What Daily Commenting on IndieHackers Actually Taught Me

Most of what I post about here is my own numbers: views, sales, the products themselves. This one is about something smaller and less visible, but it’s changed how I think about all of it: a few months back I started commenting on other builders’ IndieHackers posts most days, instead of posting my own more often.

I didn’t do this because someone told me commenting beats posting. I did it because posting once or twice a week and waiting for something to happen felt passive, and commenting was the thing I could actually do daily without needing a launch to hang it on.

The rule I gave myself

Two comments a day, on posts that were actually recent, in the Building in Public group. No “great post!” filler. Every comment had to share something concrete from what I’d actually built or seen fail, and end with a question. No link to my own site in the comment itself, since my profile already carries that.

That last rule turned out to matter more than I expected. Dropping a link in a comment makes the comment about you. Leaving it out makes the comment about the conversation, and the conversation is the only reason anyone clicks through to a profile in the first place.

What surprised me: I had to know what I thought

Writing a comment that says something specific, on someone else’s post, in someone else’s words, is a different exercise than writing my own post. On my own post I can wander toward whatever the data happens to show that week. On someone else’s post I have maybe two sentences to say something true and useful before the comment stops being worth reading.

That constraint forced a thing I hadn’t done deliberately before: I had to actually name what I believe about why small products sell and big ones don’t, instead of just having a vague sense of it. The line I keep coming back to, across dozens of comments now, is that people don’t pay for a feature, they pay for the specific worry it lifts. A subscription tracker doesn’t sell because it’s well-built. It sells because it lifts the specific worry of getting charged for something you forgot to cancel. I’d lived that lesson through my own plugin numbers before I ever said it out loud in a comment. Saying it out loud, over and over, in reply to other people’s very different products, is what turned it from a hunch into something I could actually apply on purpose.

The replies taught me more than the comments did

The part I didn’t expect was how much I’d learn from replying to the replies. Someone pushes back on the worry-versus-feature framing, or asks how it applies to a product that’s clearly a feature and nothing else, and answering that in public, fast, while the thread is still warm, is a different kind of thinking than writing a post alone. It’s closer to the testing I’ve written about before: a confidently wrong answer in a live thread gets corrected by someone else within the hour. A confidently wrong assumption sitting quietly in my own head doesn’t get corrected at all.

I’m still inconsistent about replying fast to my own posts’ comments, and slower there than I am about commenting on other people’s. That’s a real gap, not a humble-brag. The habit is easier to keep when it’s not my own work on the line.

What this actually changed

It didn’t move a Gumroad number I can point to, and I’m not going to pretend it did. What it changed is smaller and harder to measure: I now have a consistent, testable idea about why the inbound-triage plugins sold and the self-archive ones didn’t, and I got there by explaining it badly a dozen times to strangers before I could explain it well. That’s a slower way to sharpen an idea than sitting alone with the numbers, but it’s a more honest one, because someone else is allowed to tell you you’re wrong.

The community-versus-no-community gap I wrote about with the boilerplates and the plugins applies here too, just one layer up. A plugin with an audience already looking for it will outsell one that isn’t, no matter how it’s built. And a habit of showing up daily where other builders already are will teach you more than a habit of posting occasionally and hoping the right people happen to see it.

I wrote about the community gap between the plugins and the boilerplates in What 27 Views Taught Me About Building Without a Community, and about the specific worry-versus-feature framing in I built six Obsidian plugins. Two sold.. This is the habit underneath both of those posts: not something I did once and wrote up, but something I keep doing, most days, because it’s the only distribution work I can actually do without a new product to launch.