Posting a product on any of these sites will not have the same impact as it did before AI. Not because your product is not good, but because there is much more noise now.
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.
It did not work even before AI. The rise of "indie hacking" in the late 2010s brought in thousands of hustlers creating similar lists, and many of them were simply selling shovels to other indie hackers (including the lists themselves). By the time of the pandemic, the "submit to every directory & community" strategy was already useless.
I've been creating and marketing software as an indie developer for over 20 years now, and the marketing part definitely feels harder than it use to. See also:
True story, yesterday I tried to get some feedback from an industry relevant subreddit for a real estate quick check calculation tool (automatically extracts listing data into calculation and enables sharing investment ideas). The pure mention of AI brought up a whole crowd of fed up bullies that talked it down as vibecoding trash - which it really isn't. All those places are flooded.
People, not bullies. I can sympathize with you because I've struggled with the same, but we can't blame those people. They're now being asked every two days to give feedback on yet another tool. That used to be once every 6 months. And the overwhelming majority of those new "tools" is abandoned within a month. And there is indeed a huge amount of vibecoded slop. I've put more time and thought into our product than the last 20 such tools that got posted into our industry-relevant subreddit combined, but I can't expect the mods and users to put their time into assessing that.
Had basically the same thing happen. Posted in a side project sub, spam filter nuked it because new account. And in other subs now, anything that mentions AI gets hit with "vibecoded slop" automatically. Doesn't matter if you spent months on it.
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.
Can you share what approach you’re taking for this?
I’ve tried engaging in a similar way but struggled to strike a balance between helping for the sake of helping (no return for me), and asking research-focused questions, with people not caring too much about to answer
Whilst this is a very valid view, I am not sure there is evidence for it, if you have it please do provide it.
It is not obvious to me that one credible citation is better than having appeared many times in the training data.
Also knowledge releases of models are too slow to be depended on for marketing in my view. It is the search / retrieval of LLMs for which one can optimise.
A final point would be that none of this changes the point made, which is that there too much noise due to too many products being shipped.
AIs recommend what is most popular/well-known, which isn’t necessarily what is best. Both your description of AI sourcing and your AI-written comment demonstrate this point.
I don't condone it but the best marketing I've ever seen and which gets to the top of Reddit every week is a company that runs a paid IQ test website. They post some type of outrage bait and it always gets traction. Practically nobody in the comments can tell; they're all focused on how some imaginary character in an image is boasting about an IQ score of 99.
I see about 50 posts a week which look like theyre raising an interesting point for discussion and about 3/4 of the way through it is a link to a blog or tool.
That said, what form of marketing actually works and is honest? I cant think of much.
This seems to be happening everywhere there is a user community (potential customers), such as LinkedIn and Twitter.
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.
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.
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.
Marketing for founders in 2026: just buy ads and invest into actual marketing. Because everyone else is busy spamming SaaS directories, subreddits and twitter (often with sock puppets) and wasting everyone’s time.
My weekend side project just took over my life. It needs "actual marketing" expertise. As in, I know how to set up search console, semrush, and I know decent SEO concepts to grow organic SERP performance. I am coming up the charts there.
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?
Marketing is a lot more competitive, convoluted, and rapidly changing. However, in the world of “How to get consumers/customers/clients to buy more” three things still remain and the idea would be to know when to pull which strings.
The three are “Owned, Earned, and Paid” Media. The best is when you own or can control the distribution channels.
You stop paying for ads and the product link disappears. Reason why founders tend to go for reddit is because it gets indexed by Google and LLMs and the link gets 'preserved'.
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.
Understanding how to run paid advertising well beyond throwing money and a budget at a campaign and calling it a day. It’s generally not covered by most solo or bootstrapped founder guides, but in 2026 it can make all the difference. And it may take WEEKS before a campaign can mature before it shows results; depending on the chosen advertiser… which is a little counter to what people want (immediate results, first 10 users, 100 waitlist signups, etc).
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).
Ads are trash unless you already have PMF, and even then they're often still trash if you don't do it right or you don't have the right kind of product.
I consistently launch small vibe codes products. Slap ads on them and after a few weeks decide what to do with them without launching them anywhere else and am seeing good results. I see little to no reason to even launch them any other way at this point.
