The storyHow they got there
Michael Lynch built TinyPilot in 2020 — a hardware KVM (keyboard/video/mouse over IP) using Raspberry Pi that allowed remote server management at the BIOS level without physical access. His distribution strategy was entirely content-based: write excellent technical blog posts, post them to Hacker News, and let the community do the rest.
The first ten customers came from a Hacker News front-page post about the build story. The first hundred came from the monthly transparent retrospectives on mtlynch.io — each monthly retro was itself a Hacker News submission, creating a self-compounding content-distribution loop.
At maturity, the channel mix: SEO from Michael's deep technical blog posts (~40%), Hacker News front-page posts multiple times (~20%), Reddit communities r/homelab and r/sysadmin (~20%), word-of-mouth among IT professionals and homelab enthusiasts (~15%), and direct B2B repeat purchases (~5%). Paid ads and Amazon were deliberately avoided to preserve margins. Long-form blog posts and the open-source firmware community were doubled down on.
Unit economics: AOV around $300–400 for hardware plus recurring services, gross margin around 30–40% (hardware), CAC around $30–80 from mostly content. By year two, $80K+/month. Michael's transparent monthly retrospectives at mtlynch.io became one of the most documented indie-hacker journeys in public, and the transparency itself was the marketing.
Channel MixWhere the growth actually came from
Most case studies hand-wave channels. Here's the rough allocation — not in dollars spent, but in users acquired — across the routes that actually mattered.