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 think the best way to promote a product without sounding salesy is to give people something useful before asking them to try your product.
I've found that people respond much better to:
Sharing useful insights related to the problem you're solving
Showing what you've learned while building
Sharing mistakes and experiments, not just wins
Creating templates, checklists, guides, or small free tools
Answering questions where your product happens to be relevant
Sharing customer problems and how you approached solving them
Using the product as an example rather than making every post an advertisement
For example, while building Tendr, I could constantly say "Tendr helps you plan and book your celebration." But that's much less interesting than sharing something like "Here's a simple checklist for planning a birthday party in 30 days" or "Here's how I would split a ₹50,000 celebration budget." The content is useful even if someone never uses Tendr.
Then, if the product naturally helps with what you're discussing, mentioning it feels much less like an advertisement.
I also think the 80/20 rule is useful: roughly 80% of what you share should educate, help, or entertain, and 20% can directly promote what you're building.
Another thing I've learned is that showing the problem is often better than repeatedly explaining the product. If people recognize themselves in the problem, they'll become curious about the solution.
And finally, don't be afraid to promote your product occasionally. There's a difference between "Please use my product" and "I built this because I kept seeing this problem, here's what we've learned and here's how we're trying to solve it."
The second feels like a founder sharing a journey rather than someone trying to make a sale
Im trying to use a social media strategy that essentially identifies specific personas that my app solves problems for, then ive ask it help me come up with interesting slideshows that directly empathise or inspire that specific audience (about a topic most related to them) but the last slide of each slideshow has a CTA to the app and why that is another thing that can solve their problem. Ive noticed it has much more engagement and impressions than other more "sales-y" approaches I tried
Honestly the least salesy thing that's worked for me: shipping what people actually ask for, in public. Someone commented on my launch asking for a way to bookmark content to find it again later — built it, replied back once it shipped. That's the whole pitch, no push needed. Feels less like promotion and more like closing the loop with someone who cared enough to ask.
A rule we landed on for product copy that turned out to apply to promotion too: disclose once, then stop narrating the machinery.
Our product is an AI host that runs live trivia games. Early copy kept explaining the mechanism — "our AI will then generate…" — and it read as selling even when it was just describing. The rewrite states what the reader gets, discloses the AI actor once, and never mentions the machinery again.
The promotion version of the same rule: say what happened, once, plainly — "I built X because Y kept happening" — and let the artifact do the talking. The salesy feeling usually comes from re-explaining and re-justifying, not from the mention itself. One disclosure reads as honesty; three reads as a pitch.
This thread nails it. I built FlyCalm (a breathing app for fear of flying) and my early mistake was leading with features. What actually got people interested was just being honest about the problem: I've had flight anxiety myself, and none of the generic "just breathe" advice ever felt specific enough during actual turbulence. Once I started talking about that instead of the app, the app itself stopped feeling like a pitch. Still working on the "don't sound salesy" part every day though, it's a real skill.
when I started marketing my apps I used traditional ways of promotion, all went very very average. I should say influencer marketing is still less popular and having best ROI
For Petio, the least salesy posts start with a real pet-care task: finding the lot number on a food bag, remembering a vaccination date, or reconstructing a question before the vet visit. Then I show how the app handles that one task and stop there.
The product earns the next click by being specific, not by adding urgency. I also try to answer questions in public without turning every reply into a CTA. A useful rule I keep coming back to: if the post would still help someone who never downloads the app, it is probably doing its job.