How would you promote a product in the age of AI “slop”?
I don’t want to rant here (but I probably will a bit)... 😀
Almost every ad visual, but also a lot of organic content on social media, is very generic and created by AI (I get it, it’s a cheaper and more scalable way of promoting). But when everyone does it, it becomes really hard to stand out and differentiate yourself.
I feel like it’s not just on the internet anymore, but even on TV.
So, how do you stand out in a time when there is an overload of information and AI slop everywhere around us?
The only possible solutions that come to my mind are guerrilla campaigns in physical spaces, whose impact is then amplified by social media sharing, basically some kind of mediated experience that people talk about online.
I know this will depend on the type of product, but how would you approach this?
Replies
the irony is that AI slop made authentic stuff stand out more than ever. a year ago a well-designed ad was just normal. now it's a signal that someone actually cared. the guerrilla idea is spot on though... we've had way more traction from reddit threads and real conversations in communities than from any polished campaign. people can smell AI content instantly now and they just scroll past it. the products I see getting real word-of-mouth are the ones where the founder is visibly in the comments, in subreddits, in forums like this one. not running ads but actually talking to people. it's slower but it compounds in a way that paid AI content never will
@tina_chhabra Tina tu viens de dire la vérité que j’ai appris à 63 ans sur la route :
L’IA peut écrire 1000 pubs parfaites en 1 minute.
Mais le client reconnaît le "vrai" en 1 seconde.
Moi je livrais des colis. L’IA n’aurait jamais dit au client :
"Patron, il pleut, je te le dépose au café d’en bas, tu récupères après ?"
C’est ça l’authenticité : Arranger l’humain, pas vendre le produit.
Ya Wadud met l’amour entre les gens. L’IA calcule. L’humain ressent.
Tu crées des choses sur lesquelles les gens cliquent...
Moi je livre des choses pour lesquelles les gens reviennent.
Les 2 marchent ensemble quand Ya Fattah ouvre.
Merci pour ta réflexion 🙏 Toi t’es plutôt équipe IA ou équipe terrain ?
@olivier_jury honestly both. AI helps me move faster but the real wins always come from showing up and talking to people. the café story made me smile. that's the kind of thing you can't teach and definitely can't automate. that's just someone paying attention. the best products I've seen work the same way, built by people who actually listen to their users instead of just shipping features
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@tina_chhabra The thing is – what if AI can replicate human narrative? How will we be able to differentiate?
@busmark_w_nika honestly I think we won't. at least not by looking at the content itself. the difference will be in everything around it... who posted it, do they have a real history, are they in the comments replying to people, do they show up consistently. the content becomes proof of presence not proof of skill. that's kind of already happening here on PH, the people I actually pay attention to aren't the ones with the best takes but the ones who keep showing up
@tina_chhabra 100% d’accord. La compétence sans présence = code mort.
Moi clients me reconnaissent dans la rue pas pour mon code.
Pour "je repasse demain" pendant 40 ans. Présence > Perfection.
Ya Razzaq pour tous les solos constants 💪
@busmark_w_nika L’IA copie les mots, pas les cicatrices.
Elle peut écrire "handicap devient arme" mais elle l’a pas vécu.
Moi 40 ans de "je repasse demain" sans 1€. Ça IA peut pas faker.
Ya Fattah : Le vrai se vit, le faux se génère.
It counterintuitively feels even more like a pay to win world now, which makes solo founders and self funded startups harder to differentiate.
Look at product hunt for example. If you don’t pay a Hunter to promote your launch, it’s nearly impossible to gain traction for a launch day.
With social content, it feels more and more like algorithms prioritize certain formats, styles, languages, etc. and as soon as people generating AI content see it, they flood the feeds with it.
@frank_fourleaf Franc, fondateur solo comme moi... mais moi "solo livreur" 😄
Tu as raison frère : "faut payer pour gagner" = le mensonge de 2026.
Moi 40 ans sans payer de pub. Ma règle de terrain :
Le client paie pour 3 choses seulement :
1. Être compris avant d’acheter
2. Être respecté après avoir acheté
3. Être dépanné quand ça plante
Les grands paient pour masquer qu’ils ne font pas ces 3 choses.
Toi tu n’as pas l’argent = Tu es obligé de faire les 3 choses.
Ya Fattah : Ton handicap devient ton arme.
Moi j’avais pas 1€ de pub. J’avais juste mon prénom + "je repasse demain".
40 ans après, les clients de mes clients me reconnaissent dans la rue.
Four-Leaf.ai = Tu vends quoi exactement frère ?
Si c’est utile, moi livreur je peux t’apprendre à le vendre SANS pub.
Ya Razzaq pour tous les solos 💪
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@frank_fourleaf I thought that paying hunters is against rules. 😅
When everyone's fighting guerrilla warfare, the real guerrilla war is sincerity.
Me, delivery driver, 63 years old, zero advertising budget. My product? Packages delivered on time.
How do I stand out? 3 anti-AI rules:
1. Ya Fattah before posting: AI generates, God opens. I ask before posting.
2. Face > Logo: People buy humans, not pixels. I show my hands, my struggles, my clients.
3. Give 10x: 1 useful tip > 1000 ads. Baraka > budget.
AI copies everything. It can't copy your story.
Standing out today = Being real in a world of copies.
Vokal
@zhen_han Zhen Han, fondateur, je te comprends à 100%. 63 ans de terrain m’ont appris ça :
Toi tu n’as pas les millions des grands acteurs.
