Distribution Spend on influencers instead of ads
Chief builder at Bergside, creator of Flowbite
If your product has any traction, skip paid ads and invest in influencer marketing instead. Pay 1,000 to 2,000 euros per influencer, feature them on your homepage hero section, and prefer American or Australian creators for the English-speaking market. One influencer creates social proof that attracts others. The ROI on a single well-placed creator video outperforms most ad campaigns for developer tools.
Related advice
Zoltan Szogyenyi Open source can be your distribution channel
Flowbite's free open-source library has over 30 million npm downloads, and those downloads are the marketing. Instead of buying attention, Bergside gives away a genuinely useful core and lets adoption carry the brand into millions of projects. The developers who already build with the free components are the warm audience for the paid pro components and framework integrations. If your product can have a free core that people install and depend on, the open-source version is not lost revenue, it is the cheapest and most durable distribution you will ever own.
Zoltan Szogyenyi Post stories on Reddit, not sales pitches
Reddit rewards authenticity and punishes promotion. When Flowbite launched a new datepicker component, they posted the story of building it, not a sales pitch. Share the journey, the technical decisions, the problems you solved. On X/Twitter, sharing MRR numbers gets engagement. On Reddit, the same post gets buried. Each platform has its own language. Learn to speak it.
Zoltan Szogyenyi A rejection is a data point, not a verdict
Bergside's first ThemeForest template was rejected, and the company that grew out of it now does 70k a month. The rejection was information about one submission, not a judgment on the whole idea. Most founders treat an early no as proof the plan is wrong and quit one iteration before the thing that works. Zoltan and his co-founder treated it as feedback, shipped the next version, and kept shipping. Separate the verdict on a single attempt from the verdict on the direction, and keep going.
Zoltan Szogyenyi Let one big spike tell you where the market is
Bergside sold one Tailwind and Figma kit for 3,000 euros in a single Black Friday night, and that one spike redirected the entire company toward Tailwind components. A sudden, sharp sales response is the market telling you where the demand actually lives, in a way no survey or roadmap meeting ever will. When something you ship spikes far beyond the rest, do not treat it as a lucky one-off. Treat it as a map. Drop what is flat and pour your effort into the thing the market just voted for with its wallet.
Extracted from
Indie TM #6: From ThemeForest Rejects to 70k/Month