Fuck Marketing
Ask any AI about marketing, and you will get a 100% identical response every single time:
- Post on X, Reddit, and Threads.
- Launch your product on Product Hunt.
- Adopt a "Build in Public" strategy. Leverage Indie Hackers and Hacker News.
- Utilize video channels like Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube.
- Run Google Keyword Ads or LinkedIn Ads.
I have tried every single one of these. And I can tell you exactly how irresponsible each of those pieces of advice truly is.
X (Formerly Twitter)
On X, you should basically assume that users on the free plan will never get traffic. Purchasing the premium plan is an absolute must, and for corporations, the verified organization plan costs over $1,000 a month. Naturally, this is a massive burden for bootstrapped founders.
Furthermore, simply paying the platform doesn't guarantee marketing success. You need to deliver actual value and endure a growth phase until your message reaches the right audience. In this process, you must avoid churning out low-quality, slop-like content or sending useless messages that actually damage your brand. In short, while there is a chance of success, it always incurs costs—and regardless of the subscription fee, it demands extreme caution and precision in content management.
Posting marketing content on Reddit is virtually suicidal. First of all, high-quality subreddits often require a certain amount of karma, meaning accounts with zero or low karma can't even post in the first place. Moreover, if your post leans even slightly toward self-promotion, you will be ruthlessly banned. Upvoting your own posts using bots is also heavily monitored.
As the world's largest community, Reddit guards its borders like an iron fortress to prevent the platform from becoming a playground for unpaid advertisers. Sure, when you first manipulate upvotes, it might look like it's working. But after a short while, you'll find yourself shadowbanned—which is even worse than a flat-out ban. You'll end up writing posts to yourself that literally nobody else can see.
Threads
Threads is arguably a pretty decent marketing tool, at least for local small business owners. I have seen plenty of success stories there, so I can validate its effectiveness for traditional businesses. However, the moment you apply this to SaaS or AI-related products, the conversion and engagement rates plummet.
Currently, the public perception of AI goes beyond mere skepticism about its output; the majority of people flat out think "AI is trash." This sentiment stems from the reckless mass production of AI-generated content and the resulting fatigue accumulated by users. Consequently, even if you build a product, it might get some viral traction if it's a pure toy project meant for mindless fun—but if it is a heavily commercialized product, the response drops so rapidly it feels downright chilling. Nobody cares.
It is highly suspected that all three of the aforementioned platforms actively censor outlinks, and X is particularly notorious for this. For instance, if you compare a post sharing a major news piece with an external link against a post sharing the same news but purely as a personal text opinion without a link, the latter observes significantly higher traffic on X.
From X's perspective, this makes perfect sense. The algorithm naturally rewards posts that keep users on the platform rather than those driving them away via outlinks to decrease time-spent—a logic embedded in every single social media platform. Therefore, for a company that must drive traffic out to its own website, relying on the illusion of organic virality to get link clicks is downright foolish. This ties directly into costs: if you want users to click out, the fundamental survival logic of these platforms is that you must pay them. Thus, a much better trade-off is omitting outlinks entirely, using the content itself to pique curiosity, and guiding users through a multi-step journey—such as visiting your profile to find the link.
Product Hunt
In the past, this platform was undoubtedly a great launchpad where making a good product was enough to gain exposure. Today, however, it is plagued by a toxic, behind-the-scenes ranking market and a shadowban system that users are completely blind to.
For example, even if you ambitiously launch a product and ask your followers to support it, Product Hunt will not count their upvotes if they aren’t already verified users on the platform. As a result, no matter how large an audience you have built beforehand, your chances of ranking at the top through them are virtually zero.
What's the alternative then? Ironically, you have to get upvotes from seasoned, existing Product Hunt users. Climbing the ranks purely on merit in this environment is nearly impossible. Because the hottest products globally launch here, if OpenAI, Anthropic, or Microsoft drops something on your launch day, dropping a rank is a foregone conclusion. On top of that, at least 10 formidable products launch every single day, and at least half of them use professional marketing agencies to systematically manipulate their rankings.
