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Lead generation for indie hackers

No sales team. No ad budget. Twenty spare minutes a day. Here's how solo founders find real customers from public posts — without becoming a spammer.

The indie hacker's marketing problem isn't reach, it's time. You can't run outbound sequences, you won't outbid anyone on ads, and every hour on marketing is an hour not building. The one channel that fits: talking to people who are already asking for what you built.

Why "reply guy" marketing actually works at this scale

  • You need tens of customers, not thousands. A handful of good conversations a week compounds fast at indie scale.
  • Founder replies convert. "I built a tool for exactly this" from the actual builder outperforms any funnel — people love buying from makers.
  • It's free. The cost is attention, which is exactly what tooling can subsidize.

The trap: doing it manually

Manual monitoring fails for indies precisely because time is the scarcest resource: checking HN and Bluesky daily, filtering noise, researching posters, drafting replies. Most people quit within two weeks — usually right before it would have paid off.

A 20-minute daily loop with LeadSleuth

  1. Describe your product once in plain language — "screenshot API for indie SaaS developers" is enough. LeadSleuth parses it into an ICP.
  2. Get a scored list daily. Scans of Hacker News and Bluesky (Reddit planned, pending API approval) surface posts with genuine buying intent; borderline ones go to a watch tier so you can judge them yourself.
  3. Read the dossier, not ten tabs. Each high-intent lead comes researched: who they are, why they fit, evidence with citations and confidence levels.
  4. Edit the draft reply and send it yourself. The draft quotes their post; you add your voice. LeadSleuth never posts or emails on your behalf.

Indie-friendly economics

LeadSleuth is free while in beta (fair-use dossier quota of 10 a day) — see pricing. No credit card, and your data can be deleted any time.

Keep it human

Communities can smell automation. Use the research to be more personal, not less: reference their actual constraint, admit what your product doesn't do, and skip leads where you're not a real fit. Ten honest replies beat a hundred templated ones.

Try LeadSleuth free. Describe your product and ICP once — get daily, sourced dossiers on people publicly asking for what you sell. Free while in beta, no credit card (see pricing). Start now →

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