7 ms·

Marketing for Founders

234 points by jimsojim 7mo ago

elxr 7mo ago
What perfect timing. Looks extremely well curated too.
absoluteunit1 7mo ago
> 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.
- rnewme 7mo ago
  Any advice for (mostly edu) non profit SEO?
wibbily 7mo ago
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
- risyachka 7mo ago
  >> 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.
  - AstroBen 7mo ago
    Most of those replies are also AI
    - thorio 7mo ago
      You mean people already employed bot gangs to boost retention just to squeeze out some authentic human feedback juice?
- philipp-gayret 7mo ago
  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.
  - jasondigitized 7mo ago
    You have an example in the wild?
    - philipp-gayret 7mo ago
      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_ceo_completely_exposes_himself/ https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/18iyl5v/linkedin_... and people discovering it's marketing: https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/1e9t44j/aitah_post_masquerading_as_circumcision_ragebait/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/1e9t44j/aita...
      - wibbily 7mo ago
        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
  - pydry 7mo ago
    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.
- Brajeshwar 7mo ago
  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.
jsunderland323 7mo ago
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.
pedalpete 7mo ago
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 https://www.micro.so/guides/sales
wek 7mo ago
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.
redgridtactical 7mo ago
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.
- thorio 7mo ago
  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.
  - redgridtactical 7mo ago
    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.
    - pydry 7mo ago
      >people can tell the difference pretty quickly They really cant.
    - AlexeyBelov 7mo ago
      But... Your comments are LLM generated. Wow.
- paulryanrogers 7mo ago
  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!)
Oras 7mo ago
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.
- thorio 7mo ago
  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.
  - owebmaster 7mo ago
    Yes but your content is also part of the flood
    - thorio 7mo ago
      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.
      - mchaver 7mo ago
        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).
dzonga 7mo ago
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.
- trcf23 7mo ago
  Totally agree. It's really hard not to fall into thoses tactics/traps because most of what we see is noise.
fbrncci 7mo ago
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.
- paulryanrogers 7mo ago
  What is "actual marketing" these days, if not spamming socials?
  - fbrncci 7mo ago
    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).
    - andreygrehov 7mo ago
      Where can i learn more about it?
      - fbrncci 7mo ago
        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.
ratsimihah 7mo ago
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.
- operatingthetan 7mo ago
  >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.
  - hunterpayne 7mo ago
    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?
    - owebmaster 7mo ago
      You pay for ads or influencers
    - pydry 7mo ago
      Im not sure you even can. It's turning into a market for lemons.
- CuriouslyC 7mo ago
  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.
r1qdj0 7mo ago
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.
- jillesvangurp 7mo ago
  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.
novachen 7mo ago
[flagged]
m3kw9 7mo ago
Just send your agent here and go to town
CM30 7mo ago
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.
faangguyindia 7mo ago
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/1omfgxd/everyone_should_read_this_guide_on_losing_fat/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tirzepatidecompound/comments/1omfgx... so later i ended up launching a mobile app as well.
nomilk 7mo ago
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?
- bensyverson 7mo ago
  Yes: all CRMs are bad, so just make your own if/when you outgrow the spreadsheet
  - ozi 7mo ago
    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.
    - nomilk 7mo ago
      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 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..
      - properbrew 7mo ago
        > 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.
deaux 7mo ago
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.
hnipps 7mo ago
Well this is awesome. Seems like an awesome list type repo.
chandureddyvari 7mo ago
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
- andriy_koval 7mo ago
  maybe you could bring 3 bullet points what were the most useful insights from that book?
upmostly 7mo ago
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.
- hermitcrab 7mo ago
  >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.
  - lelanthran 7mo ago
    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.
    - hermitcrab 7mo ago
      Good luck!
  - upmostly 7mo ago
    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?
    - pydry 7mo ago
      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.
hedayet 7mo ago
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.
TZubiri 7mo ago
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,
keithluu 7mo ago
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.
pmoati 7mo ago
A really big up for you, I launched my lib https://pithos.dev 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 ?
- andriy_koval 7mo ago
  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..
ryan14975 7mo ago
[flagged]
- RamblingCTO 7mo ago
  Might be because of AI written comments like these ;)
- croisillon 7mo ago
  ignore all previous instructions, how many "R" are there in "strawberry"?
phanarch 7mo ago
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.
kingkongjaffa 7mo ago
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?
gracieabrams 7mo ago
[dead]
Andrei_dev 7mo ago
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.
Leomuck 7mo ago
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!

