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Ask HN: How do you handle marketing as a solo technical founder?
I've shipped multiple products over the past few years. Every single one followed the same pattern: build, post, get 12 likes from friends, a bit of organic traction, then nothing. Back to coding a new thing.
I know I need marketing help but giving equity to someone I met online feels like a huge risk. At the same time hiring a paid marketer when you have zero revenue feels just as scary. And I'm not dancing on TikTok, that's for sure.
Have any of you actually taken on a marketing co-founder? What made you say yes to that person specifically? Was it their track record, the way they pitched, a trial period first?
- PaulHoule 6mo agoMarketing can be a lot of different things. I brought on a high-touch salesperson on spec years ago and it did not work out. He and I were really successful at getting audiences with people but we never made the sales we were looking for and, worse, he lost me small cheap jobs that I could have sold myself. He'd probably say it was a product problem and he might have been right but later on I found out I wasn't the only person who had the same experience with him. For some products you need those kind of skills. I've met people like him who really are worth their weight in gold. For other products you need somebody who can make an Adwords campaign, analyzes the analytics, refine it and repeat. That kind of person can be worth their weight in gold too. For this conversation to be productive you have to have some idea if you need one or the other or a bit of both.
- Imustaskforhelp 6mo agoIf I may ask, was the product B2B or B2C and do you feel any particular advice which can be different for the two (B2B/B2C), I would love to hear your opinions on it.
- PaulHoule 6mo agoB2B with a high level of customization. Sales would have been very high touch and not all on the run ads, sleep, repeat model you see in B2C.
- Imustaskforhelp 6mo agoI wish to ask you one thing but how do you start within B2B as in how do you get your first few customers, I feel like having the next becomes significantly easier somehow but I feel like its a very large mountain to cover for the first few customers, I would really like it if you can give me some guiding points on this for future and thanks for replying to me, I really appreciate it!
- PaulHoule 6mo agoA lot of people who are successful in it can take advantage of connections they have in the industry to make the first few sales. For instance when David Duffield got kicked out of Peoplesoft he went out and started Workday to make a competitive product and of course his name was well known in the industry so the skids were greased for him. See also this legendary story: https://www.marketingmonk.so/p/salesforce-grit-to-giant-marketing-strategy https://www.marketingmonk.so/p/salesforce-grit-to-giant-mark...
- brudgers 6mo agoYou take off your solo technical founder pants and put on your solo marketing founder hat. In business, selling is much much much more important than making because if you have money you can hire technical workers. But nobody will care nearly as much about survival as you. And if you have a technical background you are much more likely to have technical people in your network. Good luck.
- Alacart 6mo agoPants are for closers.
- didgetmaster 6mo agoJobs and Wozniak proved (at least in the 70s) that a great technical founder could team up with a brilliant marketer and build a huge company from next to nothing. I seriously wonder if that can happen today. As a technical founder, I have tried to find a marketing partner for years. Every time it has failed miserably as each one proved unable to move the needle. In my case, it could be the product, but I wonder who has seen success in this day and age.
- iterateoften 6mo agoJobs was a marketer, a product visionary and a ruthless businessman. You need more than just marketing.
- hungryhobbit 6mo agoAsshole. The word you're looking for is asshole. I once knew a guy who was disabled and walked on crutches. Jobs got mad at him for being late to a meeting, and the guy replied "well someone parked in the handicapped parking spot, and it took me awhile to walk from a normal parking spot. No joke, Jobs looks him (a disabled person) directly in the eye, and says "oh, that was me; I think the country built an excess of disabled parking spaces after WW2." To the disabled guy!!!
- 6mo ago
- codingdave 6mo agoYou seem to have missed the key step. Talk to customers before you build. Build what they need. Then have them talk to you to adjust things until you really nailed down the product that solves their needs, and then have them talk to their friends about how much you rock. Marketing comes later.
- collin128 6mo agoStrong agree here. I'm a non-technical founder. I tend to interview 30-50 people initially to find a gap in the market. If I'm into something (strong PMF), a good percentage of those people I interviewed will be future buyers. I typically have cascading meetings for the following steps: 1 - is this 10X better than what currently exists 2 - does our prototype look 10X better 3 - does our v1 solve the gap we found 4 - what features do we need to build in order to get you to pay for it 5 - what features do we need to get you to refer us to 3 friends A meeting for each of those goals typically leads to customers (again, if I've found PMF).