1. The only result I'd expect from posting on launch platforms/software directories is a huge number of spam in my inbox to take my product to the top of the list.
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.
The long lists of "places to post your launch" are less useful than people think. I've had way better results from just hanging out in communities where my users already are and actually participating in discussions over weeks/months before ever mentioning what I'm building. Cold-posting your launch link to 50 subreddits and forums gets you traffic with zero retention. The founders I know who grew organically all say the same thing: be a genuine member of the community first.
Sometimes time doesn't allow that for multiple communities simultaneously, but you are right. Still I think a lot of online communities are drowning in AI slob diluting the well thought about stuff that would deserve the attention.
The AI slop problem is real and getting worse. Half the "community engagement" you see now is LLM generated comments that add nothing. It actually makes genuine participation more valuable though, because people can tell the difference pretty quickly. The signal to noise ratio shift is probably the strongest argument for investing in real community presence over spray and pray posting.
As redgridtactical pointed the community first makes right, but i will add one distinction, there is a difference between building karma and actually bein known. Karma is a proxy, what you actually want is people recognizing you as someone who adds valuebefore you ever mention what you are building.
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.
Just launched an open-source tool on a few subs; r/SideProject barely moved, but r/software and r/Markdown got like 4k views each. What did something for me was actually just describing the situation that led me to build the thing. People who had the same problem showed up.
It's a great insight for presenting stuff: spend most of the time convincing your audience of a problem and they'll love your solution. Most people expend all their energy on presenting the thing, the features of the thing, the amazing qualities of the thing, etc. instead. It doesn't work. You need to convince people that they have a problem that is solved by the thing. Talk about how expensive and inconvenient that problem is and all the damage it is causing. And then show how existing ways to deal with it are not effective. If you can get somebody to go "hmm, I think I have this exact problem" they are going to be very interested in your solution.
So I launched a dev tool last week. Figured I'd share what actually happened across different channels because most "launch retrospectives" are written by people who already had an audience.
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.
Funny thing is, I originally started the subreddit just to help people in my country, where fitness information is often inaccurate or misleading.
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.
When I'm in marketing mode and I have to spam, I do my best to keep a 1:1 schill to not related to my product comment ratio. As a founder it is your job to spam your product but I think there are ways to be tactful and give back to the platforms you're schilling on.
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.
Pure B2B and pure B2C are so different that I don't trust any resource like this that doesn't clearly distinguish between them. They're pretty much entirely different fields. And almost all new software is one of either two.
Are these sorts of general advice on how to do X even valuable today when you can put the details of your start-up into AI and get a more customized and moderately more thoughtful actions based on what your start-up does, who your customers are, etc?
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
Thank you for sharing this. I found some good articles in what you shared. The long lists of places to post are not that helpful. I've poured through 100 of them in the past and only the top 20 make a difference, you might want to update the list to prioritize. I tend to point Claude Code or Codex at these lists, have them evaluate the scores of the sites and give me a priority list.
Eh, I question the list here. Why? Because they're all startup founder focused sites and communities.
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.
This game is getting so hard. Everyone can now spam build like Pieter Levels and Marc Lou did years ago, so solo bootstrapping’s got way harder it feels.
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.
Serious question, how do you market a novel (and useful) SAAS product in the face of all that spamming? Other than make sure to market where the users are of course?
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.
Decent guide/list but it feels as if its for founders who love to build first and leave everything else as an afterthought. Like, the first section is Places To Launch Your Startup.
My SaaS is almost done and I'm about to embark on some months of cold-calling (it will be brutal). I'll probably use a google sheet as a database. Any better suggestions?
Unless you actually plan on building as successful SaaS... then just, you know, use Salesforce. There are exceedingly few reasons a $100m SaaS company shouldn't just be running on SFDC.
Frankly google sheet will take you a very long way... Attio and most CRM are built for teams with sales pipeline, not a solo founder trying to find PMF.
Most of the features aims at describing complex sales processes and collaboration.
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.
Maybe I’m in the minority here, but while directories and similar channels are useful, I felt like I was just shooting darts in the dark without understanding sales and marketing from first principles and hoping something would stick.
