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.

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

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.

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.

Marketing comes later.

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.

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.

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

Someone actually recommended to be absolutely "shameless" when it comes to speaking about what you are doing i.e. marketing your product/service.

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.

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.

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! :)

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.

I'm pretty sure my primary job is marketing the work that I do.

Source: CS grad turned revenue person

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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

later automate the daily upload? but human in the loop doing egamement is a must.

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.

doesn't seem like you're risking much if your products are not getting any traction in the first place

Marketing for Founders

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47380295

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.