- ericd 6mo agoHow do you usually find the people you interview?
- yokuze 6mo agoMy question exactly.
- csacc 6mo agoAlso my question
- abadar 6mo agoI'm in sales. This is going to sound shallow and tautological, but you find the people to interview for Product Market Fit by looking for the people you THINK are the ideal customers. If you can't find your target market, you might want to consider a different demographic that you understand better. Most successful startup founders started a business specifically to solve the problems they dealt with at their last job. They understand their product market fit because they ARE their target market.
- FpUser 6mo agoOn one particular project I started by "spamming" relevant interest based forums. Luckily I was a member of said forums for quite a while before I have released my first version. It was about 13 years ago. Strategy had worked and then I got CEO as a partner along with some investment so I no longer had to do it
- reassess_blind 6mo agoI've always relied on Google Ads and eventually SEO for my SaaS products. For SEO, I've had good success with having the landing page be an unauthenticated version of the app itself (modified to include SEO friendly text), allowing the users to immediately start using a limited version of the app which eventually prompts for signup. After signup, any data from the landing page shell gets pushed into their account. This significantly reduces bounce rate compared to a traditional landing page and I've had good success getting to the top of popular search terms after a few months/years.
- mc7alazoun 6mo ago[dead]
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- bambushu 6mo ago[flagged]
- keithnz 6mo agodepending on product, I've been using Claude code to do market analysis. I'm quite surprised at how good it has been. I'm not sure how well it works in general, but for Agriculture (which we target) there is a LOT of information out there so analyzing market segments is pretty good.
- areys 6mo ago[flagged]
- jason_zig 6mo agoI solo founded a business and it just crossed 100K MRR (still solo). The trick is: 1. Don't give up after the first month of no traction, if you can get at least 1 customer at this stage that is a good sign. 2. Make contact with every customer you acquire, find out why they installed your product and what they want from it. Build any feature that they say is missing and offer the best customer support possible 3. Repeat this for a period of time. Once you have more customers the circumstances will change but this how you go from 0 -> 1 and get some runway IMO
- another_twist 6mo agoUnderrated advice here.
- jerrygoyal 6mo agoyeah but how to get new customers
- clapthewind 6mo agoYou've to go into founder mode - solve problems that exist for customers you've already discovered, rather than build something and expect magical "marketing" to find customers. The latter was previously a weak strategy, and is completely gone with the AI era. No alternative to working very closely with customers.
- jerrygoyal 6mo agoHonestly, I'm still not quite seeing how this fits into marketing. I get that we're focusing on our current customers, but how do we actually bring in new ones?
- heyethan 6mo ago[flagged]
- clapthewind 6mo ago
- ofabioroma 6mo agoEvery change you do to make the product better 10x the effectiveness of your mkt
- garrickvanburen 6mo ago“The business enterprise has two—and only two—basic functions: marketing and innovation.” - Peter Drucker I'm pretty sure my primary job is marketing the work that I do.
- bko 6mo agoWhat's the product? I found the only thing that reliably works is direct sales. Find people that could potentially use your product and message them. Find them in forums, chats, email, LinkedIn, wherever. If I had something I was into or did and someone took the time to reach out to me to try to show me something they built in a personal way, I would definitely be receptive. Online stuff is cheap. I built products, posted on Reddit and had literally thousands of people come to my site. Not one person bothered to go to the home page and ask "what is this product". And this was when there were a lot fewer bots and scrapers. No ones going to use your product because he saw some crap on TikTok. It's cheap engagement
- kmoser 6mo ago> No ones going to use your product because he saw some crap on TikTok. It's cheap engagement If your product is a wellness product or app, that's like catnip for a TikTok influencer. If it's a B2B SaaS, probably the opposite.
- lazarkap 6mo agoPlatform where technical founders post their live products and marketers pitch to join as co-founders or paid partners. Built it because I kept running into the exact problem in my post. Not live yet but close. I think I am definitely gonna try the direct sales approach, to try and fill out the platform once its ready.
