Uneed: From 100 to 42 000 monthly users

Uneed

Hello you 👋,

These last few weeks have been very intense in terms of indie making. My oldest project, Uneed, has finally taken off!

Uneed is a hand-picked and sorted list of tools, to which I have been adding a new tool every day for almost three years. And for several weeks now, thousands of visitors have been coming every day. Some figures:

• 1 300 accounts created.
• 752: tools added.
• ~90: Tools currently in the waiting line.
• 1 300+: Subscribers to the weekly newsletter.
• 42 000+: Visitors in the past 30 days.

In this post, I will share with you the different strategies I have implemented over the last three years.

Be careful though, there is no miracle recipe! The goal is to put all the chances on your side so that one day, enough people will hear about your work and that word of mouth will start to work.

Consistency

I imagine you've all heard about this: consistency is key.

For Uneed, I used to take 2 minutes a day to add a new tool to Uneed. From time to time, I would mention Uneed in a tweet, or make a post on Reddit. I also talked about it to my colleagues, my friends...

I never expected to make a living with Uneed, but it didn't cost me much to maintain the project. So I did it.

Backlinks

Over time, Uneed has built a real network of backlinks. Blogs started talking about it, my reddit posts were seen from time to time, some people mentioned the tool in Facebook groups, others talked about it in videos.

There are also a lot of links from my own websites that point to Uneed.

But it also works the other way around! The strength of Uneed is its many links to the websites of the tools that are listed. Site administrators can see in their analytics tools that some visitors come from "uneed.best".

Building a good network of backlinks takes time. Don't hesitate to post your work on sites that can showcase it: Product Hunt, BetaList, etc. You can also make sure to get mentioned in newsletters!

Simplicity

In three years, I have added very few features to Uneed. I focused on improving the existing: I redesigned several times based on user feedback. But the core of the tool is still there, and is VERY simple: allow visitors to access the tools right away.

There is no lack of ideas, I have a long list of things I could add to Uneed. But I'm always careful that it doesn't interfere with its ease of use.

Keeping the visitors coming back

It's one of the hardest things. You have several solutions:

• The newsletter. Very effective! It can be useful even for people who don't open your emails. Simply to see the name of your website displayed allows them to remember that it exists.
• Social networks. For each tool added to Uneed, a tweet is automatically sent (and soon an instagram post!). It's a way to let people discover new tools, but also to tell them "hello, I exist!"
• Branding. "Uneed" is effective, simple and the message is clear.

That's all for today. See you soon on Uneed 🙏

NB: Our analytics are public