I help companies build marketing strategies for a living. Here's how I'm marketing my own SaaS with $0.

My day job is helping companies figure out their go-to-market. I build marketing strategies, run growth audits, advise on positioning. I've done it for SaaS companies, e-commerce brands, enterprise software.

Then I built my own product. And suddenly, none of the playbooks felt right.

Not because they were wrong. But because every strategy I recommend to clients assumes one thing I don't have: budget.

AI Growth Coach is a personal growth platform I built with AI tools (zero coding background, built on Riff.ai). It combines goal setting, daily journaling, habit tracking, and an AI coach that actually follows up with you. Think of it as the digital version of the Ink+Volt planner I bought every year for six years, except this one checks in when you go quiet.

The product is live at growthcoach4u.com. I have 16 people actively testing it. I have $0 in marketing spend. And I'm doing all of this in evenings and weekends alongside my full-time consulting job.

Here's what I'm actually doing to get this thing off the ground, channel by channel. No theory. Just what's happening right now.

1. LinkedIn: leading with the founder story, not the product

My first real marketing move was a LinkedIn post from my personal profile. Not a product announcement. Not a feature list. Just the honest version of why I built this thing.

The framing was simple: I'm a 40-year-old consultant who kept buying planners that ended up in a drawer. So I built the app I wished existed.

That post got 6,000 impressions. For a personal profile with no viral history, that felt like a signal.

What I learned: people don't engage with product descriptions. They engage with the problem. Everyone has set a goal and quietly abandoned it. When I talk about that, people respond. When I talk about features, crickets.

I also created an AI Growth Coach company page on LinkedIn, but honestly? The personal profile outperforms it by a wide margin. People follow people, not logos. Especially at this stage.

What I'd tell my client self: Stop building the brand page. Double down on the founder's personal account. You can professionalize later.

2. Indie Hackers: conversations first, content second

My first IH post ("I'm a 40-year-old marketing consultant building my first SaaS in my spare time") got 64 comments. That blew my mind.

But the comments didn't come from the post alone. They came from weeks of showing up in other people's threads first. Leaving thoughtful replies. Actually reading posts before commenting. Not dropping links. Just being a person in the community.

This is something I preach to clients all the time: you have to earn the right to broadcast. You earn it by being useful in conversations you didn't start.

The IH community can smell self-promotion from a mile away. And they reward honesty just as fast. My most upvoted comments were the ones where I admitted what wasn't working, not the ones where I talked about how great the product was.

What I'd tell my client self: The ROI on genuine community participation is impossible to measure and impossible to fake. Just do it consistently.

3. X/Twitter: slow burn, real people

I'm active on X as @AIGrowthCoach. Growth there has been slower than LinkedIn or IH, which makes sense. X rewards volume and consistency, and I can only give it 20-30 minutes a day.

My approach: find people talking about goals, productivity, accountability, personal development, and building habits. Reply with something useful. Don't pitch. If the conversation goes well, they check your profile. If your profile is clear about what you do, they click through.

I'm not chasing follower counts. I'm looking for the handful of people who actually have the problem I'm solving, and having real conversations with them. One genuine exchange with someone who says "wait, this is exactly what I need" is worth more than 1,000 impressions from people who don't care.

What I'd tell my client self: Stop measuring vanity metrics. Measure conversations that lead somewhere.

4. Instagram: the experiment I'm still figuring out

Running @ai_growth_coach on Instagram. This one is honestly the channel I'm least confident about. The content format is different, the audience behavior is different, and I haven't found my rhythm yet.

I'm testing a mix of motivational content (which feels generic but gets some engagement) and behind-the-scenes building content (which feels more authentic but reaches fewer people). Still too early to call what works.

What I'd tell my client self: If a channel isn't working after a fair test, kill it. I haven't hit that point yet, but I'm watching the numbers.

5. The channels I'm planning but haven't started yet

Being honest about what's still on the to-do list:

• Product Hunt launch: Planned but not yet scheduled. Waiting until I have a few paying customers and some social proof to maximize the launch window.
• Email list: Haven't started collecting emails yet. This is probably a mistake. Even a simple landing page with a waitlist would give me a channel I own.
• Reddit: Haven't figured out the right subreddits yet. r/productivity and r/getdisciplined seem obvious, but Reddit hates anything that smells like marketing. Need to spend time there as a participant first.
• TikTok: On the radar but not a priority. Short-form video about goal-setting and accountability could work, but I have to be realistic about how many channels one person can maintain.

What I'd tell my client self: Having a channel roadmap is smart. Having too many active channels for a one-person team is not. Pick two or three and go deep.

The uncomfortable gap between knowing and doing

Here's the thing nobody talks about when you're a marketing professional building your own product: you know exactly what you should be doing, and it's still hard to do it.

I know I should be writing a weekly newsletter. I know I should be doing SEO research. I know I should have a referral program designed before I even have paying customers.

But I also have a full-time job, a family, and about 15 hours a week to give this project. So I have to be ruthless about what actually moves the needle versus what just feels like progress.

The biggest shift in my thinking has been this: at the stage I'm at (pre-revenue, 16 testers, building in public), the most valuable marketing activity isn't creating content or running campaigns. It's having conversations with real people who might actually have the problem I'm solving. Everything else is noise until I've nailed that.

My clients pay me to think strategically. For my own product, the strategy is embarrassingly simple: talk to people, be honest about what I'm building, and make it easy for them to try it.

Where I'm at right now

• Product: live and functional at growthcoach4u.com
• Price: $5/month (founder offer for early supporters)
• Paying customers: 0 (still pre-launch)
• Free testers: 16 active users
• Marketing budget: $0
• Channels: LinkedIn, IH, X, Instagram
• Time invested per week on marketing: ~5-7 hours

The goal for 2026 is to hit 100K NOK in monthly recurring revenue. That's roughly $9,000/month, or about 1,800 paying subscribers at the current founder price. Right now, that feels like a mountain. But every conversation I have with someone who says "I've been looking for exactly this" makes it feel a little more real.

I'd love to hear from other founders who are marketing on $0:

• What's working for you that I'm not doing?
• How do you decide which channels to kill vs. double down on?
• If you're also a solo founder balancing a day job, how do you allocate your limited marketing time?

Happy to share more detail on any of these channels, or answer questions about what it's like marketing your own product when marketing is literally your profession.