Developer tools are uniquely viral and uniquely brutal. Devs find your product on GitHub or Hacker News, give you 30 seconds before they bounce, and tell two hundred peers if you nail it or twenty if you don't. The playbooks below show how indie founders launched into this audience without a personal following — open-sourcing the core and charging for hosting, writing the docs as the marketing, posting in /r/programming with a working demo not a pitch. You'll notice almost none of them paid for traffic. Most started with one technical blog post that ranked, or one Show HN that landed on the front page, or one library that got starred. Distribution is earned by being genuinely useful to people who can read code. Don't reach for paid ads here — they won't save a tool that devs don't want.
Dev tools
Open-source distribution, build-in-public, Hacker News launches, and selling to people who hate being sold to.
Tiny Host
Simple drag-and-drop web hosting for non-technical users to share files online
Zeronel (Deal Neil / Zenevy)
Social media API aggregator letting SaaS apps add social features without direct platform integrations
ShipFast
Next.js boilerplate codebase for indie developers to ship startups faster
Late
Social media API that lets developers post/automate across platforms via one unified API
Cursor Directory
A searchable directory for Cursor IDE rules, MCPs, and AI coding resources
Screenshot One
Screenshot API that captures website screenshots and delivers them programmatically
Scrape Creators
Pay-as-you-go API that scrapes public social media data and ad libraries
ChartDB
Open-source database schema visualizer for developers, with a paid cloud tier