- nick_jonas 6mo agoAgree. But I'd like to add one more thing. Just like you, I developed a product and posted about it on Reddit, and received a ton of upvotes and comments in just over ten minutes. So I knew I was in the right place. But then, moderators deleted my post cause they don't like promotion here. I've tried X, youtube and other social medias. But it's like shouting in a crowded train station—no one can hear me. So I think it's hard to harness the leverage of online marketing right from the start. Perhaps we should reach out to each customer one by one during the first phase.
- Sim-In-Silico 6mo ago[dead]
- mannyv 6mo agoThink of marketing as "letting people who might use/buy your product that it exists." You can't buy it if you have no idea it exists, right? So how do you get the word out to the potential duatomers? You can read traction (the book), or just ask gemini/perplexity where you should advertise to find them.
- maxmorrish 6mo agohonestly the thing that worked best for me was just writing about the problem i was solving, not the product. like a dev.to post about why server side processing is unnecessary for most dev utility tools got way more traction than any "hey check out my thing" post ever did. people engage with the take, then they find the tool naturally. also reddit > twitter for early stage imo, the subreddits are way more targeted
- mickael-kerjean 6mo agoWhen bootstrapping something, marketing is about finding distribution channels that work for you. Looks like you never found such distribution channels, learn and keep grinding on that, organic and tik tok dancing is not the only game in town. I do everything from tech to sales, marketing and support for my company based of my oss work: Filestash (https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash https://github.com/mickael-kerjean/filestash). For my business, the most important channel is SEO and particularly creating online tools to get people to interact with the product so if you search for "online ftp client", "online s3 browser" you will inevitably found my product. That's the top of the funnel, the cold traffic and the goal is then to transform that onto paid customers. For me, I make calls with users, try to understand their problem and fix it for them. In practice it's a lot tougher than it looks because with AI less and less people are / will pay for software
- lazarkap 6mo agoThe SEO + free tools as a funnel is something I hadn't thought about before. Not universal for every product but for the right one it's a really clean distribution channel that compounds over time. The "make calls with users" part is universal though, that's the one I keep avoiding and probably shouldn't. How long before the SEO started moving for you?
- know-how 6mo ago[dead]
- atarian 6mo ago>I know I need marketing help but giving equity to someone I met online feels like a huge risk. doesn't seem like you're risking much if your products are not getting any traction in the first place
- lazarkap 6mo agoFair point.
- another_twist 6mo agoI guess the question is who is your customer or more specifically who's your buyer, who's your user and where do they hang out ? Also how do people find out about you product ? Distribution takes time, so I think its important to gauge interest upfront rather than commit to building first. In general, the answer usually is to find people in your own network. If you go by that funnel the first thing you need is a network. LI is great at this. The next thing is to see who in your network is worth talking to. Find out whether the pain-point that you recognized resonates with them. A LI blast to your network might work as well to give you a bit of credibility. One thing that is cited often that does NOT work is spamming people asking for their time to learn about a problem. Nobody ever got back to me wit this method. But asking people in your own network for warm intros almost always works.
- manojpathak 6mo agoI am curious what products you shipped? Could you share link of 1 or 2 here?
- lazarkap 6mo agoMost of them are down honestly, which kind of proves the point of my post. Ourbit (ourbitapp.com) is still a work in progress (wrapping up the demo/assetes/characters). BuzzBench is down but the repo is open and there's a demo video if you want to see what it did: github.com/LazarKap/buzzbench / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAnbZMoQvmQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yAnbZMoQvmQ. Building something new right now that's directly about this problem, will share when it's live. Next to this, I have like 3 more failed projects.
- manojpathak 6mo agoI must say you have very strong skills. I also build something but planning to kill it. Now not planning to build anything as almost all the spaces are saturated. Do not stop, good luck
- lazarkap 6mo agoThanks for the words of encouragement, as you said to me, DON'T stop, and good luck. If I can help somehow, hit me up on linkedin, Il be glad. https://www.linkedin.com/in/lazarbogosavljevic/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/lazarbogosavljevic/
- blindriver 6mo ago> Every single one followed the same pattern: build, post, get 12 likes from friends, a bit of organic traction, then nothing. > I know I need marketing help but giving equity to someone I met online feels like a huge risk. No offense, but your equity, from your own admission, is literally worthless. If someone decides to help you out for your equity, you should be jumping for joy. Most likely you need to pay out of your pocket, but if you're not willing to risk your own capital, then how can you expect others to risk theirs?
