>>13655263That reminds me I found a ton of great indies from this Pikamee collab. (And I found out Pikamee in the first place because I guess she has good word of mouth, some random person on /v/ claimed she was Gura but better so I took a look and found she was indeed better.) Sadly most of these people have retired, never to be seen again.
But yeah, basically, you find one good collab and it introduces you to a never ending onslaught of indies, and that's how you find some potentially good ones. This is the reason why so many people want collabs with big names, because it exposes them to more people who may not have looked at them otherwise. For example I've been seeing a lot of indies get good exposure from collabing with NijiEN.