What marketing hacks helped you get your first users and improve your product's visibility?
Whenever I launched something in the past, hardly anyone knew about it. Looking back, it was mostly because I was afraid to talk about what I was building.
Fortunately, I've grown out of that. These days I talk about my product much more (maybe even more than I should 😄), and it's made a huge difference in getting it noticed.
I wanted to share a few things that worked surprisingly well for my Chrome extension (a LinkedIn activity tracker that alerts you before you hit LinkedIn's limits and trigger account restrictions).
1. I talked about it constantly on Product Hunt before launch. – I kept mentioning that I was building it and shared a waitlist to build anticipation.
2. After launch, I reached out to people on LinkedIn via DMs. – I asked whether they knew anyone struggling with LinkedIn account restrictions. Many introduced me to people who had the problem, which gave me access to real users and incredibly valuable feedback.
3. I asked people to find it manually in the Chrome Web Store. – Instead of sending a direct link, I asked them to open the Chrome Web Store → search for "SafeLimit" → press Enter. This seems to help with search visibility.
4. I searched social media for people already talking about the problem. – On X, Instagram, and TikTok, I monitored keywords like "LinkedIn restrictions" and "LinkedIn account restricted." I replied to people, helped them solve their issues, and positioned myself as someone who understands the problem rather than someone just promoting a product.
These are lessons I learned over time, and they've helped me.
One more thing that has been incredibly valuable: these discussions here on Product Hunt.
What about you? Have you had any "aha!" marketing moments that helped you attract your first users?
Replies
Scarlett.
Honestly, this is a whole science, Nika 😄 There are so many different approaches.
But if I had to recommend one thing, I would stop thinking about a “launch day” and start thinking about a “launch month.”
1.In the weeks before launch, I would talk about the product everywhere I could. I’d join relevant X Spaces, post consistently, share what I’m building, and find communities where my target users already spend time. I will add value there. Will connect with key figures around my topic.
2.The launch day itself would be a multi-platform offensive. Product Hunt would be the main launch, of course, but I’d also coordinate with friends, founders, customers, and relevant creators to repost, quote, and talk about the product on X and LinkedIn.
3.If I already had customers, I’d ask them to share real stories about how the product helped them. That is usually much stronger than the founder simply listing features.
4.Then comes the post-launch phase. I’d use the launch results as a reason to appear on podcasts, join more Spaces, contact relevant newsletters, and pitch both paid and organic mentions. I’d also use the Product Hunt badge as social proof and reach out to journalists for potential PR coverage.
So for me a proper launch is rarely one day. :lol: It is usually a coordinated 30–60 day campaign before, during, and after the actual launch.
@byalexai Honestly, love this framing-"launch month, not launch day." This is exactly the mindset shift we needed. We're about 3 weeks out from our own PH launch (B2B, enterprise LLM security/PII protection) and point 3 hits hardest for us. We don't have flashy before/after screenshots, so we've been leaning on concrete use-case scenarios (like what actually happens when sensitive data gets pasted into a chatbot) instead of just listing features ourselves. One thing I'm curious about: for the pre-launch phase, how did you decide which communities were actually worth showing up in vs. just noise?
Scarlett.
@samran_rezunate_llm Thank you for the questions, Samran!
For Product Hunt I see two very different types of communities.
The first are communities that help you build more legitimacy inside the Product Hunt ecosystem: makers, hunters, active users, founders, and people who understand how launches work there.
The second are communities built around the actual problem your product solves. That is where your ideal users are, even if most of them are not active on Product Hunt at all.
These are completely different audiences, but both matter.
The first helps the launch gain visibility and credibility on Product Hunt. The second brings relevant users, feedback, and potentially real customers.
So I wouldn’t choose one over the other. I’d just approach them differently and make sure I’m present in both before launch.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@byalexai To be honest, it is even more than a month. Let's take building your personal brand here – it is marketing too, and it takes you several years. Your value lies there too!
Your opening is the part I'd underline, because I'm the person you're describing. I launched Invoice Badger here last week having barely told anyone I was building it. Single digit upvotes, zero signups. The product had months in it. The distribution had about a day.
So my contribution is mostly the other kind: what didn't work, and what I did instead.
Didn't work: posting to Reddit from a new account. Auto-filtered before a human ever saw it. Nobody warns you the karma gates exist, so the post quietly disappears and you assume it just flopped. Worth knowing if that's your plan.
Decided against: paid ads. On a five pound a month product the maths never closes, and it does nothing for organic rank anyway.
What I did instead was pick channels that don't need an audience, because I didn't have one. The most useful single thing was publishing to the Official MCP Registry, since several directories ingest from it, so one submission propagates to places I'd never reach by hand. Generalisable version: find the upstream in your category and submit there, rather than filling in twenty forms individually.
But the honest answer to your question is your point 1, which is the one I got wrong and am only now fixing. I've spent today reading launches properly and replying to makers rather than promoting anything, and five of them have replied to me. That's five more real conversations than my launch produced. Turning up before you need something clearly works better than turning up because you need something, which reads as obvious written down and apparently took me a failed launch to actually learn.
