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.

1. can all tell

2. will not use your product

Please stop polluting the global commons

Signed everyone <3

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.

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 founders I've seen do this well pick one or two communities and go deep for months. The temptation is to spread across 15 platforms because guides say to. Narrower and deeper consistently outperforms wider and shallower, especially now when signal-to-noise has collapsed everywhere.

My Dev.to article got 42 reads and 2 reactions. Not exactly going viral. But here's the thing — Google picked it up within days, and I'm already seeing search traffic trickle in. Honestly that might end up being worth more than any launch-day spike.

Twitter was a waste of time. Brand new account, zero followers, zero impressions. And I mean literally zero — the algorithm just doesn't show tweets from fresh accounts to anybody. I could've tweeted the cure for cancer and nobody would've seen it.

Reddit though. One post in r/webdev's Showoff Saturday thread pulled 1,400 views and 10 comments. Blew everything else out of the water. Downside: that sub only lets you self-promote on Saturdays, and AutoMod killed one of my replies because my account was too new. Cool.

Also looked into BetaList — turns out they dropped their free tier, it's $39 minimum now. Found another directory that approved me in 2 days and sent... one visitor. One.

Biggest takeaway that nobody talks about: the thing blocking you isn't your writing or your product. It's subreddit karma requirements and account age filters. AutoMod doesn't care how good your post is. If you're planning to use Reddit for anything, go make that account right now. You'll thank yourself in a month.

But over time, I started getting messages from people in other countries saying they found it useful too.

it grew into a collection of detailed fitness guides written by me and a few other contributors.

At one point I even noticed people linking to our guides from social media, Medium articles, and different Reddit threads, which was pretty surprising.

https://www.reddit.com/r/tirzepatidecompound/comments/1omfgx...

so later i ended up launching a mobile app as well.

I also find that it's way more effective to live in the comment sections. Rarely does the "Hey, look at me, I'm selling a piece of software" post genuinely do well. It's always so tempting to do that too but It's way better to find someone asking specifically for a thing you're solving and respond to the individuals.

Who's still going through these kinds of docs?

I know micro.so (I'm not affiliated with them) have documented how to build agentic B2B sales AI that you can download (if you give them your email address). https://www.micro.so/guides/sales

Unless your product or service is aimed at other founders, or a techie focused audience in general, that's not where your customers are. Advertising there is like a game developer marketing their game to other devs or a writer marketing their book towards other writers.

What you really want to do is figure out who your audience actually is, figure out where they hang out online, and promote it there. Niche specific forums, subreddits, Discord servers, social media communities, etc.

That said, there's no real harm in advertising in these places, and other founders can give you useful feedback.

I’ve taken a break from building to try to find an audience, a real problem, and real users before building anything anymore.

please approach marketing like a human being. i.e one marketing starts before selling - before you have a product

if you adopt the 'indiehacker / influenzer' tactics outlined in that repo - you will starve.

I had three side projects and kept struggling to get any real traction or traffic without becoming spammy across the internet. So I decided to approach it the same way I approach learning anything new: through books, courses, and solid foundational material.

HN had a few excellent suggestions. One of them was Founding Sales. Another, which I came across through a friend’s recommendation, was Alex Hormozi’s series. He seems to have something of a cult following, which made me a bit skeptical at first, so I decided to just read the first 100 pages before forming an opinion.

I ended up finding it genuinely useful, especially for understanding the psychology and mindset needed to sell something. I now highly recommend his book $100M Leads to technical friends who are trying to figure out how to sell what they’ve built.

I’m still learning, if you’ve any good recommendations, please drop them below

I would completely disagree with this (product dependent).

If your product is a consumer app - I would highly prioritize and understand SEO before even having a product complete. Develop a good understanding of SEO around your product domain and niche.

If it’s a B2B - then yes, I would agree.

1) has llm vibes, emojis on headers, llm speak

2) looks like a magpie accumulation of data and resources, I don't trust even the author reads all of this

We know there's a lot of information in the internet, the issue is almost never lack of information but knowing what to read. That takes criteria, filtering, an ordered path.

3) quality pretty bad, lots of dead links and advice like 'launch on product hunt'. lol lmao even,