Marketing for Founders
github.com
github.com
This applies to social media posting, SEO, articles, you name it. AI has amplified the noise to the point where finding something useful is pretty hard now.
Building in public is and was always a fake trend. You see a few who made it a long time ago by posting their journey (personal choice), and then everyone jumps in to spam, which is back again to the noise, ending with a lack of value.
I feel for anyone trying to take a product to the market right now, while there are more tools to build, marketing has gotten a lot harder, consumers are struggling financially, and companies are trying to stay afloat due to a lack of growth.
I checked community guidelines before and think regarding Reddit, this is where it should be resolve in my option.
I'm saying this while in a field that's even more anti-AI/tools than yours, FWIW. By virtue of anything that mentions AI - and much of the tools that don't even mention it but are suspected - getting auto-removed by automod on the subreddit. There's only one subreddit in our field, everyone's on it, and it blanket bans anything with AI, despite the best tools out there incoporating it.
It's not even something like art, design, coding and so on where people are scared of job loss or even hobby loss, it's nothing like that at all for the community. I do suspect the mods' friends might feel threatened, as they _do_ make a living off of the community, but in our case I don't even think that's their primary reason to blanket ban it.
Maybe because you're not an actibe member of one of those fields whose subreddits now gets these vibecoded tools every other day. Because for those, I can tell you that the overwhelming majority isn't cool. Even when they are trying to solve a problem and aren't (yet) seeking a profit. They have very little time, energy and thought put into them. They're made by people who are passers-by, who aren't personally invested and often haven't experienced the problem first-hand; it's just a problem they heard about, or assumed would exist. And that leads to things that are a waste of time. Often they have blatantly obvious problems that show they didn't even QA it for an hour.
The amount of reddit posts I land on from the last few years which are noticeable longer with no added value for the increased length than they would have been in the past is getting very annoying.
What actually moved the needle was talking about data, not the product. I posted about my tool — crickets. Then I wrote about stuff I discovered while building it and people started engaging. Exact same product behind both posts, just "here's what I found" instead of "here's what I built." Night and day difference.
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/12/22/is-the-golden-age-...
1. can all tell
2. will not use your product
Please stop polluting the global commons
Signed everyone <3
the reality is most users can't tell. you can see it under every ai post on reddit, unless it is creaming ai in every word.
The gambling site “Stake” was doing the same thing recently, they’d make posts on financial advice or gaming subreddits and edit in a link (as to be “oh btw I need advice because I made money betting”). Were even using Greek Unicode “a”s and “e”s to hide from the automod filters. Scumbags among scumbags
That said, what form of marketing actually works and is honest? I cant think of much.
Many times, I’ve been “surprised” to find that, within a span of few hours, many people on LinkedIn/Twitter share similar anecdotes, punchlines, realizations, and everything in between. Of course, they all end with asking to say the MAGIC word(s) to reward the “selected few” in their DMs.
Gone are the days when we used to just give things out - here is the link to the zip file, download and do whatever you want.
Go ahead, “Say friend and enter.”
Edit/Update: About that “Tell”, honestly, I think a lot too many have no clue.
1. Keeping a consistent devlog on YouTube. It's the #1 source of traffic.
2. Getting a rank 1, page 1 HN post for a technical blog post related to our product.
3. Word of mouth. It's slow, but it works.
Just thought I'd chip in. The devlogs work the best though. Plus they keep momentum.
Probably only if you are marketing to developers though.
Ps/ Don't sell to developers. We are a terrible market.
Unfortunately I have a launch planned soon for a dev B2B product. I'm hoping that the combination of non AI coded work over many months combined with separating the docs intended for LLMs and thebdics intended for humans will break through the noise ceiling.
But, you know, maybe I should have just vibed it in a week and crossed my fingers.
My experience has been almost all positive.
Devs love to give feedback. Devs have decent paying jobs, and therefore money to purchase devtools (ours is $79) Devs love trying out new things and being early adopters.
Why is it a terrible market?