@dalemooney The upstream point is the best thing in this thread and it is sitting in a reply. Find the source the other directories ingest from, submit once, let it propagate. Almost nobody does that."The product had months in it. The distribution had about a day." I have written that sentence about myself twice.What fixed it for me was giving up on distribution being a launch week. It is the same volume of work as the build, spread over the same months, running alongside it. Once it stopped being a phase at the end it stopped being an emergency.What is the Invoice Badger wedge? Not the product. The one user you would hate to lose.
@rabnoor_s The wedge is narrower than the product, and I should probably say it out loud more often.
It is the technical freelancer who already has an AI assistant open all day, bills a handful of clients hourly, and currently invoices out of a spreadsheet because every real invoicing tool is more than they need. For that person the cost of invoicing was never writing the invoice. It is the context switch. You are mid task, you remember you did ninety minutes on something last Tuesday, and going to find the tool is precisely the thing that makes you not record it. If the thing you would have to open is already open, that cost drops to roughly nothing.
So the one user I would hate to lose is the person who logs time as they finish it rather than reconstructing a month on the last Friday. Everything else in there is downstream of that.
The uncomfortable half, since you asked properly: that user is currently indistinguishable from me. Building precisely for yourself is a well documented way to make something nobody else wants, and I do not yet have evidence there are enough of them. That is the real open question, not the marketing.
On distribution not being a phase, I think that is the correction. Treating it as a launch week makes it an emergency, and emergencies get done badly by whoever is most tired.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@dalemooney I have the same experience with Reddit – they even excluded me from some subreddits :D It is not a good place for promoting PH launches :D
You can achieve more in the comments section than by promoting something in a post. But the condition is to help people solve a problem in that comment. :)
@busmark_w_nika What has worked best for me is starting with a very small group, around 20 people already talking about the exact problem and helping them before trying to scale outreach.
Those conversations give you much more than early users. You learn the words people actually use, where they hesitate, and which part of the product matters enough to pay for. After a week, I’d review which channel created real replies and double down there. Five useful conversations are usually worth more than thousands of impressions.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@alpertayfurr This is what I am already doing with my tool. I talked to a couple of people and have some suggestions that should be implemented. But for scaling the product, it is not enough yet.
@busmark_w_nika That makes sense. A few conversations are enough to improve the product, but not enough to find a repeatable growth channel. I’d probably test one narrow audience at a time, keep the message and offer consistent for a week, then compare replies, activations, and retention before scaling anything.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@alpertayfurr BTW, do you have any Chrome extension as well?
@busmark_w_nika Yes, I use it for some applications. I'll try the extension you mentioned above soon as well.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@alpertayfurr are we already connected on LinkedIn? You can give me feedback in DMs :D
@busmark_w_nika Yes, you're right :) Of course I'll mention my feedback from LinkedIn, Nika.
For my SaaS, I found that providing a free, web-based version of my product drove a lot of traffic and converted quite well. It quickly solved an issue people were searching google for. Those that needed more signed up and paid.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@rwicqsi But you had to communicate that fact as well. How did you get attention towards that marketing tactic?
@busmark_w_nika For a lot of small problems, the attention/demand already exists!
Small tools like photo background remover, invoice generator, resume templates -- people are already searching for the solution, you just need to be the one that google recommends. I use Ahrefs to find what people are searching for, as well as how difficult it is to rank organically.
Taking minimalist phone: reduce your screentime as an example: using Ahrefs, I can see that there are about 1k-2k monthly searches for minimalist iphone wallpaper with a keyword difficulty of around 10/100, which makes it relatively easy to rank in the first page of google search if create a good webpage. Bonus points if the webpage/wallpapers are easily sharable with links/socials, as this improves chances of being mentioned on socials / backlinked and further improving organic search visibility.
Since "minimalist iphone wallpaper" is related to what the product offers, you'll naturally see conversion to the product and gain some users who can provide feedback and improve the product. Essentially, this is the playbook that I see companies like Canva and Adobe use to great success. And now, me too :)
I was able to get my first users this way without talking about my product publicly. Although I regret not being more open with what I was building and I am slowly changing that.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@rwicqsi aaa, so it is more of a game of SEO, AEO. Gotcha. In that case, I need to create a separate landing page for my product (it is a Chrome extension that counts LinkedIn activity, so people will not be banned when they overengage) :)
Tho I think that most of my audience is on LinkedIn + other social media (as people with restricted accounts are going to complain there) :D
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@pierodetomi I think you should start distribution more agressively :D
The thing that's worked for me isn't a hack and it's embarrassingly slow: commenting on other people's launches every day, asking one specific question, and following up when they answer.
Eighteen days in with nothing launched yet. But two makers have shipped changes based on questions I asked, and I've got maybe six or seven people who'd recognize my name now. That's not an audience, but it's the raw material for one.
