Save Wise

Anish initially tried the standard indie founder channels — Product Hunt, Hacker News, and Indie Hackers — and got high traffic but a ~95–96% bounce rate with no sticky users. He then tried cold outreach to influencers and creators, sending 300–400 emails and messages, and received exactly one reply. Neither approach worked. The breakthrough came when he shifted to niche-specific Reddit subreddits and Facebook groups focused on travel, credit cards, and points earning — communities of people who were the actual target users of Save Wise, not builders or tech enthusiasts. He used a tool called "Map of Reddit" to discover related subreddits from a seed subreddit (e.g., r/creditcards), and searched Facebook for keywords like "Rakuten" to find groups like "Rakuten Stacks." He lurked in these communities first, observing tone and content, then started engaging in comments (e.g., weekly Q&A threads) before ever making a top-level post. He also set up F5bot keyword alerts to get real-time email notifications whenever his target topics were mentioned on Reddit. One of his earliest high-impact moves was building a spreadsheet from a SQL query of his own product's data — a list of Rakuten + Amex offer stacks — and posting it in a Facebook group. The sheet linked back to his website, driving over 1,500 visitors from a single post. On Reddit, after ~3.5 months of comment-level engagement and building features based on community feedback, he got moderator approval for a top-level post, which "blew up" and took him from single thousands of users to tens of thousands.

Deep personal expertise in credit card stacking, coupons, and points earning — the exact problem his product solves. Also had a tech background (Microsoft, Instagram, Foursquare, Dropbox) enabling him to build the product solo, including writing SQL queries to generate viral content assets directly from his own product data.

reddit_community_posts

Product Hunt, Hacker News, and Indie Hackers — generated traffic but ~95–96% bounce rate and no retained users. Cold outreach to influencers and creators — sent 300–400 emails/messages, received a single reply, zero conversions. Subscription pricing — launched as a subscription and immediately received customer pushback; consumers strongly preferred lifetime plans.