- lazarkap 6mo agoNone taken, I agree with you, and it is a fair point. I need to rethink my approach.
- gomox 6mo agoMessage me I'll do 2h of being your marketing cofounder for free. Source: CS grad turned revenue person
- mikenikles 6mo agoHow about this counter offer? I give you 50% of the revenue for any sale you make for https://seaquel.app https://seaquel.app. If you tell me we need a lifetime offer, consider it done.
- mikenikles 6mo agoOh wait... haha your source doesn't match your professional experience :). My offer still stands though.
- gomox 6mo agoNot sure what you mean, I am definitely a CS grad and I run a Sales/Marketing org I built at a company I used to be CTO of :)
- siriusastrebe 6mo agoThis product looks fantastic! I got one question that I can't find the answer to on the website. What sql variants does it support? Postgres? MariaDB?
- lazarkap 6mo agoI'd love to take you up on that. Sending you a message, do you have an email/linkedin or preferred way to connect?
- gbourne1 6mo agoAs a builder/developer, marketing often isn't considered "fun". But you need to do it, else the build was for your personal entertainment/learning exp (which is sometimes a good thing). What I do is stop building and focus 100% on marketing - well, 90% because I can't help myself. Even if this isn't as "fun", you need to switch modes and stop building. As for my approach, I start with Google Ads + SEO/AEO. Google ads can get results in a few weeks (Google does have a learning phase) and SEO and AEO is a much longer process, which can be months before you see results. I use AHREF to check my SEO/AEO progress. While AHREF isn't a direct measurement of Google, I've found their DR to be correlated with my organic traffic.
- lazarkap 6mo agoThe 90% is relatable, I physically cannot stop building even when I know I should be doing something else. The mode switching is the hardest part, not the marketing itself. Good reminder that ads can show results fast while SEO compounds slowly, running both makes sense.
- ChrisArchitect 6mo agoRecently: Marketing for Founders https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47380295 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47380295
- sltr 6mo agoThere's been a course for that since before 2015: https://30x500.com/academy/ https://30x500.com/academy/ I am currently taking it. From the landing page: > Most of us, when we want to ship a product, we start at the beginning and with the most obvious ingredient: the product. Because when you can create, the act of creating feels most natural and straightforward. But it makes it so easy to end up with a product that nobody wants to buy. And isn't that every new entrepreneur's worst nightmare? All that work, and nobody cares.
- manojpathak 6mo agoLet us know how it went. Good Luck
- lambdascript 6mo ago[dead]
- lostathome 6mo agoVery useful advice on this post.
- CSP_LIBRARY 6mo agoIt's not impossible to be a one-man army. carry on
- cindyllm 6mo ago[dead]
- dubeye 6mo agoIt’s easy to learn it’s just boring. Spend half your time marketing from day one. Be strict about it
- Jeffrin-dev 6mo ago[dead]
- Meld5792 6mo ago[dead]
- mahadillah-ai 6mo ago[dead]
- Akuehne 6mo agoSo many people are victims of what I like to call the "Field of Dreams Fallacy." Also known as: If you build it, they will come. In the real world, it doesn't matter in the slightest if you build the best product in the history of the universe. If you don't have the proper marketing and sales pipelines, you will lose to the product that does. There was a great article on here a while back about VHS and Betamax. While Betamax was better by nearly every metric, it lost. Same for HD-DVD against BluRay. And for so many other great products that have died on the vine. I think this is actually a bigger problem with society as a whole than people notice. The majority of people think that an idea alone is as valuable as a business. People regularly tell themselves that if they would have come up with X, Y, or Z, then they'd be rich and successful. When in reality, the product or idea doesn't equate to success in the slightest. It's the same thing that I'm sure a lot of you in tech see, where people say "Can you make me an app?" or "We should start a tech company that does this one thing better than the other guy." And yet almost every single time I explain to them that there are 4,000,000 versions of their app already, and that it's still a business that requires significant effort, they act like it's my fault for not helping them or not believing in their idea. I've let millions of better ideas fade from memory without a second thought. Because I've learned that operating a successful business is an entirely different world from building a cool thing. The idea is the easy part. Everything after it is the actual work.