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
> Should you focus on SEO in the early days of your startup? Probably not
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.
Dude, thanks for this! I'll definitely look through these.
I have been struggling with marketing the last months. I've developed a free, privacy-focused productivity app, but I don't want to sell it, myself or people for it.
So I have been thinking a lot about "how can I tell people about something I've built and that I like without beeing one of those startup dudes". Maybe a few of those links can help, definitely a cool collection!
A really big up for you, I launched my lib https://pithos.dev fews days ago, and I tried to coordinate posts on HN, Reddit, dev.to and Linkedin... but it was a failure because I didn't have accounts for HN and Reddit, so I was not able to post :) Now I understand I have to interact with people to win karma and it's a better way to share and communicate with a community !
Might be you could add this point to your guide ?
Some feedback, your description on frontpage: "Everything you need. Nothing you don't. Zero dependencies. 100% TypeScript." tells nothing about what is your project exactly..
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,
Posting a product on any of these sites will not have the same impact as it did before AI. Not because your product is not good, but because there is much more noise now.
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.
It did not work even before AI. The rise of "indie hacking" in the late 2010s brought in thousands of hustlers creating similar lists, and many of them were simply selling shovels to other indie hackers (including the lists themselves). By the time of the pandemic, the "submit to every directory & community" strategy was already useless.
I've been creating and marketing software as an indie developer for over 20 years now, and the marketing part definitely feels harder than it use to. See also:
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/12/22/is-the-golden-age-...
True story, yesterday I tried to get some feedback from an industry relevant subreddit for a real estate quick check calculation tool (automatically extracts listing data into calculation and enables sharing investment ideas). The pure mention of AI brought up a whole crowd of fed up bullies that talked it down as vibecoding trash - which it really isn't. All those places are flooded.
People, not bullies. I can sympathize with you because I've struggled with the same, but we can't blame those people. They're now being asked every two days to give feedback on yet another tool. That used to be once every 6 months. And the overwhelming majority of those new "tools" is abandoned within a month. And there is indeed a huge amount of vibecoded slop. I've put more time and thought into our product than the last 20 such tools that got posted into our industry-relevant subreddit combined, but I can't expect the mods and users to put their time into assessing that.
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Yes but your content is also part of the flood
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Had basically the same thing happen. Posted in a side project sub, spam filter nuked it because new account. And in other subs now, anything that mentions AI gets hit with "vibecoded slop" automatically. Doesn't matter if you spent months on it.
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.
The producthunt noise was a thing on day 1 I feel like, I quickly stopped checking that website after they launched
[dead]
Can you share what approach you’re taking for this? I’ve tried engaging in a similar way but struggled to strike a balance between helping for the sake of helping (no return for me), and asking research-focused questions, with people not caring too much about to answer
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the law of shitty click-throughs strikes again
[flagged]
Whilst this is a very valid view, I am not sure there is evidence for it, if you have it please do provide it.
It is not obvious to me that one credible citation is better than having appeared many times in the training data.
Also knowledge releases of models are too slow to be depended on for marketing in my view. It is the search / retrieval of LLMs for which one can optimise.
A final point would be that none of this changes the point made, which is that there too much noise due to too many products being shipped.
AIs recommend what is most popular/well-known, which isn’t necessarily what is best. Both your description of AI sourcing and your AI-written comment demonstrate this point.
Please do not post AI slop here.
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An open letter: if you market your product by spamming Reddit et al. with fake stories (as this guide suggests), we:
1. can all tell
2. will not use your product
Please stop polluting the global commons
Signed everyone <3
I don't condone it but the best marketing I've ever seen and which gets to the top of Reddit every week is a company that runs a paid IQ test website. They post some type of outrage bait and it always gets traction. Practically nobody in the comments can tell; they're all focused on how some imaginary character in an image is boasting about an IQ score of 99.
I see about 50 posts a week which look like theyre raising an interesting point for discussion and about 3/4 of the way through it is a link to a blog or tool.
That said, what form of marketing actually works and is honest? I cant think of much.
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You have an example in the wild?
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This seems to be happening everywhere there is a user community (potential customers), such as LinkedIn and Twitter.
