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
The shift that worked for us: stop promoting the product, start promoting the question it answers.
Instead of "check out AIAsset.Market" we ask "is your AI project a demo or an actual asset?" — that's a question builders genuinely haven't thought about. The tool enters naturally once they're already thinking.
Three things that helped:
1. Lead with a problem frame, not a feature frame. "Most AI tools can't be sold or operated by anyone else — here's how to tell if yours can" lands differently than "we grade AI projects."
2. Give something useful before asking for anything. We offer a free grade — no email required to understand the criteria.
3. Pick forums where the pain is live. A thread about "how to monetize my side project" is a better place to mention an asset marketplace than a generic launch post.
The meta-lesson: salesy = you're thinking about your product. Not salesy = you're thinking about their problem.
This is incredibly helpful, Suzy! 'Promote the problem, not the product' completely changes how I look at it. Sharing the 'before' state and framing the plugin as the answer feels way more natural than just dropping a pitch. I'm definitely going to try answering questions in public rather than just posting standard announcements. Thank you!
hey nika, building a workout tracker, doing client work, and the thing that fixed this for me wasn't changing what i say. it was changing what i show.
posts where i just talked about the product or the journey: fine, forgettable.
posts where i attached receipts: a screenshot of real MRR, an actual paywall A/B result, the exact onboarding screen that bumped conversion. those outperform everything. nobody reads a screenshot of real numbers as salesy. they read it as free information they'd normally have to pay for.
the mental shift: you're not promoting, you're publishing your data. the product is just where the data comes from.
second thing that helped: never ask. announce milestones instead. "just crossed X users" with the story of how does more than any CTA, because people share milestones for you. they don't share pitches.
your edit the post after it performs move is genuinely smart btw. keeping that one.
This post had me thinking, my situation has a specific twist that makes this even harder.
360now solves a real problem, but it's a personal one. The people who need it most are leaders quietly wondering "does my team actually respect me?" or "is my leadership landing the way I intend?" but nobody wants to admit that publicly, and I'm not sure I want to either.
So I can't exactly post "struggling with your leadership? try this" without it feeling either too raw or too salesy.
I haven't cracked it yet, which is probably exactly why this thread caught my eye. Would love to hear if anyone has navigated promoting something that touches on a problem people feel but don't say out loud.
Hi Nika!
I have always found that promotion is best received by being authentic. You're passionate about the product you're building. Talk about it. What's your origin story? Why this product, right now? What problem are you solving? If you're speaking from this angle, it almost always sells itself.
For 16 years, I was in the service business (now in tech), and the easiest customers to win over were the ones who understood my story, saw themselves in the problem I was solving, and connected to my solution. You don't need to "sell" to grow fans and loyalists. They just need to see you, your work, and your passion.
Wishing you the absolute best.
One framing that helped me: promotion feels less salesy when I separate “proof of learning” from “please join my waitlist.”
For a product like a LinkedIn plugin, I’d post the messy before/after: the post that took too long, the small workflow you changed, the mistake you fixed, then mention the waitlist only when the lesson clearly connects.
I’m still learning this too, but the posts I trust most don’t hide the product — they just make the product the natural next step after a useful observation.
I've found that sharing lessons learned works better than selling features. People follow the journey before they buy the product.
Honest answer: I'm not the person who cracked this. I'm the person who built for months and promoted almost nothing — so take this as a confession, not advice.
But looking at your list, something jumped out. All five things are about where to put the link. Comments, profile, CTA at the end, P.S. under an unrelated post. That was my instinct too, and I think it's exactly the part that feels gross — you can feel yourself engineering the insertion.
What I found underneath that was less flattering and more useful. I was so busy working out how to promote that I never checked whether the thing I was promoting could hold anyone when they arrived. This week I found a canonical tag on my highest-traffic page still pointing at a URL I'd rebranded away from months ago — quietly telling Google that page didn't matter. Then I found 21 of my pages weren't indexed at all. I'd been paying for ads into a funnel with a hole in the bottom, and blaming my promotion.
So the reframe that helped me: promotion feels salesy roughly in proportion to how much work it's doing that the product should be doing. If you have to be clever about where the link goes, some of that cleverness is compensating for something.
The one thing that has never once felt gross: answering someone's actual question so completely that your product becomes the obvious next question — and then not linking it. Let them ask. Someone always does, and the moment they ask, it stops being selling.
Of your five, the one I'd drop is the P.S. under unrelated posts. That's the one that reads as selling, because it is — and it costs you the goodwill the funny comment just earned.
The one I'd double down on is build-in-public. It's the only one on the list where you're giving something before you ask for anything. That's the whole difference.
I used to think I had to talk about my product more. Lately I've started doing the opposite.
Instead of promoting the product itself, I share the problem that led me to build it, lessons I've learned, mistakes we've made, or interesting conversations with users. If people relate to the problem, they naturally become curious about the solution.
I also try to follow the 80/20 rule. Around 80% of my content is about things other founders and builders can learn from, and only 20% is directly about the product.
People usually don't mind being sold to if they've already learned something valuable from you. How do you think?
"I struggle with this too! What works best for me is focusing on 'value first.' Instead of saying 'Use my tool,' I prefer sharing the problem we are solving or asking for genuine feedback. When you share your building journey or ask for advice, people naturally want to support you without feeling like they are being sold to."