In the long run, about half the downloads came from google searches. One trick is to completely forget about branding. E.g. if you wanted to promote a habit building app, just call it "Habit building", not "Habitly" or some custom name.
We were on 5 newspapers and several blogs. Nobody reads newspapers, and they brought us about 3% of traffic. However, about 10% of our total traffic (and about 90% early on), came from people linking newspaper articles. Blogs, one of our suppliers, Facebook groups.
HN, Reddit, Quora actually seem terrible direct ways to get traffic, but awesome indirect ways for it. You can't actually shill yourself, someone else has to do it for you.
Thanks for sharing. Yeah I totally get you. Have been very dependent on Google with another project of mine and it's not great. But right now I am more trying to figure out how to just get a bunch of (target) people in front of my MVP (which is really just a landing page) for another idea, just so I can start to talk to them.
I feel a landing page is probably not enough to post on HN or PH but paying Google for ads is also so, so. The other thing I have been trying is going to related subreddits and that seem to bring in at least some feedback (maybe not super specific to what I am doing, but in general).
And, virality is not unheard of, even this day and age, but incredibly rare. I'm just saying, in many indiehacker success cases I've read, they're getting significant traffic from Google.
It's darn near impossible to get a steady stream of traffic unless Google decides to give it to you. It seems like, Most success stories I've heard on indiehackers typically are due to Google giving them a steady stream of traffic in the hundreds or thousands per day.