On the being-afraid-to-talk-about-it part — I think there's a version of that which isn't fear. I've had a Chrome extension shipped for months without promoting it, and the reason isn't nerves, it's that I still can't decide what it is. A cute thing or a useful thing. Talking about it before I know would just teach people the wrong frame, and that's harder to undo than silence.
Curious whether you'd push back on that. Would you say talk about it anyway and let the framing get corrected in public?
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@ark_y_k I think that if someone uses your extension, it is a good sign, and it means that the promotion was weak. You need to try something. If the problem exists and you solve that, go for promoting. What extension do you have?
@busmark_w_nika It's a Chrome extension where your dog walks around your screen and chases your cursor. Mine's a small cream-colored thing who mostly sleeps, so watching him sprint after the pointer is funnier than it has any right to be.
Which is exactly my framing problem. Described one way it's a toy. Described another way it's for people who spend nine hours at a screen and want one thing in the corner that isn't a notification.
Your point lands though — I've been treating "I haven't decided what it is" as a reason to wait, and it's probably just a reason to find out. You can't correct a frame nobody has seen yet.
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@ark_y_k So it is more like "fun" feature for users, right? How many downloads you have?
Point 4 is the only one here I would call a moat. The rest are tactics. That one is research wearing a marketing costume.
Searching "LinkedIn account restricted" gets you people describing the problem in their own words, before anyone told them what to call it. That vocabulary is worth more than the signups.
We learned it the expensive way. Three of us spent 90 minutes hand-dialling a list and reached zero decision-makers. Right buyers, wrong channel. Most of them were already saying the exact thing in public and we were dialling instead of reading.
Where I am stuck is your point 1.
I have something going out in a few weeks and I still cannot find the line between talking about it and pitching it. You clearly found it. What is the test you run before you post?
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@rabnoor_s what vocabulary should I use for the problem? Because as soon as I think about the problem as a marketer, I somehow forget to think about it as the consumer :D
Regarding point 1 – always go through the problem narrative – don't post about your product. Ask about the problem and solutions. The discussion you create serves as the place where you can promote.
@busmark_w_nika Steal it, don't write it. Open your last 10 support messages or call transcripts and take the phrase verbatim. If you have to translate it, you already lost it. Marketers name the category, users name the symptom. "Agent memory" is a category. "It forgot what we decided yesterday" is the symptom. Only one of those gets replies. Quick test: would they say it out loud to a colleague? If not it's your word, not theirs. What does your inbox actually say?
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@rabnoor_s for now they say nothing, but I found that people use the phrase LinkedIn restricted my account.
Really useful breakdown, Nika. Especially #3, hadn't thought about search visibility that way.
A few things we've been leaning into ahead of our own PH launch:
Building presence before asking anything. Same as your waitlist approach, we're spending these weeks just being active and useful in the community, not pitching yet.
Leading with the problem, not the product. We're an LLM gateway with PII detection for enterprise, so instead of "check our tool," we talk about the actual failure mode. e.g., an employee pasting sensitive data into a chatbot and what happens to that prompt downstream. People engage with the problem way more than a feature list.
Framing PH as a feedback and reaction channel, not a lead-gen one. We're optimizing for genuine comments and demo interactions over upvote count, feel closer to what you found with real user access via DMs.
curious how long you kept the "talk about it constantly" phase pre-launch before it started feeling repetitive to your network?
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@samran_rezunate_llm TBH, I still think that I am not talking enough about my tool on PH. :D So I will be doing that :D
the thing that's actually moved the needle for me isn't volume of posting, it's rec-swaps - finding a couple other people building adjacent things and genuinely recommending each other to your existing audiences. cold posts into a new community basically never convert for me, but a warm intro or a mention from someone whose audience already trusts them does, even if it's a much smaller number of eyeballs. the annoying part is it doesn't scale on a schedule, it comes in bursts whenever the right person happens to be paying attention, so you can do everything right for weeks and see nothing, then get three sign-ups from one Slack message. took me a while to stop reading the quiet weeks as failure
minimalist phone: reduce your screentime
@galdayan TBH, conversations in the comments have helped a lot, but for now, most of my work is "manual" – I have to message people to try out my extension. Would like a system where they can try it on their own.
@busmark_w_nika manual doesn't scale but it does teach you things a self-serve trial never will - you actually see who bounces and where, because you're watching them try it in real time. I'd resist automating that too early, you might end up optimizing a funnel before you know what's actually converting people. the "years for personal brand" point below is real too, though - the manual messaging is what builds that in parallel, so it's not wasted time even if it feels slow.
Not a hack exactly, but the most useful thing I did this launch was answer every paid-promotion DM with an affiliate offer instead, 25% recurring, commission only.
Five people offered to promote my launch to a combined 900K followers. All five declined the moment payment depended on conversions. One had quoted $80 and dropped to $60 within two messages.
Cost me nothing and told me exactly what that reach was worth. If you're launching and getting flooded with these, it's a two-line filter.