You might think, "Can't I just manipulate the rankings a bit too and aim for a top 5 or top 10 spot?" Even that rarely translates into meaningful marketing ROI. I have used Product Hunt for years, but time isn't infinite. Even power users like me look at maybe five products at most on a good day, and usually just stick to the top 1 or 2. For the rest, we barely glance past the logo and the one-line tagline.
Let's look at the data. I previously launched a product on Product Hunt and ranked in the top 20. The traffic generated from that was embarrassingly low. Shooting a sleek video for YouTube and hyping up the launch means nothing if the launch itself falls flat. So, what is the solution?
Some people spend months calculating their launch strategy. They build communities in advance, trapping and nurturing leads via Discord, Telegram, and newsletters. But this only works if you already have a pool of users to begin with. In other words, you need a pre-existing audience that also happens to have aged Product Hunt accounts, and you have to choreograph them to upvote on a specific date just to have a shot at ranking.
Unfortunately, even this is largely futile. Realistically, customers aren't going to create an account weeks in advance on a site they never use and log in exactly on your launch day just to help your product succeed. Do those who actually follow through even amount to 10%? This is why, behind closed doors, most people just resort to buying paid upvotes. It all funnels back to money. Cases of succeeding without spending a dime are extreme anomalies, and listening to their advice can be incredibly dangerous.
Build in Public
The "Build in Public" strategy seems to be trending heavily these days. With AI accelerating development speeds, this outcome was inevitable, but looking closely at the reality reveals a complete mess.
Go to Indie Hackers right now—the holy grail recommended by AI—and look at the "New" category. You will see a relentless wall of posts with 1 upvote, 0 comments, and founders talking to themselves about what they built while absolutely nobody responds. People take a 1-in-1,000 success story (which is usually based on unverified self-claims rather than proven data) and preach it as the ultimate marketing playbook. While a 1-in-1,000 chance is still a chance, the real problem lies in the brainless guides that market this as a proven doctrine. If you stop asking AI and actually audit these forums yourself, you will see meticulously written updates from deeply consistent founders. Can anyone look at their disastrous results and still claim this strategy works? I think not.
For an early-stage founder lacking resources, time and energy are the most precious assets. They must be spent with extreme calculation. Telling someone to just "Build in Public" is equivalent to giving advice like, "The success rate is unverified, but someone out there made it work, so you should try it too."
Another issue with this strategy is the credibility of the people preaching it. If you look at the individuals claiming success through this method, their actual services are often underwhelming, and putting a question mark on whether their product is generating real market value usually exposes the truth. One of the flaws of the current era is that people blindly believe claims without filtering or verifying them. The moment someone claims unverified revenue, their traffic suddenly spikes: "I hit $10,000 MRR in 1 month as a solo founder." Yet, when you look past the few screenshots and the curated storytelling, there is nothing substantial there.
While a handful might be genuinely successful, if you scrutinize how they achieved it and what distribution networks they possessed beforehand, you will seriously reconsider the idea that "anyone can do it." One influencer I looked into truly succeeded via Build in Public. However, he had spent years running a newsletter, amassing tens of thousands of dedicated subscribers who passively consumed his content, and his X following had exceeded 100,000 for years. Build in Public done by someone who already owns a distribution channel vs. someone starting from absolute scratch is the difference between heaven and earth.
Conclusion
Most other "orthodox" marketing tactics spit out by AI are not orthodox at all. They are merely responses trained on content generated by people deceiving others for their own financial gain.
Because of this, I have long held a deep skepticism toward marketing. The vast majority of so-called "experts" insist on a minimum ad spend of thousands of dollars, yet they themselves are walking case studies of failing to generate any meaningful conversions.
And that's not all. Once you start running ads yourself, money drains instantly with almost nothing to show for it. Finding your target audience? Delivering the right ad copy to them? All of this is simply the primary revenue driver for the platforms people use every day.
Let's look at it from our own perspective. How many times do you actually click an ad while scrolling through Instagram? How many times on LinkedIn? How many of those ads actually catch your eye, and how many of those lead to an actual conversion, like signing up?
Ultimately, marketing is neither a formulaic method taught by AI nor a naive strategy of throwing cash at a platform. It is a field directly tethered to human emotion, where a single miscalculation can vaporize thousands of dollars into thin air. Without a calculated, razor-sharp approach, you will end up bankrupting your time, money, and energy altogether.
