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Ask HN
Ask HN: How do you get visibility if you're suuuuper bad at marketing?
Hi, I built a small tool that I have used daily for a long time. A few friends and classmates also use it and they keep telling me it is genuinely useful. But I am stuck on distribution. I am a student, I have no budget for ads, and I am not good at marketing (i try but i'm super bad). When I mention it in other communities it often gets treated as self promotion and I get blocked.

If you were starting from zero today, how would you get the first 100 real users in a clean way? I would love specific ideas like where to share, what kind of write up works, how to approach niche communities, or what you would build into the product to make sharing natural.

Thanks.

I've had a similar problem in my personal development journey.

I haven't solved it, but my experience has lead me to believe that building in public and blogging/vlogging your journey (why you started and what you learned) is promising. That type of content drives brand and product hype via views/engagement, helps you filter ideas (if your vlog is getting no traction, maybe not a great product?) and avoids promotional post rules in a lot of communities.

My new years resolution is to dial in my content driven development pipeline.

> That type of content drives brand and product hype via views/engagement

Product hype might be hard with developer/tech types of tools. Devs have very good BS radar and "hype" is sometimes all there is in a lot of content. I see and hear a lot of the "build in public" being promoted as the way to do things with the "build an audience" mantra.

There is a huge hurdle to produce good video content, it takes a lot of time to record, edit and publish quality videos. Publishing quality videos can help get traction/views/subscribers but that doesn't mean it will translate into paying customers either. Do people really want to watch software developers code or talk about it? There has to be other ways to market a product.

Thanks for the reply. To be honest I love the coding part, but getting users or even testers to actually try the tool is a nightmare for me. I am still trying to figure out a clean way to commercialize my projects without getting flagged as spam everywhere. And yeah the building in public idea is exactly what I just started doing. If you are curious, I have a blog page for the tool where I am writing what I am learning. Happy to share the link: https://clipnotebook.com/blog
I’m a indie developer and do marketing for my products. Build in public is a good way because building becomes the content which is the hard part. If you have an idea of your ICP, then cold outreach on LinkedIn specially if you are building and have people following you and commenting on your post. Don’t rely only in just the posts. I recently deleted every post on my linkedin with the goal of starting building in public and following this method which is the answer to your question. I belong to a paid community of very successful bootstrapped business developers and this is what the top members do, granted they are very successful and paid people to write their content which can be time consuming.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46343355
great, thank u so much
Do super personalized outreaching
Thanks, that makes sense, but when you say personalized outreach, do you mean emailing people, DMing them, replying to relevant threads...? What is the best way to do it without looking spammy?