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
Oh, self promotion is a really complicated topic! I grew up in the same environment. I love the options you tried actually. And idea of editing post after it performs well is smart!
Making expert content is good idea, but sometimes it can be a trap of giving valuable information for free.
I think it is everything about recalculating the balance all the time and keeping it in the way that is ok for you.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@julia_shtogren The thing is – how much free content is enough? :)
My trick is to enter some vc pitch competition and treat it as an opportunity to sell/practice selling (like the one i just finished is 1752 Lighting Round 8), because if you can get into the finals, you win a fund, and vc may hook you up with investors and customers. If not, you still get a chance to earn feedback and improve sales technique before approaching real clients.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@new_user___1702026e6f946759d1d798a Is there anything for boothstrapped? :D
I relate to this a lot. What's worked for me: lead with the problem, not the product. Instead of "check out my tool," I'll share the specific annoying thing that made me build a feature — e.g. "realized people were downloading a PDF just to re-upload it into their own email, so I added a send-button" reads very differently than "new feature alert!"
A few other things that helped me feel less salesy about it:
Only posting when there's an actual reason (a real bug fixed, a real feature shipped) — not on a fixed schedule just to "stay visible"
Being upfront about being small/early rather than overselling traction you don't have yet — people respond well to honesty about where you actually are
Engaging genuinely on other people's threads (like this one) without a pitch attached — the profile link does the work, you don't have to
Your build-in-public approach on X is already the right instinct. I'd just make sure the LinkedIn CTA doesn't feel bolted onto a good post — if the update itself is worth sharing (a real problem solved), the ask feels earned rather than tacked on.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@deepanshu_garg9 What do you mean by the second point? "Being upfront about being small/early rather than overselling traction you don't have yet — people respond well to honesty about where you actually are"
@busmark_w_nika Sure — concretely, it's stuff like not saying "trusted by teams everywhere" when you have 5 users. I just say what's actually true: "5 people have used this so far, here's what one of them said" or "I'm a solo dev building this after hitting the problem myself." People can tell the difference between confidence and inflated numbers, and being straight about being early usually gets more goodwill than pretending to be bigger than you are — nobody expects a new product to already have scale, so there's nothing to hide.
I like your approach. As a founder, I've found that talking about the problem you're solving feels much more natural than talking about the product itself. When people connect with the journey, they're usually more interested in the product too.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@visvanathan_d Will try to incorporate this! :)
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@picspace More people told I should talk about the problem, they are on the point. I need to frame it enough!
I feel this hard , I think about it as: " I'm telling the story of a problem I had and what I did about it.
We give useful stuff in public way more than you ask for anything. If 90% of what people see from you is helpful and 10% is "hey, I made this," the 10% lands as welcome instead of spammy
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@juanpablocastro Where do you hang the link? Within the post or in the comments section?
@busmark_w_nika In the comments most of the times works better
This thread is a good one. In my opinion leading with the product sometimes fails because people don't care about it yet, most potential customers don't really care about your story or company's story either, asking for recommendations has to be earned. So the best for me in promoting without coming across as too pushy or too salesy is simple: lead with the problem They see, position yourself as someone who understands it well, ask their expertise about solving the problem and then offer your product as a better solution or cost effective alternative. This is my formula for promoting my product. You're Free to copy it for your. Cheers!
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@richatsealedvault Thank you! More people mentioned this angle, so I need to put it into the practice!
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.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@virko_kask are you talking about the problem on LinkedIn? Because if yes, they also built a feature that shows you in analytics how many people clicked on your link:
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.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@lera_kuntsevich8 In that case, we need to have good story telling skills :)
Following the advice here to lead with the problem, not the product: I spent almost 30 years in org development, then ended up running a software company, a care home, and a cafe at the same time — and kept missing things that mattered because everything competed for my attention equally. That's the story I lead with when I talk about FounderFlow, not the "AI agent" framing. The version of the pitch that actually gets replies is "what's the thing currently slipping through the cracks when you're juggling more than one business?" — people answer that; they don't answer "check out my AI chief of staff."
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@stacywycof83995 Simply I need to learn to talk about the problem more.
@busmark_w_nika That's really it in a nutshell. Once I stopped explaining the product and started describing the mess of running multiple businesses at once, people had something to react to. Good luck with the LinkedIn posts — the problem-first framing will land.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@stacywycof83995 Thank you so much! :)
@busmark_w_nika You're welcome, happy it helped!