If you ship one product a year, you can afford a big launch for it. If you ship a game, two small apps and a book every quarter, you can’t — and you shouldn’t try. Marketing many small products needs a different shape.
Market the maker, not each product
Each new product starting from zero followers is exhausting and slow. Instead, build one audience around a theme — building many things with AI, games for kids, tools for dog owners — and treat every product as a new thing to tell that audience.
That means:
- One home. A site or profile where all your products live and link to each other.
- One list. An email list or feed that people join for the theme, not for one app.
- Cross-links. Every product mentions the others where it makes sense. A reader of your dog-training book is a likely user of your dog-training app.
Build in public with your real process
You already have content most marketers don’t: the actual process. Phases, releases, what the agent got wrong, what you cut. Share it:
- A short post when a version ships, taken straight from the changelog — see ship small versions.
- The won’t-do list and why — people love seeing what you chose not to build.
- A weekly snapshot of all your projects and where each one is stuck.
Share numbers you are comfortable sharing and never make them up. Honest small numbers build more trust than vague big claims.
One page that answers three questions
Every product needs one page — a landing page or a store listing — that answers, above the fold:
- Who is it for? Be narrow. “Indie devs running 5–10 repos with AI agents” beats “developers”.
- What one problem does it solve? In the reader’s words, not yours.
- What does it look like? A real screenshot or short video, not an abstract illustration.
For store listings, this is most of App Store Optimization: a title and subtitle with the words people actually search, and first screenshots that show the product doing its one job. Write the listing during the build, not after — it forces you to state the promise of the version.
Honest positioning converts
Say who the product is not for. “Not a team kanban. Not a full git client. Desktop only.” It feels like losing customers; in practice it filters out the ones who would have asked for a refund, and it makes the claims you do make more believable.
The same goes for status: say “Windows version not tested yet” rather than hiding it. Honesty is cheap marketing that competitors with bigger budgets often can’t match.
Reuse the launch, don’t reinvent it
Keep a launch checklist and run it for every product: listing, screenshots, one post in each community you actually belong to, update your home page, email your list. The tenth launch should take an afternoon.
Pick ideas with marketing in mind, too — when you brainstorm, ask which ideas your existing audience would want.
Where ShotMatic fits
Marketing tasks are tasks: a listing to write, screenshots to capture, a post to publish. Put them on the same board as the code, as phases of each project, so a finished build doesn’t sit unlaunched for weeks. With many products, running them in parallel includes running their launches.
