Launched FreeTV Garden 🚀
Hi Indie Hackers! 👋
I recently launched FreeTV Garden.
🌍 https://freetvgarden.com
It's a searchable directory that helps people discover publicly available live TV channels from around the world. You can browse channels by country, category, and language with a fast, mobile-friendly interface.
Building it was fun, but migrating it from a free hosting platform to its own domain was one of the biggest technical challenges. I'm now focused on improving performance, search, and the overall user experience.
I'd love your honest feedback:
• What feature would you add?
• Is the navigation intuitive?
• How can I improve the mobile experience?
Thanks for taking a look, and I'm happy to answer any questions!
Access is one thing, but discovery is usually what brings people back.
Are users returning regularly or mostly one-time visits?
That's a great question.
At the moment it's a mix, but I'm seeing a growing number of returning users. Most people initially come from search to find a specific channel, while returning visitors use the country, category, and search features to discover other channels. I'm continuing to improve navigation and discovery so there's more reason to come back beyond a single visit.
Your returning visitors use country/category/search to browse. But your traffic is 90% searchers who typed "watch [specific channel] free" and bounced after they found it. You're building discovery features for the browser, but the searcher is your volume — and they leave with zero reason to return.
The transition isn't "better navigation." It's: "You searched for BBC — here are 3 UK channels you didn't know you wanted." Turn the searcher's intent moment into a discovery moment in the same session. Otherwise you have two products: a search engine (high volume, zero retention) and a TV guide (low volume, high retention).
I run PreLaunch AI — we simulate user segments for content platforms to find the trigger that turns a one-search visitor into a weekly browser. Happy to model your searcher-to-browser funnel if you want to see where the retention leak is. No strings.
What stood out to me is that you're organizing discovery rather than creating content.
As more viewing options become fragmented, helping people find something worth watching can become as valuable as the content itself. That's a different problem than simply maintaining a directory.
Thank you! That's exactly the direction I'm trying to take.
Rather than hosting content, the goal is to make discovery as simple as possible. I'm focusing on helping users find publicly available TV channels quickly through country-wise browsing, categories, search, and a clean interface. There are still many improvements planned, especially around recommendations and making discovery even easier.
That makes sense. Recommendations seem like the point where this gets especially interesting.
Have you thought about what should drive discovery there—what's popular, what resembles something a user already watches, or something more contextual?