- lazarkap 6mo ago"The idea is the easy part" is something I knew deep down but was too afraid to admit to myself. It's easier to keep building than to confront that everything after it is the actual work. Took me years and a few dead products to really accept that. I feel like Im in the process of swallowing that pill.
- Gagarin1917 6mo ago>There was a great article on here a while back about VHS and Betamax. While Betamax was better by nearly every metric, it lost. Not every measure. It could hold like half the recording as a VHS. The “killer app” for video tapes was being able to record live TV when you weren’t home with timers on the players. VHS could record more without any intervention. It also meant most movies could be watched all the way through without interruption. People didn’t care about the ever so slightly better quality of Betamax. They cared about getting their moneys worth and not being interrupted. That’s why VHS won.
- MarcelinoGMX3C 6mo ago[dead]
- skyberrys 6mo agoI don't really know the answer you are looking for. I think it's different from one product to the next. I haven't managed to gain massive traction from the things I've built so far, but one thing I'm doing differently this time is treating marketing like the gym. I mean, don't expect overnight results, but make a consistent plan and continue to implement it over months and years not weeks and days. ETA: based on your profile you started March 20 but in 2025 and your domain name expired. Did you build a product that has a fixed cost to remain live? I found your video, your YT seems popular. You can make a free website with GitHub pages and point your URL at that at least. Keep persisting, you can do it.
- lazarkap 6mo agoNo, that was one of the products I slowly did let die, and kinda modified the product to be open-sourced, cli first tool. Thanks for the words of support. I will definitely try to be more active on youtube and leverage that.
- lyfeninja 6mo agoIn a similar situation and I understand where you're coming from. Although I have not taken on a Marketing co-founder, I have had a number of important and revealing conversations that I've learned a lot from. 1. Make sure the market for your product exists before you make it. This is counterintuitive to builders like myself and probably you. building is what I'm good at, and I know what I'm making adds value, but that doesn't mean others will see that value. 2. Kinda goes with #1, but talk to as many people as possible in the market you are considering a product for and learn what their problems and pain points are so you can solve them. If you can relieve someone's pain, the marketing will do itself. It's hard to even get the conversations, but each one is helpful, even if it's telling you something you don't want to hear. 3. Focus on gaining external interest, not necessarily revenue. Again, hard, but a pilot or partnership with another startup or small business can go along way and showing value to future investors or customers. 4. Talk to and learn from other founders. Your already doing this, but there are nuggets of information that can help even if it's just a slight change of perspective. 5. Keep your head up. It's a slog and it's brutal, but it's a marathon. I'm still working on all these things myself, so you're not alone. The realization that a good product without a market is nothing, was a big revelation for me (and in hindsight makes me feel like an idiot). I honestly thought if you solve a hard enough problem or built a good enough product that the rest would fall in line, but that was not the case, but I'm not ready to give up yet.
- MahereMarley 6mo ago[dead]
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- cisco801 6mo ago[dead]
- EITB_2026 6mo agoYes
- hirewilliam 6mo ago[dead]
- EdgeNRoots 6mo ago[dead]
- khalgand 6mo ago[dead]
- shivang2607 6mo agoIts really tough as a techincal guy. Coding and building product is the easiest part actually, Hard is to distribute and market. Many people here are suggesting talking to people if they really need what you built. This is really true, but even when you build something which people might wanna use, I still find it hard to distribute and market. I mostly get traction from the reddit but that's it. I am not even allow to post here on HN. I know what I've built is useful, but I do not even know how to pitch it correctly, or where to market it apart from reddit.
- omertt27 6mo agoI am using channels like indiehackers, reddit, x.These can be helpful for you.But i need to say that its hard bro, not easy.
- ListeningPie 6mo agoI'm thinking of doing the same, but am hesitant to "advertise" as being advertise to, is not why users are on reddit and x. How do you see it?
