Niche
Indie product analytics vs a creator marketplace
A creator marketplace is a real product. It is a catalog of people who signed up to get deals. I still want the people the algorithm is already pushing to the person who would pay for this tool this week.
In indie product analytics: the tag is SaaS founders selling their own tools; they want a collab thread, not a paid post about yours.
The person: 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. Example: someone clicking through GA4 for four minutes and still not knowing today’s signups. Skip the growth Twitter thread-lord selling a $499 funnel course.
How I actually work without the catalog
Marketplaces are good when you need a body in a niche and you can live with applicants. They are fast. They are public. Your client or your competitor can buy a version of the same list.
I scroll Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube as that person on real phones. Scout is $1,500/month for that list. Outreach is $2,500 if contacting should not be your job. Dealmaker is $5,000 if the yes should not live in DMs. Creator fees extra. No demo. No download guarantee.
GA4-hate already has the indie audience; a number they can read on a phone is the demo.
When to use which
Use a marketplace if you need a 200-person CRM for a store catalog. Use a feed session if you shipped a privacy-friendly pageview that is not a Google Analytics maze, or a one-event funnel a solo founder will actually open and you need names this week from the people already in the room.
Build-in-public accounts quote newsletter-sponsorship rates for a mention. I want roughly 50k average views. Below that, $700 a post for 1k views is a money sink. A Minimum View Guarantee on a call is how I keep the deal honest. Example: $2000 / 4 posts / 1M views. Over email you just get the first number.
If you do this right, ie at scale, you will have many other creators to choose from.
Money page: jumptrend.co/for/indie-analytics. Campaigns: jumptrend.co/campaigns.
Related: - How I find influencers - How we find creators by scrolling a real TikTok avatar - Campaigns - Brief - Money page for indie product analytics