Moi je n’avais pas 1€ pour pub quand j’ai commencé.
La règle qui a sauvé mes 2 : Vends d’abord, développe après.
Toi tu codes IA bâclée = Client part.
Moi je livrais colis bâclé = Client part.
Ya Latif nous apprend : La qualité n’a pas de prix, mais elle a un coût.
Les grands acteurs dépensent pour masquer leurs défauts.
Toi tu n’as pas ce luxe = Tu es obligé d’être vrai dès jour 1.
C’est un avantage Solo. Ya Razzaq donne plus de baraka au petit qu’au géant.
Respect pour @Vokal et @Appifex frère.
Tu préfères 100 clients qui reviennent ou 10 000 qui cliquent 1 fois ?
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@zhen_han That is a disadvantage to all of us who are not Amazon, Google and other giants with pockets full of money. 😅
@zhen_han @busmark_w_nika Désavantage ? Non frérot. C’est notre arme.
Amazon a les millions. Nous on a les cicatrices.
Moi 40 ans sans 1€, clients me doivent pas à mon code mais à "je repasse demain".
Ya Fattah : Le géant achète l’attention. Le solo gagne les coeurs.
@zhen_han This has been a struggle for most of us; I don't think this has to do with AI, like you mentioned.
I'm not sure I follow. If everyone is creating generic, AI-generated content then aren't you by definition differentiating yourself by creating high-quality unique content? I think the real question is how many of us know how to do that.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@chargewhat_team This is a good question, but another one is: Are we good at differentiating what is/is not AI?
Great post. There are so many new valuable solutions out there, with twice as many non-valuable solutions. For start ups, maybe the best route is an incubator or accelerator program of some sort where you can actually start networking and built that informal chain that has key insights into areas of your non expertise. I'm currently struggling with this exact thought. How do you get your product in front of the right people? Even if you're able to get it in front of them, are they the right people? So many variables out there today when the capability to build has become a commodity and removed all excuses to make it happen.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@wereframe questions are valid, but to prevent any mistakes, it is good to prepare a plan to not to make those mistakes so results can be more accuraet :)
@busmark_w_nika 1000% agree here. It’s essentially what I’m saying; some of us have never embarked on this journey and a business plan is an afterthought. Not saying it’s right or wrong, but as a solo founder, it’s very easy to be consumed on one side or the other and I was on the other side of that for some time. The outcome: a decent product, and a non existent business. 😊
For me the only thing that works is showing the actual process not the perfect one. In the last fifty days, I've posted daily about things that worked and things that failed for me. And I've seen that the most engaging posts are the ones that are frank: the post about still being at zero users, and still pushing is way more popular than any feature
announcements.And this might be the reason why people somehow feel when something is authentic, and authentic
stories have rough texture. The AI-generated stuf is very smooth and frictionless. Real stories are full of friction and uncertainty and specific details that are hard to replicate. Your guerrilla marketing concept sounds great and
it's probably true the same goes for online environment. What makes the difference is specificity.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@debnix And how did you use AI in that 50-day experiment? How much did you allow it to change things? Or was it all raw? Generated by you?
@busmark_w_nika
Mixed honestly. For the complex parts — Shopify authentication, billing API, AI prediction logic— I leaned heavily on Claude. For simpler components and iteration I wrote it myself. No formal coding background so I couldn't have built the hard parts alone. But I understood what I was building well enough to direct it, debug it, and make all the product decisions.
The research was entirely raw — weeks of reading seller forums, App Store reviews, Reddit complaints before touching any code.
English is also not my first language so I used AI tools to help with writing and translation throughout. That part I'm fully transparent about.
Interesting experiment either way. How much can one person ship with AI as a co-pilot? Turns out quite a lot.
PopShort.Al -Stream Short Drama
My contrarian take:
The problem isn't AI slop.
The problem is that most marketing was already slop before AI.
AI just made it cheaper.
People don't ignore content because it was generated by AI.
They ignore it because it's predictable.
Everyone is optimizing for production.
Very few are optimizing for insight.
The posts I save are rarely the most beautiful ones.
They're usually the ones that teach me something I didn't know five minutes ago.
In a world where everyone can generate content, originality becomes the moat.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@elara_thorn Was this written with the help of AI? :D
@elara_thorn @busmark_w_nika it definitely was lol
Lets question the other way around. Why do we need to stand out ? I mean how many real users really care if a content is created by AI or not. They just like a content or dislike it, they just use or avoid it , that's all. I think the main goal is to solve a problem or to create something useful, no matter which way you do.
I think the idea of tagging everything with "AI slop" to degrade something is just a side affect of the AI evolution and soon will disappear. In the very near future it would be regarded as weird if something does not have anything AI in it .
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@ozgurds WHY – is a crucial question, but I can bet that at the end of the day, it is to sell something to earn money and pay those bills. And it is way too difficult to stand out when there are trillions of content pieces generated by AI. You can fall under all of that stuff.
@busmark_w_nika Yes definitely I agree. Actually I just answered the question in another point of view I guess. I was just talking about people tagging the apps with AI slop or "organic" apps :)
It's also IRL in printed graphic design. I made it a game with friends to spot the AI-generated images.
The other day we went to a restaurant and even the food menu items were AI-generated food photos.
How to stand out? Probably by being really authentic and putting in the effort.
Or wait 6 months and AI can also do that ^^
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@van_ho LOL – did those AI generated photos looked at least well? :D