	Any launch → Product Hunt and launch directories for indie products
YouTube live	$0 / low	50k views on a 3-hour stream	Dev and B2C apps

Table sources: cold email¹, free tools², affiliates and HN³, pSEO⁴, Meta ads⁵, personal brand⁶, Reddit⁷, directories⁸, live⁹.

Meta ads, Marc’s minimum setup: install the pixel (check with Meta Pixel Helper), track only the purchase event (fired on the post-payment page), start with retargeting of past visitors rather than cold audiences, and adapt proven ad templates (Notes-app screenshot, memes, “competitors do it wrong / we do it right”) instead of designing from scratch.⁵¹⁰

Cold calls are on the list as a training ground rather than a scale channel: script the opener and objections with ChatGPT, research the owner’s name and a hook (bad reviews, fully booked) first.¹¹

Founder–channel fit. Marc says ByeDispute (Stripe dispute prevention) needed cold email to big companies or fear-based marketing, neither of which he wanted to do, so he under-grew it. WorkbookPDF (language workbooks) got ~100 SEO clicks a day but he thinks it belongs on TikTok-style social, and the same goes for his habit tracker.¹²¹³

Disagreements / caveats

• Every number is self-reported by one creator whose audience (160k+ Twitter, 120k+ YouTube by 2025) boosts later launches; early-stage founders should expect smaller spikes.
• Marc ranks cold email as “boring but fastest”, yet it is also what burned him out — the ROI ranking and his personal recommendation differ.
• Channel numbers date from 2018–2025. In 2026 Marc notes indie hackers report declining Google traffic (see Programmatic and content SEO for indie products).

See also

• What successful indie product case studies have in common (2025–26) — what channels the case-study founders actually used
• Should we add a new ad channel? Scale, return, effort — and small platform syndrome — when testing a paid channel is worth it
• Marc Lou

Footnotes

1. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 00:00 — Marc Lou ↩ ↩²

2. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 04:36 — Marc Lou ↩

3. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 12:35 — Marc Lou ↩

4. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 17:18 — Marc Lou ↩

5. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 20:21 — Marc Lou ↩ ↩²

6. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 24:59 — Marc Lou ↩

7. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 28:04 — Marc Lou ↩

8. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 31:12 — Marc Lou ↩

9. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 34:19 — Marc Lou ↩

10. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 23:27 — Marc Lou ↩

11. How I made $2,000,000 with my side projects @ 17:18 — Marc Lou ↩

12. I made these 10 SaaS (and earned $237,631) @ 11:29 — Marc Lou ↩

13. I made these 10 SaaS (and earned $237,631) @ 09:06 — Marc Lou ↩