How do you promote your product without sounding too salesy?

What worked for me was to stop promoting and just be useful in the exact places my users already are. I answer color and makeup questions on Reddit and Quora with no link and no product mention, just genuinely solving the person's problem. The tool sits in my profile bio, so people who want it find it and the ones who don't still got real help. Slower, but it never reads as an ad because it isn't one.

Honestly still figuring this out myself. What's helped a bit: talking about the problem more than the product. If I lead with "here's what I built" it feels like an ad, but if I lead with the actual pain point (in my case, staring at a blank reply box for a bad review, not knowing what to say), people relate to that first, and the product mention just becomes a natural "here's what I ended up doing about it" instead of a pitch.

Also helps to genuinely answer the question being asked rather than looking for an opening to mention my thing. If it fits, it fits, if it doesn't, I just leave it out.

Still feels a little awkward every time though, not sure that fully goes away.

I try to educate before I promote.

Instead of telling people my solution is the best, I prefer building free calculators and decision tools that solve a real problem first. If someone saves money or discovers an opportunity thanks to one of those tools, trust comes naturally.

In my experience, measurable value is much more convincing than marketing claims. When people can clearly see the cost of missed opportunities or inefficient processes, they don't need a hard sales pitch—they already understand why a solution matters.

That's the approach I'm trying to follow with every product I build

The thing that's worked best for me so far: only mentioning the product when someone actually asks a question that it's the honest answer to, never as the opener.

I've been posting on Indie Hackers lately — comments answering real technical questions people had, no link, no product name most of the time. A couple of those turned into actual back-and-forth conversations where the other founder eventually asked what I was building, at which point mentioning it didn't feel salesy at all, because it was the answer to their question rather than something I was pushing.

I also posted a fully honest "here's what I tried, here's what completely failed to move the needle" recap instead of a highlight reel, and that got more genuine engagement than anything more polished I'd written. I think "salesy" isn't really about word choice — it's about whether you're answering something someone asked, or interrupting something they weren't asking about.

Curious if others have found the line shifts once you have actual users vs. pre-launch — does it get easier to talk about the product without it feeling like a pitch once there's real usage/feedback to reference instead of just claims?

Following this because I still feel weird plugging Applio too. What's worked best for me is just answering real resume questions on reddit/quora and only mentioning the tool if someone asks, feels way less like a pitch than any launch post.

the thing that actually changed how I post was what I check the next morning. stopped looking at impressions, started checking reply rate. a post that gets ignored tells you the problem framing was off way faster than a slow trickle of profile clicks ever does.

the "post about the problem for as long as you can stand it" line further down is the real one. everyone underestimates how long that actually needs to be before people agree the problem exists.

by helping and communicating the value that the product is delivering for customer's problem statement, taking my own product's example: instead of saying Score my lead is the best lead qualification tool, we can say, save your time in setting up your lead scoring without login or any complex CRM integrations.
just sharing what's going in my head rn, quite honestly I haven't tried selling it yet as I feel it's still an unfinished product.

Salesy is not a tone problem, which is why fixing the wording never works. It is a structure problem: a message is salesy when the person reading it gets nothing unless they act. Every "just launched, would love your support" is a request with no payload. You can say the identical thing warmly and it still reads as an ask, because it is one. The fix is to make the message worth reading even for the person who will never buy. Post the thing you learned, the number that surprised you, the decision you got wrong. Someone who reads it and does nothing still got paid for their attention, and that is what stops it feeling like a pitch. Selling then happens as a footnote to something useful rather than as the whole message. Easy test before you post: if I strip out the product entirely, is there anything left that a stranger would want to have read? If not, it is salesy no matter how it is phrased.

I’m genuinely glad to see someone else wrestling with this. Self-promotion does not come naturally to a great many people.

I’m building something myself, and approaching close friends to try it or give feedback can make me feel oddly slimy, as though I’ve suddenly turned a catch-up with my friend into a sales opportunity. I find it far easier to promote somebody else’s work than my own.

I suspect the balance is to share the problem, the process and what you’re learning, rather than constantly pitching the product. Your approach sounds measured to me, and one dedicated product post a week hardly feels excessive.