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
I am living this exact question right now (launching my first product next week), so here is what has kept the awkwardness down for me. I stopped promoting the product and started telling the problem story: a friend of mine got 230 applications for one junior role, most AI-written, and read them by hand over two days. People lean into the story and ask what I am doing about it, and then telling them is answering, not selling. The other rule I stole from this community: ask for feedback, not for support. Tell me what would make this useful for you reads honest at any frequency, while check out my product burns out by the third post. And your edit-the-CTA-in-later trick on posts that already perform is genuinely clever, I am taking that one with me. For what it is worth, from the outside you never read as salesy. Your ratio of giving to asking is why.
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.
I've found that talking about the problem gets a much better response than talking about the product.
Instead of saying "Here's my tool," I share something I learned, a mistake I made, or a workflow that saved me time. If the product naturally fits into that story, it doesn't feel like an ad it feels like context.
People don't usually mind being sold to when they've already gotten value from the post.