I make audio plugins now (KERN Audio). Which means March turned into a month-long study of how tiny software companies actually grow, because I needed it to work for my own.
Most of what I added this month came straight out of that. Plugin and creator playbooks I was testing on myself.
The ones I'm using
The one that changed my thinking: release a free "gateway" plugin to pull people into your paid catalog. Give away something genuinely good, no strings. It builds more trust than any ad.
Then co-develop with influencers instead of just paying them. A creator who helped build the thing sells it like it's theirs, because it is.
And a Discord beta community that turns your first users into evangelists before launch day. The people who shaped it show up when it ships.
Two bigger swings for anyone past the early stage: AI programmatic SEO (thousands of targeted pages) and IRL micro-community events, the Build Club model that hit 50,000 members across 60 cities on zero ad spend.
The thread
There's a pattern here I first noticed making music. You win by making something a small group loves enough to tell their friends. A free plugin, a Discord, a room of 30 people who get it. That is where the flywheel starts.
I am in the messy early part of this with KERN. Some of these worked. Some didn't move a thing. But the gateway-plugin idea alone changed how I think about the whole catalog, and that is worth a month.