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How do you promote your product without sounding too salesy?

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I've always struggled with promoting my own work. 😓 It always felt a little awkward because I grew up in an environment where drawing attention to yourself wasn't really encouraged.

That's not exactly ideal when you're trying to build a business, and even less so when marketing is literally how you make a living. :D

I never had a problem promoting other people's products. Just my own.

Now I'm in the same situation again.

I'm building a , and one of the main ways to get it in front of people is by talking about it on LinkedIn.

The problem is, I don't want people to see me as someone who's constantly selling.

What would you recommend doing to promote a product without coming across as too pushy or too salesy?

Here's what I've tried so far:

  • On X, I'm taking a build-in-public approach and sharing my coding journey and I leave the link in the comments.

  • I've added the waitlist link to my social media profiles.

  • When one of my LinkedIn posts performs well, I edit it afterwards and add a short call to action at the end, inviting people to join the waitlist.

  • If a LinkedIn post isn't related to the tool, I'll sometimes leave a funny comment underneath it and add a P.S. mentioning my tool.

  • I want to dedicate at least one LinkedIn post per week specifically to the product I'm building.

I'd love to hear what has worked for you.

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Hi Nika, I realized I don't actually promote my product. I promote the problem I'm solving.

I launched a wellness method on here a couple of weeks ago. My instinct at first was to talk about the product itself, features, prompts, the mechanics. But what actually got people leaning in was talking about the problem.

I have two years of GLP-1 maintenance data and no good way to make sense of it day to day. That's a real problem a lot of people share. When I talked about that, the product became the answer, not the pitch.

I also created a companion podcast where I devote episodes to explaining the method and weaving in my real-life story. That's given people a way to understand the why behind the product not just the promotion itself.

A couple of things that have worked for me:

  • Share the before, not just the after. People connect with the problem you were trying to solve, not the polished tool you built.

  • Answer questions in public instead of posting announcements.

  • Let the founder story do the selling.

Hope some of this helps.

 suzy this is so spot on, “promote the problem not the product” is basically the whole game. the before > after thing especially.

the podcast idea is really smart too. giving people the why behind it instead of just the pitch is such an underrated move — feels like you’re letting them in rather than selling at them. def stealing the “answer questions in public instead of posting announcements” line, thats a great way to put it.

 Thanks so much, I really appreciate that.

 🙏

 Thank you for sharing the experience here !!!

 you're very welcome.

I have just released an app that took over 2 years to build a couple of days ago and I am trying to find what works best. As you say “promote the problem”. I wonder though, do users prefer to see the person behind the product or would it matter as long as the problem that it solves is being shown? What are your thoughts? Also, following you.

 Great question. I think people connect with people first and products second. A founder puts a face, personality, and story behind what they're building, which creates trust.

I always think of Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop. Sure, people use the products, but a lot of the connection comes from knowing who's behind the brand and why she built it. It's much more human than just a logo.

That said, I think it's both. Lead with the problem you're solving, but don't hide yourself. People like rooting for founders, especially in the early days. Your journey building the app for two years is part of the story too.

Great advice that I’ll surely be implementing moving forward! Thank you.

 Thank you, I need to write this down for my marketing and pre-launch plan. I have a lot of experience with the problem and the pain point, so I will try to talk about it more. Thank you so much!

I really understand what you mean Nika. Promoting your own product can feel weird.

The approach that works best for me is to become genuinely useful in your niche first. For example, if your product is for LinkedIn, I would focus on becoming one of the best people in your space when it comes to educational content: tips, examples, breakdowns, mistakes, experiments, workflows. Then the product becomes a natural plug, not the main thing.

You educate first, build trust, and then mention the product in the comments or as a light CTA when it is relevant.

We recently had a viral tweet with around 1.5M impressions, and it brought 150+ beta users mainly because the content itself was valuable. The product was just plugged naturally around it.

So my answer would be: be extremely good at the content, make people trust your thinking, and then plug the product without making the whole post about selling.

 Advice is very sound , How long did it take for you to build trust and find users ?

 Wow – which post earned so much attention? The thing is that as LinkedIn is becoming mainstream, the structure of the content that is required by many people has a different narrative.

It seems that people want less educational content, and more fun content.

i feel exactly the same. while promoting the FlowNotch app in different channel, I literally try to approach with use cases, but everytime it feel Like i am biased and sound like too salesy. Any other approach to Go with?

 yeah rohit i know that exact feeling, where even a genuine use case starts sounding like an ad in your own head lol.

what helped me was flipping the order. instead of “here’s flownotch doing X”, start with the annoying moment that made the use case exist. like don’t say “my tool solves this”, say “i wasted 40 min doing this stupid thing last week” and let the tool show up at the end almost as an afterthought. people lean in on the frustration, not the feature.

also honestly the biasedness never fully goes away, you just stop trying to hide it. saying “yeah im obviously biased but here’s how i actually use it” reads way more honest than pretending to be neutral. worth a shot imo.

   Yes, this is also what described – we need to talk about the problem more.

