This GitHub repository aggregates practical marketing resources for startup founders, functioning primarily as an educational and knowledge-sharing platform. The content engages modestly with Article 19 (freedom of expression), Article 20 (freedom of association), Article 23 (work and employment), and Article 27 (cultural participation) through a framing that emphasizes knowledge dissemination and economic empowerment. Structural protections (HTTPS, security headers, accessible design) support privacy and equal access, though the repository's primary focus is utilitarian rather than human-rights-centered.
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Art 23 ↔ Art 22 —Repository promotes work and employment opportunity for entrepreneurs but does not address social security or welfare protections for those excluded from entrepreneurship.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
1. The only result I'd expect from posting on launch platforms/software directories is a huge number of spam in my inbox to take my product to the top of the list.
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.
Decent guide/list but it feels as if its for founders who love to build first and leave everything else as an afterthought. Like, the first section is Places To Launch Your Startup.
As redgridtactical pointed the community first makes right, but i will add one distinction, there is a difference between building karma and actually bein known. Karma is a proxy, what you actually want is people recognizing you as someone who adds valuebefore you ever mention what you are building.
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.
So I launched a dev tool last week. Figured I'd share what actually happened across different channels because most "launch retrospectives" are written by people who already had an audience.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Ads are trash unless you already have PMF, and even then they're often still trash if you don't do it right or you don't have the right kind of product.
If you don't have an audience don't bother to build anything for anyone else, it literally doesn't matter how good it is or how much people need it, they'll never see it unless you directly spam them.
If you're a 10x builder with 0 followers on socials, sorry to say but you can get cucked by a noob with claude code and a big audience.
This seems to be happening everywhere there is a user community (potential customers), such as LinkedIn and Twitter.
Many times, I’ve been “surprised” to find that, within a span of few hours, many people on LinkedIn/Twitter share similar anecdotes, punchlines, realizations, and everything in between. Of course, they all end with asking to say the MAGIC word(s) to reward the “selected few” in their DMs.
Gone are the days when we used to just give things out - here is the link to the zip file, download and do whatever you want.
Go ahead, “Say friend and enter.”
Edit/Update: About that “Tell”, honestly, I think a lot too many have no clue.
Marketing is a lot more competitive, convoluted, and rapidly changing. However, in the world of “How to get consumers/customers/clients to buy more” three things still remain and the idea would be to know when to pull which strings.
The three are “Owned, Earned, and Paid” Media. The best is when you own or can control the distribution channels.
My weekend side project just took over my life. It needs "actual marketing" expertise. As in, I know how to set up search console, semrush, and I know decent SEO concepts to grow organic SERP performance. I am coming up the charts there.
However, I have friendly investor interest. The only place I can imagine spending money on this project is on Google Ads. I have no real idea of how to create and manage Google Ads these days. So, who do I hire? Does anyone have any recs for what I should do? Is there a service, or a go-to consultancy with a small minimum spend requirement?
It did not work even before AI. The rise of "indie hacking" in the late 2010s brought in thousands of hustlers creating similar lists, and many of them were simply selling shovels to other indie hackers (including the lists themselves). By the time of the pandemic, the "submit to every directory & community" strategy was already useless.
You stop paying for ads and the product link disappears. Reason why founders tend to go for reddit is because it gets indexed by Google and LLMs and the link gets 'preserved'.
What is your experience in stickiness of users after acquisition via Ad? Given crack down by reddit mods for posting links - I am considering just buying ads.
It's a great insight for presenting stuff: spend most of the time convincing your audience of a problem and they'll love your solution. Most people expend all their energy on presenting the thing, the features of the thing, the amazing qualities of the thing, etc. instead. It doesn't work. You need to convince people that they have a problem that is solved by the thing. Talk about how expensive and inconvenient that problem is and all the damage it is causing. And then show how existing ways to deal with it are not effective. If you can get somebody to go "hmm, I think I have this exact problem" they are going to be very interested in your solution.
Frankly google sheet will take you a very long way... Attio and most CRM are built for teams with sales pipeline, not a solo founder trying to find PMF.
Most of the features aims at describing complex sales processes and collaboration.
So basically what you want to do is to try different takes (cold emailing, phone, events, influenceurs), get your first 50 customers, try to understand the process (who takes the decision, who will pay, who will use, etc) and based on that, design your CRM to match this process.
My 2 cents (saas solofounder with 6000 users): very important not to overengineer everything. As dev it's our natural tendency but your time and marketing effort is probably the biggest leverage you have.
I've been creating and marketing software as an indie developer for over 20 years now, and the marketing part definitely feels harder than it use to. See also:
Repository title and description promote marketing knowledge-sharing for entrepreneurs. Content facilitates information access and distribution for business communication. Framing centers founder/entrepreneur perspective and knowledge dissemination.
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