Marketing for Founders

elxr

What perfect timing. Looks extremely well curated too.

absoluteunit1

> 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.

wibbily

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

jsunderland323

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

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

wek

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

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.

Oras

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.

dzonga

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.

fbrncci

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.

ratsimihah

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.

r1qdj0

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.

m3kw9

Just send your agent here and go to town

CM30

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

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/1omfgx... so later i ended up launching a mobile app as well.

nomilk

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?

deaux

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

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

chandureddyvari

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

upmostly

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.