Thank you so much. Surely, I like the approach. i will try this way as well.

I think the best promotion is the kind that doesn’t really feel like promotion.

With mobile apps, for example, I think one of the most effective approaches is getting creators to show the product as something they actually use in their daily lives, instead of doing an obvious ad. Seeing the product solve a real problem in a real situation is much more convincing than being told to buy it.

I think the same idea applies to LinkedIn. Instead of constantly talking about the tool itself, I’d talk about the problems it solves, things you’re learning while building it, user feedback, and real use cases. The product naturally becomes part of the story.

People usually don’t mind seeing the same product multiple times if they’re getting something new or useful each time. It only starts to feel salesy when every post is basically the same pitch.

 That thing with the app works best when your product is already "famous". But to get first-time users, it is very difficult to have an influencer at a low cost. But once your product is famous, people will gladly share it organically to "flex" in front of their community.

I can be that “someone who's constantly selling.” 😂

Someone has to tell people about good products.

 I need your courage :D

 You have my courage. And my upvote

 awww, thank you

LinkedIn engagement is super low. The reach is only a third of my followers, and it needs long drafts and curated content. It's a really time-consuming task.

Have you checked out Reddit? I feel like Reddit or similar platforms could connect us directly to the problems the product is aiming to solve. And it shouldn't sound as salesy as other platforms.

 I think that Reddit is more strict, and you can be more likely to be banned there (not only by moderators, but also by the platform).

When it comes to LinkedIn. I used to have 5k or 10k impressions per post, then got banned several times and for 2 months, my impressions were like 200 – 400 per post.

Now, I am getting back. You need to keep posting.

hey nika, this hits home. i build dev tools (netfox for networking stuff, findergit for git, octoscope for github insights) and honestly technical folks sniff out a pitch instantly 😆 so Ihad to drop the whole “promoting” thing entirely.

couple things that flipped it for me:

  • I stopped posting about the product and started posting about the annoyance that made me build it. for findergit it wasn’t “check out my git tool”, it was more like “i kept losing track of which folder was on which branch and it drove me nuts” — and the people with the same headache just showed up on their own. the tool’s the punchline, not the headline.

  • I share the messy stuff. a bug i fixed in octoscope, a design call i got wrong in netfox and had to revert. reads like a builder thinking out loud, not someone selling. link goes in the comments or a p.s., same as you’re already doing.

tbh your instincts are already solid — editing a post after it does well to add a soft cta is a smart low-pressure move. only reframe i’d throw in: you’re not promoting yourself, you’re just documenting a problem you happen to be solving... that little shift is what made self-promo actually feel ok for me

 The things is that my LinkedIn community is not used to my "process of building part" – I would rather share that on Twitter. But as for the problem, I think this is something my LinkedIn community is very familiar with since I was ranting every single time they restricted me :D

Thank you! :)

 haha yeah that makes total sense, the build-in-public stuff def lives better on twitter. keep that split.

but honestly the fact that you were ranting every time LI restricted you IS the goldmine. thats not build-in-public, thats just you being mad about a real problem your whole audience feels too 😄 like the restriction rants ARE the content — you dont even have to frame it as “im building a tool”, you just keep telling the story of the annoyance and the plugin quietly becomes the obvious answer.

kinda poetic too, the platform restricting you is literally handing you the marketing angle for the thing that fixes it lol. i’d lean into that hard.

What has helped me is making the post useful even if nobody clicks.

For Retime, I try to talk about the messy meeting workflow, not "here is another scheduling tool": the invite is in the calendar, the agenda is in a doc, notes are somewhere else, and follow-ups live in someone's head. That is a useful topic on its own, so the product mention can stay small.

For your LinkedIn plugin, I'd probably turn one real LinkedIn annoyance into a weekly teardown: what happened, why it was annoying, what you tried, and what you changed in the plugin. If the reader can use the lesson without joining the waitlist, the CTA feels earned.

 you nuked me an idea to create more features for my plugin :D

I relate to this a lot.

What I’m learning while launching DataCrawlPro is that the product should not be the main story every time. The problem should be.

For example, instead of saying “try my web scraping/data extraction product,” I try to talk about the messy real-world problem: businesses have websites, PDFs, scans, or public sources full of useful data, but turning that into clean CSV/Excel/JSON is slow, unclear, and often too technical.

Same with website scraping risk audits — the interesting problem is not “buy an audit,” it’s: “Do you know what bots, competitors, or AI crawlers can easily collect from your public website?”

So I think the best promotion is:
share the problem, show the process, give useful examples, and only mention the product when it naturally fits.

That feels much less salesy and much more helpful.

 How many posts per week do you create posts like that?

I know exactly how you feel.

We've been focusing on sharing useful content first (mostly on Reddit), and only mentioning our product when it's genuinely relevant. It feels much more natural than trying to "sell" every post.

Longer term, I'd much rather have creators and users talk about the product than be the one constantly promoting it myself.

 Was it successful when you mentioned the product on Reddit? Because they tend to remove any link.

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