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.
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.
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:
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.
People, not bullies. I can sympathize with you because I've struggled with the same, but we can't blame those people. They're now being asked every two days to give feedback on yet another tool. That used to be once every 6 months. And the overwhelming majority of those new "tools" is abandoned within a month. And there is indeed a huge amount of vibecoded slop. I've put more time and thought into our product than the last 20 such tools that got posted into our industry-relevant subreddit combined, but I can't expect the mods and users to put their time into assessing that.
I think it’s strange to dislike vibe coded things. I’ve seen a lot of cool stuff that’s mostly vibe coded. fomo.nyc for example. The problem is mostly the intention. I think a lot of vibe coded stuff isn’t solving a problem someone has its someone trying to seek profit. It’s no different from when smartphones first came out and people wanted to make a for everything when most of them didn’t solve any problems. The difference is nobody is wowed anymore by anything so your app that turns your phone into a beer kind of thing doesn’t exist in the vibe coded world.
While this is directionally correct it does come down to a tonality, that I think wasn't justified in that case. But hey, it's the Internet and I'm not naive either.
Had basically the same thing happen. Posted in a side project sub, spam filter nuked it because new account. And in other subs now, anything that mentions AI gets hit with "vibecoded slop" automatically. Doesn't matter if you spent months on it.
What actually moved the needle was talking about data, not the product. I posted about my tool — crickets. Then I wrote about stuff I discovered while building it and people started engaging. Exact same product behind both posts, just "here's what I found" instead of "here's what I built." Night and day difference.
Can you share what approach you’re taking for this?
I’ve tried engaging in a similar way but struggled to strike a balance between helping for the sake of helping (no return for me), and asking research-focused questions, with people not caring too much about to answer
Whilst this is a very valid view, I am not sure there is evidence for it, if you have it please do provide it.
It is not obvious to me that one credible citation is better than having appeared many times in the training data.
Also knowledge releases of models are too slow to be depended on for marketing in my view. It is the search / retrieval of LLMs for which one can optimise.
A final point would be that none of this changes the point made, which is that there too much noise due to too many products being shipped.
AIs recommend what is most popular/well-known, which isn’t necessarily what is best. Both your description of AI sourcing and your AI-written comment demonstrate this point.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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
> 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.
114 comments
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.
https://successfulsoftware.net/2025/12/22/is-the-golden-age-...
What actually moved the needle was talking about data, not the product. I posted about my tool — crickets. Then I wrote about stuff I discovered while building it and people started engaging. Exact same product behind both posts, just "here's what I found" instead of "here's what I built." Night and day difference.
It is not obvious to me that one credible citation is better than having appeared many times in the training data.
Also knowledge releases of models are too slow to be depended on for marketing in my view. It is the search / retrieval of LLMs for which one can optimise.
A final point would be that none of this changes the point made, which is that there too much noise due to too many products being shipped.
1. can all tell
2. will not use your product
Please stop polluting the global commons
Signed everyone <3
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
I’ve taken a break from building to try to find an audience, a real problem, and real users before building anything anymore.
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.
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
> 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.