If there's an open source version thats half as good or they can hack together their own version with bits of string they will usually do that instead.
-Less technically clueless than typical B2C or B2B customers.
-More likely to give feedback, helpful bug reports etc.
The negatives:
-Used to free stuff.
-Loads of competition (because every developers first thought is to sell to other developers)
-Relatively small market.
-The things @pydry said.
You can still pay someone else to spam your product on social media at a fraction of the cost of paid ad campaigns (and a fraction of the results).
I do use some AI but its minimal; most scripts are still just algorithmic, but its easy to build them with Claude; while they are super expensive (couple of hundreds to thousands) if you bought them from some established marketeers (like Mike Rhodes demand gen script).
If you're getting >CLV from your advertising cost of customer acquisition without PMF you're doing exceptionally well.
The three are “Owned, Earned, and Paid” Media. The best is when you own or can control the distribution channels.
However, I have friendly investor interest. The only place I can imagine spending money on this project is on Google Ads. I have no real idea of how to create and manage Google Ads these days. So, who do I hire? Does anyone have any recs for what I should do? Is there a service, or a go-to consultancy with a small minimum spend requirement?
What is your experience in stickiness of users after acquisition via Ad? Given crack down by reddit mods for posting links - I am considering just buying ads.
2. Selling lifetime deals is the easiest way to become a slave of small paying customers without even knowing if your product is going to find PMF ever.
3. You can't just go to a subreddit and post your product. And the ones that allow anyone to post, well, you can guess the expected outcome from those.
I run a full stack digital marketing service, and here's what I'd recon:
1. If you're developing for developers, HN is the best place to post. For both to collect feedback, and to get early customers.
2. If you're building a B2C business, start with a social presence. This is a must in today's ecosystem. DON'T LAUNCH TO THE VOID.
3. If you're building a B2B business, try to get into an accelerator like YC, who can make lots of customer intros in the early days. And given how hard it's to get into an accelerator - you should try Google ads, and maybe a couple of linkedin campaigns if you've a sharp First Target Customer Profile (not vague ICP) as fallback.
They really cant.
(The product flopped and I got lost on so many rabbit trails. YC took me out of the game with a side hustle forum!)
The founders I've seen do this well pick one or two communities and go deep for months. The temptation is to spread across 15 platforms because guides say to. Narrower and deeper consistently outperforms wider and shallower, especially now when signal-to-noise has collapsed everywhere.
My Dev.to article got 42 reads and 2 reactions. Not exactly going viral. But here's the thing — Google picked it up within days, and I'm already seeing search traffic trickle in. Honestly that might end up being worth more than any launch-day spike.
Twitter was a waste of time. Brand new account, zero followers, zero impressions. And I mean literally zero — the algorithm just doesn't show tweets from fresh accounts to anybody. I could've tweeted the cure for cancer and nobody would've seen it.
Reddit though. One post in r/webdev's Showoff Saturday thread pulled 1,400 views and 10 comments. Blew everything else out of the water. Downside: that sub only lets you self-promote on Saturdays, and AutoMod killed one of my replies because my account was too new. Cool.
Also looked into BetaList — turns out they dropped their free tier, it's $39 minimum now. Found another directory that approved me in 2 days and sent... one visitor. One.
Biggest takeaway that nobody talks about: the thing blocking you isn't your writing or your product. It's subreddit karma requirements and account age filters. AutoMod doesn't care how good your post is. If you're planning to use Reddit for anything, go make that account right now. You'll thank yourself in a month.
But over time, I started getting messages from people in other countries saying they found it useful too.
it grew into a collection of detailed fitness guides written by me and a few other contributors.
At one point I even noticed people linking to our guides from social media, Medium articles, and different Reddit threads, which was pretty surprising.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tirzepatidecompound/comments/1omfgx...
so later i ended up launching a mobile app as well.
I also find that it's way more effective to live in the comment sections. Rarely does the "Hey, look at me, I'm selling a piece of software" post genuinely do well. It's always so tempting to do that too but It's way better to find someone asking specifically for a thing you're solving and respond to the individuals.