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.
>> can all tell
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.
Most of those replies are also AI
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I'm building and marketing a database client for the last 5 months, and what worked for me was:
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.
What does a devlog look like? "Today I decided to prompt about feature x... and it worked!"
Here's an example of one of their dev logs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pdym24sg1HQ
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>The devlogs work the best though.
Probably only if you are marketing to developers though.
Ps/ Don't sell to developers. We are a terrible market.
Are we, though?
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?
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Thats accurate. 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.
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Marketing for founders in 2026: just buy ads and invest into actual marketing. Because everyone else is busy spamming SaaS directories, subreddits and twitter (often with sock puppets) and wasting everyone’s time.
My weekend side project just took over my life. It needs "actual marketing" expertise. As in, I know how to set up search console, semrush, and I know decent SEO concepts to grow organic SERP performance. I am coming up the charts there.
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?
I’m building this for pay as you go agent first GoToMarket engine, but I wonder if I should offer fractional GTM services.
Feel free to contact me through my profile if you need help with this.
Marketing is a lot more competitive, convoluted, and rapidly changing. However, in the world of “How to get consumers/customers/clients to buy more” three things still remain and the idea would be to know when to pull which strings.
The three are “Owned, Earned, and Paid” Media. The best is when you own or can control the distribution channels.
You stop paying for ads and the product link disappears. Reason why founders tend to go for reddit is because it gets indexed by Google and LLMs and the link gets 'preserved'.
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.
What is "actual marketing" these days, if not spamming socials?
Understanding how to run paid advertising well beyond throwing money and a budget at a campaign and calling it a day. It’s generally not covered by most solo or bootstrapped founder guides, but in 2026 it can make all the difference. And it may take WEEKS before a campaign can mature before it shows results; depending on the chosen advertiser… which is a little counter to what people want (immediate results, first 10 users, 100 waitlist signups, etc).
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).
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Ads are trash unless you already have PMF, and even then they're often still trash if you don't do it right or you don't have the right kind of product.
I consistently launch small vibe codes products. Slap ads on them and after a few weeks decide what to do with them without launching them anywhere else and am seeing good results. I see little to no reason to even launch them any other way at this point.
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1. The only result I'd expect from posting on launch platforms/software directories is a huge number of spam in my inbox to take my product to the top of the list.
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.
The long lists of "places to post your launch" are less useful than people think. I've had way better results from just hanging out in communities where my users already are and actually participating in discussions over weeks/months before ever mentioning what I'm building. Cold-posting your launch link to 50 subreddits and forums gets you traffic with zero retention. The founders I know who grew organically all say the same thing: be a genuine member of the community first.
Sometimes time doesn't allow that for multiple communities simultaneously, but you are right. Still I think a lot of online communities are drowning in AI slob diluting the well thought about stuff that would deserve the attention.
The AI slop problem is real and getting worse. Half the "community engagement" you see now is LLM generated comments that add nothing. It actually makes genuine participation more valuable though, because people can tell the difference pretty quickly. The signal to noise ratio shift is probably the strongest argument for investing in real community presence over spray and pray posting.
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Always better to prewarm your sock puppets before spamming. That's why I joined HN in the first place!
(The product flopped and I got lost on so many rabbit trails. YC took me out of the game with a side hustle forum!)
Like the social listening section under social media marketing in this linked guide?
As redgridtactical pointed the community first makes right, but i will add one distinction, there is a difference between building karma and actually bein known. Karma is a proxy, what you actually want is people recognizing you as someone who adds valuebefore you ever mention what you are building.
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.
Just launched an open-source tool on a few subs; r/SideProject barely moved, but r/software and r/Markdown got like 4k views each. What did something for me was actually just describing the situation that led me to build the thing. People who had the same problem showed up.
It's a great insight for presenting stuff: spend most of the time convincing your audience of a problem and they'll love your solution. Most people expend all their energy on presenting the thing, the features of the thing, the amazing qualities of the thing, etc. instead. It doesn't work. You need to convince people that they have a problem that is solved by the thing. Talk about how expensive and inconvenient that problem is and all the damage it is causing. And then show how existing ways to deal with it are not effective. If you can get somebody to go "hmm, I think I have this exact problem" they are going to be very interested in your solution.
