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.
I think it’s strange to dislike vibe coded things. I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff that’s mostly vibe coded. fomo.nyc for example. The problem is mostly the intention. I think a lot of vibe coded stuff isn’t solving a problem someone has its someone trying to seek profit. It’s no different from when smartphones first came out and people wanted to make a for everything when most of them didn’t solve any problems. The difference is nobody is wowed anymore by anything so your app that turns your phone into a beer kind of thing doesn’t exist in the vibe coded world.
> I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff that’s mostly vibe coded. fomo.nyc for example.
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.
And to top it all off, they frrquently even vibe code their reddit posts. There is absolutely nothing of interest to interact with those posts.
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.
While this is directionally correct it does come down to a tonality, that I think wasn't justified in that case. But hey, it's the Internet and I'm not naive either.
I'm saying that the tonality is justified due to all of the other slop. You and me are simply the unavoidable casualties.
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.
While that's true, my tool (as part of the flood) didn't originate from the same spring, it's just something I happen to be building that same way, I did before the LLM wave. It's not vibecoded SaaS fast food.
I checked community guidelines before and think regarding Reddit, this is where it should be resolve in my option.
Unfortunately the source doesn't matter when there so much. It is really hard to differentiate things when you are inundated. Did you try a Show HN here? It requires more luck than ever because of the same problem, but worth a try. I'll take an honest look if you do it (though hard to say if I am the target market).
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.
Maybe the solution is to ban editing. Or let moderators review + approve edits at least.
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
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.
Coz theyre very reluctant to pay for tools and cant be bothered to lobby their boss for tool purchases for more than a couple of things.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
I come from a few years experience in Marktech, but I am also now training a partner of mine to run and maintain ads with zero to no experience. The best way to go about it is using something like Gemini guided-learning, asking it to explain the differences between Google, Meta, Tiktok, Microsoft and LinkedIn ads; deciding which ones to run for which type of audience; how to target intent, rather than keywords; explaining what retargeting is, landing page conversion optimization as well as how PMAX works; and how to optimize for it over a longer period of time. You can make a "Gem" in gemini about this, and continuously advance learning. I wouldn't throw any money at it until you understand those basics, and while I mostly run Google ads, its quite important to understand all the differences and nuances between other advertisers.
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.
Which ad network do you use? Google, Meta, TikTok? I imagine you had pre-existing experience especially if it's Google, it's rare to get good RoI out of it unless you really know what you're doing. If you go with the defaults you'll get a few thousand "clicks", zero actual users among them.
Google and Meta. I did work for a Marketing agency for years handling automations development for them. So I have been exposed to hundreds of campaigns across different industries and have seen what works well and what doesn't. Not saying that you need this experience, but once you see stable results from others; and how to protect them, its hard not to chase after them as well!
Do you mean the creatives? I do outsource the creatives. For ads, I largely automate setting up and maintaining them; like rebalancing and demand generation scripts. But here we are talking good old spreadsheet magic not AI.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I hadn't heard of SFDC, but watched a ~5min summary vid [0]. Seems like overkill for a one person startup, but seems decent for a larger company [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntZbRd-DPII
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..
> I'm about to embark on some months of cold-calling (it will be brutal)
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.
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.
> 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 ?
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.
I think it’s strange to dislike vibe coded things. I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff that’s mostly vibe coded. fomo.nyc for example. The problem is mostly the intention. I think a lot of vibe coded stuff isn’t solving a problem someone has its someone trying to seek profit. It’s no different from when smartphones first came out and people wanted to make a for everything when most of them didn’t solve any problems. The difference is nobody is wowed anymore by anything so your app that turns your phone into a beer kind of thing doesn’t exist in the vibe coded world.
> I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff that’s mostly vibe coded. fomo.nyc for example.
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.
And to top it all off, they frrquently even vibe code their reddit posts. There is absolutely nothing of interest to interact with those posts.
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.
While this is directionally correct it does come down to a tonality, that I think wasn't justified in that case. But hey, it's the Internet and I'm not naive either.
