Marketing for Founders

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Are these sorts of general advice on how to do X even valuable today when you can put the details of your start-up into AI and get a more customized and moderately more thoughtful actions based on what your start-up does, who your customers are, etc?

Who's still going through these kinds of docs?

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

Thank you for sharing this. I found some good articles in what you shared. The long lists of places to post are not that helpful. I've poured through 100 of them in the past and only the top 20 make a difference, you might want to update the list to prioritize. I tend to point Claude Code or Codex at these lists, have them evaluate the scores of the sites and give me a priority list.

The hardest part of this for solo founders: even knowing the right tactics doesn't solve the execution problem. You can read every playbook on cold email, SEO, content — and still spend Sunday night writing one tweet because context-switching from product mode to marketing mode is genuinely hard.

The tactics in this repo are solid. Worth adding a layer about execution patterns for founders who work alone:

- Batch creation over reactive posting (capture ideas in product mode, write in dedicated blocks) - Systems that reduce the blank-page problem (templates, frameworks, voice notes → drafts) - The "minimum viable consistency" principle: posting once a week reliably beats three times a week for a month then silence

The repo covers what to do well. The meta-problem is that most founders know what to do — they just can't sustain the doing when product is always on fire.

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.

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.

> 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.

What perfect timing. Looks extremely well curated too.

Just send your agent here and go to town