The "indie hacker" part is underselling the value of hooking into these marketplaces.<p>The Atlassian marketplace is how we're able to make draw.io/diagrams.net free everywhere else. We don't have to handle any licensing or billing and it's a commercial market where users expect to pay.<p>We generate 8 digits annually there with 5FTE people, you can build a medium sized company around just one of these marketplaces.
I work directly with founders of B2B SaaS (run a design a [1] UI/UX design company with a focus on dev teams) which gives me a good idea of the landscape.<p>The biggest opportunities seem to be in the edtech space, remote working and any other type of category which facilitates remote work.<p>If you are looking for opportunities, try to map out where your skills and interest can contribute in a remote / wfh economy.<p>I’ve seen a number of companies scramble to keep up with growth. Others doubled revenue.<p>[1] <a href="https://fairpixels.pro" rel="nofollow">https://fairpixels.pro</a>
I work with Salesforce,so I'm quite familiar with the ecosystem. I think a lot people on HN would have a hard time believing the kind of apps that exist on AppExchange and the number of companies that are willing to spend money on them.
I was looking through the Shopify marketplace a while back and I had the thought that channel partnerships/marketing is probably an amazing way to bootstrap a SaaS. Glad to see someone else had the same idea and did the due diligence to collect a good chunk of these. I'm bootstrapping something consumer facing now, but I've of course thought about "pivoting to B2B" if the opportunity plays out. It's nice to remember that these channels provide ample concrete space to help figure out the distribution side of things beyond paid acquisition. Now paid acquisition is great and all for VC backed companies, but for indie hackers, listening to and iterating /based/ off of the channel itself seems to be a real lifeline. You don't have to worry about the marginal acquisition costs that would otherwise price you out of the game entirely.<p>Looking at a couple of comments here, I'm seeing some eye popping figures from folks who pulled off using channel marketing for their SaaS. It's very heartening to see.
Correct me if I'm wrong but unless you're already an established brand that people actively seek out, or part of the first X listings in a category of a thing everyone wants (i.e. SEO, Ads, accounting for webshops), wouldn't you already be too late on these market places?
We do a lot of work with SaaS businesses helping them with product design and if needed capital and development.<p>Our primary work is in remote work for non-desktop people and educational/video space plus live ecommerce which seems to be the areas that are really thriving right now.<p>Even if covid passes organizations will still be looking for tools that makes them resillient to that kind of disruption again.<p>So plenty of areas to dig into.<p>(P.s. If you have ideas and are looking for product design or seed capital just DM me would love to talk with you)
Thank you for the link! Really helpful.<p>We are already listed on Slack marketplace and I can say that it allowed us to onboard several first users and still we are getting organic installs every day.<p>But one should mention that in order for such marketplace listings to be efficient you still have to work on SEO and other marketing channels.
I've been curating remote jobs from hundreds of remote job boards and directly sending it to job seekers to help during their job search. I'm trying to see how can I use this data to do B2B sales. Is there a market place that I can submit the remote jobs data that can be helpful.
I would add Bitly in Marketing as well. They have more than $100 million revenue per year. Link shortening has got a bad rap but there is plenty of demand for branded links.<p>I have spent last few months talking to unsatisfied customers of Bitly and following this space and I see a general disappointment with UX, lack of flexibility and high costs associated with the platform.<p>My service <a href="https://blanq.io" rel="nofollow">https://blanq.io</a> has tried to address these but I feel there is plenty of space left for more players to enter in. It is relatively easy to get started and scale the service. The barrier of entry is quite low.<p>But you would need to differentiate your platform - there are like a 1000 clones of Bitly that pretty much do the same.
I've found for my business marketplaces are key to get exposure to your potential users.<p>A few more you might add are package managers, such as NPM. If you have a dev focused company and provide SDKs, those are great places where your users can find you.
I posted my add-on in Heroku Marketplace over a year ago <a href="https://elements.heroku.com/addons/knapsack-pro" rel="nofollow">https://elements.heroku.com/addons/knapsack-pro</a> and did not see much organic leads from the marketplace itself.<p>Anyone using Heroku Marketplace as well? Any ideas how did you approach promoting your add-on? Thanks.