- hernanhumana 6mo agowhat about generate the social media posts first. like 30 between text, media pictures videos even more first. later automate the daily upload? but human in the loop doing egamement is a must.
- videobroker 6mo ago[dead]
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- danelliot 6mo ago[dead]
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- psychomfa_tiger 6mo ago[dead]
- sminchev 6mo agoUnfortunately, being a developer, at least in my case, they don't teach us sales and marketing. Many people believe that if the product is good it will sale good, and get disappointed. What I can add as an additional advice is that asking AI what to do does not help either. It can give good suggestions, and ideas on how to promote it, but the actual execution is a total disaster. For example, it says, show it in hacker news, but does not tell you how to do it, and because you don't know what to ask the AI, posting here just like that is a big fail. Same as Reddit, ProductHunt, BetaList, and all other other platforms. Sometimes the AI can give really bad suggestions as well, like, pretend that you are not promoting it, but somewhere in the middle, try to add your things, so that it looks honest. PURE EVIL! Marketing and promotion is totally different topic and the experience really matters! :)
- afron_manyu 6mo ago[dead]
- gethly 6mo ago[dead]
- sarimkx 6mo agoAll I want to add here is, if you are shy or scared of being "cringe", this path is NOT for you. Someone actually recommended to be absolutely "shameless" when it comes to speaking about what you are doing i.e. marketing your product/service.
- mollygarden 6mo ago[flagged]
- late_night_fix 6mo agoYou don't have to go Tiktok or Instagram. Even email, niche forums or tiny add test can tell you a lot.You want someone who's small and iterating.
- PocketBot 6mo agoIt's as rough as it gets. You really have to know who your customer is. Not as a thesis, but as a proven. If you can find your exact customer base, you will get customers over and over again. There is one subreddit where I can post any time of the day and will have 50-100 new testers by the morning (and if it does extremely well then 10x those numbers). It's way more niche and specific for most products than people think, spamming X won't help build brand identity unless you are following and talking to your literal customer. Then persistance, persistance and more persistance. P.S I am an absolute amateur at this as well but just my experience.
- Shogo_Kaneda 6mo ago[dead]
- faangguyindia 6mo agoI launched a few weeks back, got already 2000 active users, here's my project: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.macrocodex.app https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.macrocodex... I've a community in bodybuilding space, where I share my work. People have to believe in your work, you can make best product in the world but people won't take any interest in it unless they believe in your abilities, or they hear about your product from someone else who have successfully used it. This is why don't just spend building best product but get a few users and see if they succeed Many competiting product couldn't even get their 100 downloads let alone active users who use your product everyday.
- drbojingle 6mo agoHave you asked chatgpt?
- Areena_28 6mo agoI'll speak on the co-founder question, try out the the trial period approach. Give someone a 60-day paid project with a clear deliverable before any equity conversation. You learn more about how they think and execute in 60 days than in 10 interviews.
- peerscope 6mo ago[dead]
- kevinfarrugia 6mo agoFrom my experience building a product that is so good that it sells itself is highly unlikely and you will need to spend a good deal of time on marketing. If you are building a B2B product you could go through direct sales channels and speak to the prospective customers yourself. Get out of your comfort zone and reach out to them directly. In the worst case they will ignore you or tell you that they are not interested. If you are building B2C I think it is significantly harder. As others mentioned, first you need to find your customer and then build your product. This way you have some guaranteed revenue and (more importantly) feedback.
- dhruvkar 6mo agobuild distribution first. treat this like a product. simplest - email list. if there is an area you are interested in, start writing weekly. post it in 5-10 relevant subreddits. post it in 7-15 relevant facebook groups. daily. give yourself 6 months to get to 1000 subscribers. now when you launch something, you have a warm audience. protip: to grow email faster, niche down. and try to talk individually to each subscriber like you would a friend.
- jameslsy1995 6mo ago[dead]
- mvsingh 6mo agoA lot of cold outreach on platforms where your ICP lies. Creating content to get organic traffic, leveraging free directories, launch pads. these work if you are early and need traction. If you have money you can do collabs, and paid marketing.