How do you promote your product without sounding too salesy?
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 LinkedIn plugin, 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.
Replies
Retime
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.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@hadifarnoud you nuked me an idea to create more features for my plugin :D
The salesy feeling is almost always a ratio problem, not a promotion problem. It shows up when you ask before you have given, so the fix is to keep a running credit of useful things you put out with no link and no ask at all. Those zero CTA posts are what you spend later.
One caution on your list: editing a CTA onto a post after it performs well can quietly train your audience to expect a pitch every time something of yours lands, which is the exact reflex you are trying to avoid. I would rather let the product surface through the work itself. Show the plugin doing the annoying thing on a real LinkedIn workflow, in public, and let people ask for the link rather than being sent to it. Opt in beats redirect.
I run a few products alongside a full time job and the pattern holds across all of them. The posts that converted best were rarely the ones with a CTA, because the earlier free work had already done the persuading. Simple test before you publish: if the post would still be worth reading with the last line deleted, it is not too salesy.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@oshylabs Where did you promote the most?
@busmark_w_nika Forums like this one, more than launch pages. A launch is a single day and then the traffic is gone, but a thread that answers a question people are already asking keeps returning them for weeks.
Across my products the channel mattered less than whether I turned up with a problem or a pitch. The same point, from the same account, converts completely differently depending on which one it is. So the honest answer is wherever people already had the problem and I could be useful first. In practice that has been PH discussions and answering questions in public, because it compounds and never reads as selling.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@oshylabs I think that I will have to turn to Reddit, Quora, Product Hunt, Hacker News :D
The test I run is to delete every product mention from a post. If it still stands on its own, it earns the one line I add back at the end. If deleting the product guts the post, it was an ad.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@builder_eden It shouldn't feel to be pushy. I prefer organic show off the product.
Hi @busmark_w_nika Something I noticed was that every tactic on your list is about placement [where the link goes, when the CTA shows up, how often you post]. But none of them touch the actual discomfort, which is why promoting feels like drawing attention to yourself, and you were raised not to do that.
That's worth naming out loud, actually, because it might be the more honest hook than any of the tactics. "I'm bad at this because self-promotion was never modeled as okay" is a much more relatable opener than a waitlist link.
I've got THIS thread going with Founders working through problem-first framing for their own launches. It might be worth a look if you want to see how different people are naming theirs.
P.S. You literally can't talk enough about your product/problem on LinkedIn - if it feels like too much, I guarantee you, it's not!
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@anna_ludwinowski Wow, you solved in the thread almost the whole business. This platform feels like full service for entrepreneurship! :D thank you :)
@busmark_w_nika Thanks - some good conversations in that thread!
MonoCloud for Startups
You sound salesy when you talk about your product instead of the problem. Nobody forwards a feature list to a colleague, but they will forward a sharp observation about a pain they live with daily. Sell by being right about something annoying, then mention you built the fix at the end, almost as an afterthought. I have gotten more signups from a good rant than from any launch post I labored over.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@shivangit26 I will try my best to talk about the problem then :)
I kept running into websites that required uploading passport photos just to resize them. Since many of those images contain personal documents, I wanted something that worked entirely in the browser. That led me to build ResizeHub, which now includes 71+ free image and PDF tools. If anyone else is dealing with the same problem, I'd love to hear your feedback
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@vijaykanna56 PH is exactly the place where someone can test it :)
@busmark_w_nika Thanks, Nika! That's exactly what I'm hoping for. Real feedback from makers is much more valuable than launching in silence. I'm already getting a few feature suggestions, and I'll be improving ResizeHub based on what people actually need.
Softorino 💻📲
What's worked for us at Softorino: talk about the problem like a human who has it, not a vendor who solves it. Our best-performing posts never mention features – they describe the exact annoying moment the product kills (the fake download buttons, the "your file is ready, just sign up" walls). People recognize themselves and ask about the product on their own. The moment copy starts explaining, it starts selling – and everyone can smell it.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@yelyzaveta_kibets I learnt from people in this thread and started using problem as the context for posts :)
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@yelyzaveta_kibets and it works :)
Softorino 💻📲
@busmark_w_nika Yay! Always works for me too)
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.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@prashant_patil14 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.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@erika_th Was it successful when you mentioned the product on Reddit? Because they tend to remove any link.
@busmark_w_nika Yeah, links are much harder now.
I rarely include them anymore. If it's relevant, I'll just mention the product name without a link.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@brooke_houck LinkedIn is my target audience, but as soon as people are blocked, they are trying to find a solution elsewhere because they do not have access to LI. So also Facebook groups, Reddit and X too – LinkedIn support is more responsive there. But I will try articles too :)