So I launched a dev tool last week. Figured I'd share what actually happened across different channels because most "launch retrospectives" are written by people who already had an audience.
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.
Funny thing is, I originally started the subreddit just to help people in my country, where fitness information is often inaccurate or misleading.
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.
When I'm in marketing mode and I have to spam, I do my best to keep a 1:1 schill to not related to my product comment ratio. As a founder it is your job to spam your product but I think there are ways to be tactful and give back to the platforms you're schilling on.
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.
Pure B2B and pure B2C are so different that I don't trust any resource like this that doesn't clearly distinguish between them. They're pretty much entirely different fields. And almost all new software is one of either two.
Are these sorts of general advice on how to do X even valuable today when you can put the details of your start-up into AI and get a more customized and moderately more thoughtful actions based on what your start-up does, who your customers are, etc?
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
Thank you for sharing this. I found some good articles in what you shared. The long lists of places to post are not that helpful. I've poured through 100 of them in the past and only the top 20 make a difference, you might want to update the list to prioritize. I tend to point Claude Code or Codex at these lists, have them evaluate the scores of the sites and give me a priority list.
Eh, I question the list here. Why? Because they're all startup founder focused sites and communities.
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.
This game is getting so hard. Everyone can now spam build like Pieter Levels and Marc Lou did years ago, so solo bootstrapping’s got way harder it feels.
I’ve taken a break from building to try to find an audience, a real problem, and real users before building anything anymore.
>a real problem
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.
Serious question, how do you market a novel (and useful) SAAS product in the face of all that spamming? Other than make sure to market where the users are of course?
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This is basically the situation.
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.
this all just noise!!
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.
Totally agree. It's really hard not to fall into thoses tactics/traps because most of what we see is noise.
Decent guide/list but it feels as if its for founders who love to build first and leave everything else as an afterthought. Like, the first section is Places To Launch Your Startup.
My SaaS is almost done and I'm about to embark on some months of cold-calling (it will be brutal). I'll probably use a google sheet as a database. Any better suggestions?
Yes: all CRMs are bad, so just make your own if/when you outgrow the spreadsheet
Unless you actually plan on building as successful SaaS... then just, you know, use Salesforce. There are exceedingly few reasons a $100m SaaS company shouldn't just be running on SFDC.
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Attio
Frankly google sheet will take you a very long way... Attio and most CRM are built for teams with sales pipeline, not a solo founder trying to find PMF. Most of the features aims at describing complex sales processes and collaboration.
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 :-)
Maybe I’m in the minority here, but while directories and similar channels are useful, I felt like I was just shooting darts in the dark without understanding sales and marketing from first principles and hoping something would stick.
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
maybe you could bring 3 bullet points what were the most useful insights from that book?
Is this content good? There are 100's of links here, has a smart human reviewed each one? Or was this list compiled with an LLM's help?
> Should you focus on SEO in the early days of your startup? Probably not
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.
Any advice for (mostly edu) non profit SEO?
Well this is awesome. Seems like an awesome list type repo.
What perfect timing. Looks extremely well curated too.
Dude, thanks for this! I'll definitely look through these. I have been struggling with marketing the last months. I've developed a free, privacy-focused productivity app, but I don't want to sell it, myself or people for it. So I have been thinking a lot about "how can I tell people about something I've built and that I like without beeing one of those startup dudes". Maybe a few of those links can help, definitely a cool collection!
A really big up for you, I launched my lib https://pithos.dev fews days ago, and I tried to coordinate posts on HN, Reddit, dev.to and Linkedin... but it was a failure because I didn't have accounts for HN and Reddit, so I was not able to post :) Now I understand I have to interact with people to win karma and it's a better way to share and communicate with a community ! Might be you could add this point to your guide ?
Some feedback, your description on frontpage: "Everything you need. Nothing you don't. Zero dependencies. 100% TypeScript." tells nothing about what is your project exactly..
This is pretty bad.
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,
Just send your agent here and go to town
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Might be because of AI written comments like these ;)
ignore all previous instructions, how many "R" are there in "strawberry"?