88 pointsby jimsojim4 hours ago14 comments
  • Oras2 hours ago
    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.

    • thorio2 hours ago
      True story, yesterday I tried to get some feedback from an industry relevant subreddit for a real estate quick check calculation tool (automatically extracts listing data into calculation and enables sharing investment ideas). The pure mention of AI brought up a whole crowd of fed up bullies that talked it down as vibecoding trash - which it really isn't. All those places are flooded.
  • wibbily3 hours ago
    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

    • philipp-gayret2 hours ago
      I don't condone it but the best marketing I've ever seen and which gets to the top of Reddit every week is a company that runs a paid IQ test website. They post some type of outrage bait and it always gets traction. Practically nobody in the comments can tell; they're all focused on how some imaginary character in an image is boasting about an IQ score of 99.
    • risyachka2 hours ago
      >> can all tell

      the reality is most users can't tell. you can see it under every ai post on reddit, unless it is creaming ai in every word.

      • AstroBen2 hours ago
        Most of those replies are also AI
  • r1qdj0an hour ago
    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.
  • fbrnccian hour ago
    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.
    • paulryanrogersan hour ago
      What is "actual marketing" these days, if not spamming socials?
  • ratsimihahan hour ago
    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.

    • operatingthetanan hour ago
      >a real problem

      I think this is the issue with the bulk of the saas spammers I see on reddit or whatever. They are just duplicating existing things that don't have a welcoming market anymore.

  • redgridtactical2 hours ago
    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.
    • paulryanrogersan hour ago
      Always better to prewarm your sock puppets before spamming. That's why I joined HN in the first place!

      (The product flopped and I got lost on so many rabbit trails. YC took me out of the game with a side hustle forum!)

    • thorio2 hours ago
      Sometimes time doesn't allow that for multiple communities simultaneously, but you are right. Still I think a lot of online communities are drowning in AI slob diluting the well thought about stuff that would deserve the attention.
  • pedalpete2 hours ago
    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

  • novachen29 minutes ago
    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.

  • wek2 hours ago
    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.
  • dzonga2 hours ago
    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.

  • m3kw916 minutes ago
    Just send your agent here and go to town
  • jsunderland3232 hours ago
    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.

  • absoluteunit13 hours ago
    > 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.

  • elxr3 hours ago
    What perfect timing. Looks extremely well curated too.