Strategy guides

Go-to-market plans, channel scorecards and marketing on no budget, written for founders doing it alone.

14 guides

Strategy

How Often Should You Launch? A Cadence That Holds

How often should you launch a product? What platforms allow, which milestones earn a launch, a cadence for one product or a portfolio, and a 12-month calendar.

Oct 29, 20269 min read

Strategy

Weekly Marketing Routine for Founders: 2, 5 and 10 Hour Plans

A weekly marketing routine for founders at three time budgets: 2, 5 and 10 hours. Five recurring jobs, a block schedule, and what to drop first on a bad week.

Oct 28, 20269 min read

Strategy

How to Shut Down a SaaS Product (Without Burning Anyone)

How to shut down a SaaS product well: a shutdown timeline with what you owe users at each step, data export and refunds, the shutdown post, and the assets to keep.

Oct 27, 20269 min read

Strategy

How to Restart a Stalled Side Project: Find the Stuck Decision

How to restart a stalled side project: a four-cause stall diagnostic, the stuck decision you have been avoiding, a two-hour restart, and when to close it instead.

Oct 23, 20269 min read

Strategy

Positioning vs Messaging: Which Half of Your Pitch Is Broken?

The difference between positioning and messaging in one sentence, plus a symptom-to-cause table that shows which one is failing and why rewriting your copy rarely fixes it.

Oct 21, 20268 min read

Strategy

Positioning for Solo Founders: Pick the Shelf First

Startup positioning for a solo founder launching into a category that barely exists: a worksheet built on the competitive-alternative question, not a fill-in-the-blank statement.

Oct 20, 20269 min read

Strategy

Free Marketing Tools for Startups: The $0 Stack

A $0 marketing stack for solo founders covering research, content, email, social proof and analytics, plus a verified table of exactly where each free tier stops.

Aug 27, 202612 min read

A solo founder standing at a glowing amber planning wall running a single 90-day marketing plan laid out as a three-phase Gantt chart of horizontal amber bars labeled 1-30, 31-60, and 61-90 — foundation blocks and a rising article stack accumulating over the first phase, a review star, a testimonial card, and a backlink chain accumulating over the second, and a launch rocket lifting off a finished base over the third as a crowd of other founders arrives — with amber threads connecting the founder to that network of peers and feeding help into every phase, illustrating that a solo founder's quarter runs foundations first, then authority, then the launch spike, powered throughout by favors traded with other founders.

Strategy

90-Day Startup Marketing Plan: A Template for Founders

A 90-day startup marketing plan built for one person with no budget — a week-by-week schedule you can actually run, with every task linked to its full playbook.

Jul 30, 202611 min read

A solo founder standing at a glowing amber fork in the road deciding whether to run paid ads — on one side a coin-fed ad meter burning through a small budget into a crowd of strangers who scatter the moment the meter stops, with nothing left behind, and on the other side the same founder trading hours with a network of peers along amber threads that harden into permanent assets: a review card, a backlink, a testimonial, and a search listing that keeps standing after the spend ends — with a small decision-tree diagram floating between the two paths, illustrating that for a bootstrapped startup before product-market fit, rented attention resets to zero while traded effort compounds.

Strategy

Paid Ads for Bootstrapped Startups: Do They Work?

Do paid ads work for bootstrapped startups? Rarely before product-market fit. The auction math, the honest exceptions, and a decision tree to settle it.

Jul 29, 202610 min read

Strategy

Marketing Channels for Indie Hackers: The 2026 Scorecard

The full marketing-channel menu ranked for a one-person team — by effort, time-to-payoff, and whether it compounds. A scorecard, not another list of 7 tips.

Jul 24, 202611 min read

A solo founder standing at the center of four glowing amber lanes labeled Content, Community, Reciprocity, and Founder-as-product, connected by amber threads to a network of other founders — illustrating the four modes of founder-led marketing.

Strategy

Founder-Led Marketing Explained: A Guide for Solo Founders

Founder-led marketing is using your own voice and credibility as the channel. Here's the clean definition, the four modes, a maturity ladder, and how to do it with no personal brand.

Jun 23, 20269 min read

A solo founder choosing between two glowing paths — a compounding amber tree growing from content, reviews, and backlinks on one side, and a fading spark of paid ads and one-off posts on the other — connected by amber threads to other founders trading favors.

Strategy

SaaS Marketing on No Budget: The Honest Playbook

Marketing a SaaS on no budget isn't a money problem — it's a time problem. Here's which free channels compound, which evaporate, and how to turn effort into growth.

Jun 17, 202610 min read

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