First indie product analytics campaign checklist

A first indie product analytics campaign at founder scale. Numbered so you can stop lying to yourself about which step you skipped.

Confirm a working project they can paste a snippet into tonight, not a sales call actually closes. Creators cannot fix packaging.
Write the avatar in a sentence: US English indie hacker, 25-38, already bounced off GA4 and a Mixpanel they never instrumented, watches ‘GA4 is unusable’ and ‘I shipped and I have no idea who signed up’ videos after a launch night.
Write the problem in their mouth: I shipped at 11pm and I still cannot tell you how many people signed up.
Write what they already quit: GA4 they cannot read, Mixpanel they never finished, and a CSV of Stripe they pasted into Notion.
Write what they watch: GA4 hate, ‘I shipped with no analytics’, Plausible-vs-Posthog arguments, launch-night refreshers.
Write the reject: the growth Twitter thread-lord selling a $499 funnel course.
Write adjacent so the phone does not smear: launch-night refresh, privacy-friendly pageviews, not enterprise CDP theater.
Put that sentence into the brief
Scroll as them on a fresh Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube account. Example to look for: someone clicking through GA4 for four minutes and still not knowing today’s signups. Signal: the same GA4-hate face two launch nights in a row.
Keep a 50k average-view floor. Below that, $700 a post for 1k views is a money sink.
Skip #buildinpublic as a roster method.
Email. The contact is usually in a bio that is just a first-name at gmail, or a tiny indie site contact page. Name a real video. Ask for the phone number.
If they won’t give a number, move on. Build-in-public accounts quote newsletter-sponsorship rates for a mention.
On the call, Minimum View Guarantee. Example: $2000 / 4 posts / 1M views. Talent extra.
Send the contract while the yes is still warm. Scout $1,500 / Outreach $2,500 / Dealmaker $5,000.
A public signup with a snippet, no demo call.
Tell them what to film: paste the snippet, refresh, read the number. If they needed a call, you are not indie-priced. Do not ask them to flash fake MRR. Ask them to paste the snippet and read today’s count.
Give each creator their own code. Unique signup links, not a build-in-public screenshot of MRR you did not earn.
Do not run a launch day on the same morning if you wanted isolation.
Two follow-ups, then stop. If you do this right, ie at scale, you will have many other creators to choose from.

Doing the scroll by hand is kind of soul-crushing. Like a VC-startup launch and you will leave the solo-snippet people. No demo. No download guarantee. You approve every creator and every rate.

GA4-hate already has the indie audience; a number they can read on a phone is the demo.

First indie product analytics campaign checklist

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