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
This resonates a lot honestly, that awkward feeling of "am I just spamming my own thing" never fully goes away even when you know the product is genuinely useful. Suzy's point about promoting the problem instead of the product is spot on, people lean in way more when you talk about the mess before the fix.
Been trying to apply the same logic myself lately, talk about the pain point (like the compliance headaches or the "why isn't my agent trusted yet" struggle) way more than the feature list, and honestly it feels less forced and gets better replies too.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@nolan_vu Where do you talk about the problem the most? Which social media channel or channel in general?
the framing shift that helped me was stopping talking about what the product does and starting with the exact moment the pain hits. not "this tool analyzes health data" but "you get a lab result on your phone at 11pm, can't read it, no one to call." that specific moment invites a conversation — the feature description invites a yes/no. the more concrete the pain, the less it reads as promotion and the more it reads as someone who actually gets the problem
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@sabber_ahamed yup, people are more likely react to the problem with "I have the same problem". But when you pitch the tool, nobody can align with the tool. only the problem :D
@busmark_w_nika Great question! Echoing what a few folks have said: leading with the problem works. But I think what makes it land is when there’s a little humanity behind it.
Share why the problem matters to you. Share where it was harder than expected. Share the mistakes you made along the way, especially the ones that made the solution better.
There’s so much polished AI-generated content now that a bit of humility goes a long way. It makes promoting your work feel less like selling and more like inviting people into what you’re learning.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@grace_knowhow I think that being and sound like a human is a competitive advantage now :)
The Eureka Database
I relate to this a lot. The thing that has worked best for me is to genuinely give away as much free value as I can. I run a free newsletter and try to make every issue actually worth someone's time, so people get to know the product without me having to sell it.
And do not be afraid to just be a human and reach out to people privately. As ironic as it is, automated outreach never really worked for me. I wrote every message personally, and those were the ones that actually connected.
If you lead with value and stay genuine, I think people can feel that :)
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@jeremy_galang Do you have any special templates to reach out to those people? What works? Also, do you have a demo call with them or something where you know them better? :)
One angle I have not seen yet in here: the least salesy promotion is helping with someone else's problem, not describing your own. If you are consistently useful in the exact rooms where your problem already lives, people start asking what you build, and the pitch becomes a link they request rather than one you push. It is slower and it does not feel like marketing, which is probably why it lands. A track record of being helpful in public does more than any single well worded post.
The thing that changed it for me was dropping every number from my own copy. I run a small housing tool and early drafts were full of stats that sounded persuasive but I could not actually back up. Once I stripped them out, what replaced them was one real story, my own dispute with a landlord, told plainly with no dressing up. It converts better than any invented percentage did, because people can tell the difference between a stat someone made up and a thing that actually happened. Promoting stops feeling salesy once the thing doing the convincing is true rather than polished.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@oshylabs To be honest, I need to create a better strategy around my product :)
@busmark_w_nika You have most of one already, you just have not written it down. Restricted on LinkedIn, annoyed enough to build the fix, now shipping it in public. That is the story, and it is true, which is the only reason it will not read as salesy.
The bit I would actually plan is the order. Comprehension before demand. Get a handful of people to say back to you what SafeLimit does after five seconds on the listing, fix whatever they get wrong, and only then push traffic at it. Strategy built before that step tends to be a plan for promoting a message nobody has confirmed lands.
BetterClaw
Share your process, let value sell itself.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@better_shaya I share my journey on X (using #buildinpublic hashtag) :)
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. People recognize themselves and ask about the product on their own.
I think the easiest way to not sound salesy is to stop treating promotion as a separate activity.
Share the problem, what you are learning, what you tried, what failed, and how the product is solving one small piece of it. When people see the thinking behind the product, the product mention feels like context, not a pitch.