Welcome to the tinyfound story. It's been a month.

This is my August 1st update.

tinyfound collects detailed stories of how independent people – writers, makers, coaches, small founders – find their audience and customers without a serious ad budget. What worked, what didn’t, and the real numbers.

This blog is mostly about growing and promoting tinyfound, so I won’t say much about the project itself here. If you’re curious – you can read more about it here: About tinyfound.

Now, on to what I did in the first month!

About the subscribers. I’d had a newsletter on Substack, and I simply imported that list (300 subscribers) into this project – with a heads-up, of course. I knew people had signed up for a different topic, not for tinyfound, and I expected at least half to unsubscribe right away.

But over the first month only 25 people unsubscribed – 8%! That made me really glad, and I take it as trust extended up front, something I’ll work to earn.

On the downside: only 5 new subscribers. The main reason is the lack of outside traffic – more on that later.

Registered the domain tinyfound.com.
Signed up for beehiiv.
Built the questionnaire, set it up on Airtable.
Published the first test case on promotion using the questionnaire (my own story).
Worked out the project concept.
Drew up a task plan and mapped out the strategy (distribution included) for the early stage (almost none of it worked).
Signed up for Reddit and Substack.
Already had a LinkedIn account in play (20 contacts).
Started getting to grips with beehiiv’s interface and mechanics (lots of options, but a fairly tangled interface) – this will be a never-ending story.

A lot of time went into learning platforms, sites, and social networks (for instance, I’d never worked with LinkedIn before). I also looked through Etsy, Indie Hackers, and some others.

I was picking out channels and sources where I could find potential interview respondents and reach out to them with the offer.

At the end of the second week I started sending the first cold emails. This is where I hit my first emotional low. The thing is, my circle of online contacts is small. I don’t have many contacts on my social accounts, and I couldn’t count on them at the start. As a result, by the middle of the third week I’d received just 2 requests for the questionnaire.

I rebuilt the list of channels, automated the respondent search a little, and then things picked up. In total over the month (really just the last two weeks) I received about 15 replies from people asking me to send them the questionnaire, and 6 of those became stories on tinyfound. The rest either went quiet or haven’t filled in their questionnaires yet.

First of all, every reply I did get was very warm. People really are interested in the offer and the opportunity.

The people these stories are about received the finished interviews exceptionally well. So on that front I’m on the right track for now. I adjusted the questionnaire a few times based on requests and feedback. I’m also constantly experimenting with the wording of the cold emails and every other part of the exchanges.

I’m very grateful to the authors of the first stories: Olga, Rebecca, Katarzyna, Xenia, Kate, Tiffany. You gave me the push to keep going, and I’ll always think of you as my good wizards. Thank you!

The open and click rates are encouraging (though there’s room to grow, of course):

I figured it wouldn’t be easy, but I didn’t think it would be THIS hard.

It was a month of bans. I got banned on Substack, Reddit (4 times), Etsy (temporarily), and Gmail started flagging my emails as spam.

It’s a curious thing, really. I wasn’t trying to sell anything. I wasn’t burying respondents in my cold emails under links, requests to subscribe, requests to repost, and the like. I was offering people the chance to run the story of their own promotion and an ad for their project, on my own site!!

On Reddit I only left comments – not a single post – and every comment was on-topic for the post it replied to, and none of them had links.

Etsy wrote: “Messaging users without their consent may lead to a temporary suspension of the messaging feature and/or an account block.” But how am I supposed to get that consent without contacting the user (without consent) the first time??

I get that this is the fight against spam. But right now it looks more like paranoia, and soon the only thing you’ll be allowed to ask is, “How’s the weather today?” Everything else will get banned. The only way out I can see is for platforms to use really good AI agents and filter out only the obvious spam. Otherwise the whole idea of talking to people on platforms will be hollowed out.

As the first week of month two begins, I’m reworking how I deal with the platforms and how my messages are framed, “nursing” my email back to health, and looking for relatively safe ways to make cold contact – contact forms on sites, for example.

You can have the most brilliant idea, the best painting, the finest handmade product, an incredibly interesting newsletter. But if you don’t find a way to distribute them that’s right for THEM specifically – they’ll stay with you, and at best only your friends will know they exist.

So I want to spend month two looking for distribution methods that fit tinyfound. I need platforms and methods that would bring in passive traffic, a flow of subscribers, and potential interview respondents. Cold emails work in the early stages (1-6 months), but they don’t scale, and you’re chained to the conveyor belt. On top of that, the sources dry up over time.

What platforms and methods are those? And here I come to my third favorite:

It’s not SEO anymore. Search traffic is already heading toward almost 0. People talk about AI search and AI traffic – but how often do you click the links in AI answers yourself?

It’s not Reddit anymore, with its paranoia.

Distribution guides, if they were written more than three years ago, barely work. If someone’s selling you a book called “How I Got My 10,000 Subscribers” – first check what period it covers. We’re already living in a different era.

So what does work? I don’t know yet. I’ll keep looking, and of course I’ll tell you about it. Maybe it’s some kind of niche stories… I don’t know yet.

By the way, so you don’t get too discouraged, let me be clear: all of this is about promotion at a medium and above-medium scale. At the early stage, almost everything works!

And while we’re all still searching, let’s help each other out!

In one exchange, someone asked me: “I’m wondering, as tinyfound grows, what kind of impact are you hoping it will have for independent founders beyond simply sharing their stories?”

I think (I’m sure) it will be several things:

I’d be glad if you replied to this email (or left a comment on this post on the site) and shared your thoughts on promotion and distribution.

I’d be glad if you decided to publish the story of how you promoted your project, your work, yourself – just write ‘I’d like to’ in reply to this email, and I’ll send you the questionnaire. It would be both an ad for you and real, useful help to your fellow independents.

I’d be glad if you forwarded this email to someone who’d be interested in publishing their own story.

In short, I’m always glad to hear from you and your replies.

Found your own audience or customers without a serious ad budget?

Email Alex at [email protected] if you'd like to share yours – he'll send over a short questionnaire, and your answers become a story just like this one, free. Past respondents have picked up real, tracked signups and sales just from being featured.

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– Alex, tinyfound