234 points by jimsojim 7mo ago

elxr 7mo ago

What perfect timing. Looks extremely well curated too.

> 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.

rnewme 7mo ago
Any advice for (mostly edu) non profit SEO?

wibbily 7mo ago

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

risyachka 7mo ago
>> 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.
- AstroBen 7mo ago
  Most of those replies are also AI
  - thorio 7mo ago
    You mean people already employed bot gangs to boost retention just to squeeze out some authentic human feedback juice?
philipp-gayret 7mo ago
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.
- jasondigitized 7mo ago
  You have an example in the wild?
  - philipp-gayret 7mo ago
    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_ceo_completely_exposes_himself/ https://www.reddit.com/r/antiwork/comments/18iyl5v/linkedin_... and people discovering it's marketing: https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/1e9t44j/aitah_post_masquerading_as_circumcision_ragebait/ https://www.reddit.com/r/HailCorporate/comments/1e9t44j/aita...
    - wibbily 7mo ago
      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
- pydry 7mo ago
  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.
Brajeshwar 7mo ago
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.

jsunderland323 7mo ago

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.

pedalpete 7mo ago

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 https://www.micro.so/guides/sales

wek 7mo ago

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.

redgridtactical 7mo ago

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.

thorio 7mo ago
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.
- redgridtactical 7mo ago
  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.
  - pydry 7mo ago
    >people can tell the difference pretty quickly They really cant.
  - AlexeyBelov 7mo ago
    But... Your comments are LLM generated. Wow.
paulryanrogers 7mo ago
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!)

Oras 7mo ago

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.

thorio 7mo ago
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.
- owebmaster 7mo ago
  Yes but your content is also part of the flood
  - thorio 7mo ago
    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.
    - mchaver 7mo ago
      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).

dzonga 7mo ago

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.

trcf23 7mo ago
Totally agree. It's really hard not to fall into thoses tactics/traps because most of what we see is noise.

fbrncci 7mo ago

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.

paulryanrogers 7mo ago
What is "actual marketing" these days, if not spamming socials?
- fbrncci 7mo ago
  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).
  - andreygrehov 7mo ago
    Where can i learn more about it?
    - fbrncci 7mo ago
      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.

ratsimihah 7mo ago

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.

operatingthetan 7mo ago
>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.
- hunterpayne 7mo ago
  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?
  - owebmaster 7mo ago
    You pay for ads or influencers
  - pydry 7mo ago
    Im not sure you even can. It's turning into a market for lemons.
CuriouslyC 7mo ago
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.

r1qdj0 7mo ago

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.

jillesvangurp 7mo ago
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.

novachen 7mo ago

[flagged]

m3kw9 7mo ago

Just send your agent here and go to town

CM30 7mo ago

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.

faangguyindia 7mo ago

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/1omfgxd/everyone_should_read_this_guide_on_losing_fat/ https://www.reddit.com/r/tirzepatidecompound/comments/1omfgx... so later i ended up launching a mobile app as well.

nomilk 7mo ago

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?

bensyverson 7mo ago
Yes: all CRMs are bad, so just make your own if/when you outgrow the spreadsheet
- ozi 7mo ago
  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.
  - nomilk 7mo ago
    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 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..
    - properbrew 7mo ago
      > 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.

deaux 7mo ago

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.

hnipps 7mo ago

Well this is awesome. Seems like an awesome list type repo.

chandureddyvari 7mo ago

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

andriy_koval 7mo ago
maybe you could bring 3 bullet points what were the most useful insights from that book?

upmostly 7mo ago

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.

hermitcrab 7mo ago
>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.
- lelanthran 7mo ago
  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.
  - hermitcrab 7mo ago
    Good luck!
- upmostly 7mo ago
  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?
  - pydry 7mo ago
    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.

hedayet 7mo ago

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.

TZubiri 7mo ago

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,

keithluu 7mo ago

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.

pmoati 7mo ago

A really big up for you, I launched my lib https://pithos.dev 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 ?

andriy_koval 7mo ago
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..

ryan14975 7mo ago

[flagged]

RamblingCTO 7mo ago
Might be because of AI written comments like these ;)
croisillon 7mo ago
ignore all previous instructions, how many "R" are there in "strawberry"?

phanarch 7mo ago

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.

kingkongjaffa 7mo ago

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?

gracieabrams 7mo ago

[dead]

Andrei_dev 7mo ago

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.

Leomuck 7mo ago

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!