ReplyDaddy

Over the last 1 year i built two small projects one called shipstation.ai ( build your online portfolio in minutes ) & Teacherop.com ( Still live, my core product which i aim to grow ) - which is an adaptive learning platform, marketing these products as an indie hacker i had not a lot of choices, and reddit seemed to be a good place you can market for free, but it was really time consuming and frustrating when comments/posts were removed because i missed reading / understanding one rule of the subreddit, finding the right places to engage, so i tried out tools like replyguy, then replydude both of them now completely broken the pages don't even load, so as any other sane indie hacker would do i went ahead and built my own simple scripts which i could run in my ide, these scripts would find me relevant posts to engage with and help me draft replies so i can quickly capture the opportunities.

For teacherOP within two weeks i was able to get 124 new user signups just via reddit and i was shocked! Then I thought i can build a better more ethical version of replyguy, where i dont auto comment / auto post to reddit which is a spammy practice and most likely will lead to your account getting banned, so i quickly turned my simple python scripts into a small flask + jinja app, which would run on my local host and not hosted online, went to godaddy, and thought why not replydaddy because daddy knows best and he will do better, built a landind page explaining the tool, with a lifetime plan of $199, where you can pay and download replydaddy software on your own system, open an IDE, setup and run in 10 minutes, within a week I got 2 sales.

When i got those 2 sales, it felt like magic, that i have discovered a real pain point, so i decided that now i need to up my game, build a webhosted version which is easy to use, as the first version could only be used by developers due to the setup process, so i listed down the core functionalities, finding the most relevant hot leads, brand analysis and context building to draft very valid replies for these posts and a post validator / generator, which will help you build reddit posts which never get banned it would automatically check your profile for karma, age, check the subreddit rules, let you know if you are even allowed to post, if you are allowed help you build a post which is compliant with all the subreddit rules available. Turned my simple flask + jinja template into a react + flask app, hosted on a ioflood server, and development is an ongoing process after the MVP version i keep improving it with the feedback of my current paying users.

When i decided that I will turn the small flask version into a full fleged app, I started posting my journey on twitter a 96 hour marathon to build the app, with real time updates, this helped me gain atleast 150 geniuene followers over just one week, once the app was live started posting about it where ever i could, reply to people on twitter, post about how replydaddy is different, how should people treat reddit, why they should not spam or use tools which auto comment and auto post, started posting on linkedin and within one week i launched my product on uneed.best where i was able to gather enough love and win best product of the day and second best product of the week, this got me almost 30 new signups, and demo calls were booked, few of which i was able to convert to paying users, and again marketing is like going to the gym you gotta do it everyday, i have just begin - if i do this everyday for atleast a year i am sure i can reach 2-3K MRR minimum, maybe more.

MVPs should be broken and small. You should not find free users, only paid users, there is no better validation than paying users. If there are similar tools in the market already doing revenue thats a big plus because there is a real problem in my case replyguy was doing upwards of 10k mrr. Marketing is everything, my tool still has bugs, doesn't work sometimes, but i keep working on improving that, it doesnt stop me from marketing my product.