Yep. Been working on Polypane full time since 2019 as a solo developer. Electron based, available on mac, windows and linux, in x64 and arm versions. Its subscription based and I release a new update roughly every month.
It was a side project before that but I started charging for it when I went full time.
Essentially content marketing, which drives both social sharing and SEO. It helps that I enjoy writing articles! And word-of-mouth of course.
I have tried nearly everything but couldn’t get a lot of things to work (ads are Hard Mode when over half your target audience has an ad blocker!) I’m also trying to do a lot of public speaking, affiliates and ‘engineering as marketing’ (releasing free tools) and they’re okay, but definitely not as effective as content marketing.
Thanks! Is it mainly the blog/SEO or do you do social also? Sorry for so many questions I'm just giving some serious thought to going solo lately and trying to see what's been successful for others.
I share what I write about on social, and share features as I release them or sometimes while I work on them, but I don’t think that counts as ‘doing social’. I do no retargeting or other type of social ads. Just post what I like on twitter and linkedin.
There isn’t a definitive way to do things and a lot is based on your target audience so I doubt much of what you ‘learn’ ends up being applicable. Just have to try and finds something that works that you like!
It was a side project before that but I started charging for it when I went full time.
https://polypane.app