Who's still going through these kinds of docs?
I know micro.so (I'm not affiliated with them) have documented how to build agentic B2B sales AI that you can download (if you give them your email address). https://www.micro.so/guides/sales
Unless your product or service is aimed at other founders, or a techie focused audience in general, that's not where your customers are. Advertising there is like a game developer marketing their game to other devs or a writer marketing their book towards other writers.
What you really want to do is figure out who your audience actually is, figure out where they hang out online, and promote it there. Niche specific forums, subreddits, Discord servers, social media communities, etc.
That said, there's no real harm in advertising in these places, and other founders can give you useful feedback.
I’ve taken a break from building to try to find an audience, a real problem, and real users before building anything anymore.
I think this is the issue with the bulk of the saas spammers I see on reddit or whatever. They are just duplicating existing things that don't have a welcoming market anymore.
If you don't have an audience don't bother to build anything for anyone else, it literally doesn't matter how good it is or how much people need it, they'll never see it unless you directly spam them.
If you're a 10x builder with 0 followers on socials, sorry to say but you can get cucked by a noob with claude code and a big audience.
please approach marketing like a human being. i.e one marketing starts before selling - before you have a product
if you adopt the 'indiehacker / influenzer' tactics outlined in that repo - you will starve.
I'll probably use a google sheet with a row for each prospect, and columns for spoke to, hotness (degree of suitability for my SaaS), and 'notes' (will put a new bullet point with brief summary of each call).
I was thinking it would be cool to record the calls and feed them to AI for some simple/crude auto-summary which automatically pulls out rejection reason, concerns, interesting points etc.
I might even vibe-code something myself, since I prefer primitive and reduced clutter. May open source it if I do. However, I'd be surprised if something like this doesn't already exist..
This is something I need to do, have no knowledge about and is definitely going to be harder than building the thing.
> it would be cool to record the calls and feed them to AI for some simple/crude auto-summary which automatically pulls out rejection reason, concerns, interesting points etc
This is very close to what the software I've been building over the last few months is, offline note transcription with summary file generation in a nicely formatted PDF/Docx using local models. Codex is available if you don't want to do the inference on your laptop (I will sort claude out soon as well).
If it sounds like something of interest then feel free to send me a message. More than happy to send you a 30 day trial version.
So basically what you want to do is to try different takes (cold emailing, phone, events, influenceurs), get your first 50 customers, try to understand the process (who takes the decision, who will pay, who will use, etc) and based on that, design your CRM to match this process.
My 2 cents (saas solofounder with 6000 users): very important not to overengineer everything. As dev it's our natural tendency but your time and marketing effort is probably the biggest leverage you have.
Good luck :-)
I had three side projects and kept struggling to get any real traction or traffic without becoming spammy across the internet. So I decided to approach it the same way I approach learning anything new: through books, courses, and solid foundational material.
HN had a few excellent suggestions. One of them was Founding Sales. Another, which I came across through a friend’s recommendation, was Alex Hormozi’s series. He seems to have something of a cult following, which made me a bit skeptical at first, so I decided to just read the first 100 pages before forming an opinion.
I ended up finding it genuinely useful, especially for understanding the psychology and mindset needed to sell something. I now highly recommend his book $100M Leads to technical friends who are trying to figure out how to sell what they’ve built.
I’m still learning, if you’ve any good recommendations, please drop them below
I would completely disagree with this (product dependent).
If your product is a consumer app - I would highly prioritize and understand SEO before even having a product complete. Develop a good understanding of SEO around your product domain and niche.
If it’s a B2B - then yes, I would agree.
1) has llm vibes, emojis on headers, llm speak
2) looks like a magpie accumulation of data and resources, I don't trust even the author reads all of this
We know there's a lot of information in the internet, the issue is almost never lack of information but knowing what to read. That takes criteria, filtering, an ordered path.
3) quality pretty bad, lots of dead links and advice like 'launch on product hunt'. lol lmao even,