I'm saying that the tonality is justified due to all of the other slop. You and me are simply the unavoidable casualties.
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.
Yes but your content is also part of the flood
While that's true, my tool (as part of the flood) didn't originate from the same spring, it's just something I happen to be building that same way, I did before the LLM wave. It's not vibecoded SaaS fast food.
I checked community guidelines before and think regarding Reddit, this is where it should be resolve in my option.
Unfortunately the source doesn't matter when there so much. It is really hard to differentiate things when you are inundated. Did you try a Show HN here? It requires more luck than ever because of the same problem, but worth a try. I'll take an honest look if you do it (though hard to say if I am the target market).
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
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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
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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.
It’s also against the rules now too. I wish there were a report button.
Isn't that what the "flag" option is for?
kind of hidden. they should make it more prominent now .
How did you guess it was AI slop? I read it and answered before seeing your comment :)
X is not Y — it’s Z.
Because: - A: … - B: …
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.
You have an example in the wild?
Looking around on Reddit I see a lot of them have started to get banned, I was able to find the name of it though; Aptilink. An Aptilink viral marketing search yields posts like these; https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/18iyl5v/linkedin_... and people discovering it's marketing: https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/1e9t44j/aita...
Maybe the solution is to ban editing. Or let moderators review + approve edits at least.
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
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
You mean people already employed bot gangs to boost retention just to squeeze out some authentic human feedback juice?
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
would you share tools you used to create it? Is voice your own?
Huh, nice. Thanks for sharing.
>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?
The positives:
-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.
Coz theyre very reluctant to pay for tools and cant be bothered to lobby their boss for tool purchases for more than a couple of things.
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.
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.
Good luck!
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.
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.
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.
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).
Where can i learn more about it?
I come from a few years experience in Marktech, but I am also now training a partner of mine to run and maintain ads with zero to no experience. The best way to go about it is using something like Gemini guided-learning, asking it to explain the differences between Google, Meta, Tiktok, Microsoft and LinkedIn ads; deciding which ones to run for which type of audience; how to target intent, rather than keywords; explaining what retargeting is, landing page conversion optimization as well as how PMAX works; and how to optimize for it over a longer period of time. You can make a "Gem" in gemini about this, and continuously advance learning. I wouldn't throw any money at it until you understand those basics, and while I mostly run Google ads, its quite important to understand all the differences and nuances between other advertisers.
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.
Which ad network do you use? Google, Meta, TikTok? I imagine you had pre-existing experience especially if it's Google, it's rare to get good RoI out of it unless you really know what you're doing. If you go with the defaults you'll get a few thousand "clicks", zero actual users among them.
Google and Meta. I did work for a Marketing agency for years handling automations development for them. So I have been exposed to hundreds of campaigns across different industries and have seen what works well and what doesn't. Not saying that you need this experience, but once you see stable results from others; and how to protect them, its hard not to chase after them as well!
How do you make the ads themselves? Are you a content creator yourself? Using AI? Hiring someone to make them?
Do you mean the creatives? I do outsource the creatives. For ads, I largely automate setting up and maintaining them; like rebalancing and demand generation scripts. But here we are talking good old spreadsheet magic not AI.
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).
Yes, I was curious about the creatives. You're doing a lot, so I was just curious where you were choosing to spend your time.
Ads as a product validation strategy is old, and used to work great, but now is saturated and produces meh results in most niches.
If you're getting >CLV from your advertising cost of customer acquisition without PMF you're doing exceptionally well.
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.
>people can tell the difference pretty quickly
They really cant.
But... Your comments are LLM generated. Wow.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Im not sure you even can. It's turning into a market for lemons.
You pay for ads or influencers
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
I hadn't heard of SFDC, but watched a ~5min summary vid [0]. Seems like overkill for a one person startup, but seems decent for a larger company [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntZbRd-DPII
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..
> I'm about to embark on some months of cold-calling (it will be brutal)
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.
There are a few steps between founding a company and pulling in $100m in revenue, but yeah, I guess
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 :-)
> 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 ?
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"?