What's the worst advice you've ever gotten about marketing your product?
I'll go first.
Someone told me: "Just be consistent. Post every day. The algorithm rewards consistency."
So I did.
For six months, I posted every single day. Sometimes at 7am. Sometimes at 10pm. Weekends included. I wrote about our product, our features, our roadmap. I followed all the "best practices" — hook in the first line, three takeaways, call to action at the end.
I got maybe 30 likes per post. A few comments from friends. Zero customers.
One day I got tired. I posted something messy. No structure. Just a story about a deal we lost because ChatGPT had wrong info about our SOC2 status. It was raw. It was specific. It had nothing to do with "consistency."
That post got 40,000 views. Seven people DM'd me asking to try the product. One of them became our biggest customer.
The "consistency" advice was safe. It was easy to follow. It didn't work.
The thing that worked was saying something real. Something uncomfortable. Something that proved I actually knew what I was talking about because I'd lived it.
What's the worst advice you've followed?
Imed Radhouani
Founder & CTO – Rankfender
Replies
the advice wasnt wrong tbh, you were just consistent at saying nothing. consistency without a point of view is just scheduled noise. the messy post worked because you finally had something to say, not because structure is bad
@umairnadeem You're absolutely right. I needed to hear that. The advice in factt wasn't wrong. I was. I was consistent at saying nothing, just filling the calendar. The messy post worked because I finally had something to say! not because I broke the rules, but because I stopped hiding behind them.
That's the part nobody tells you. You can follow all the formulas perfectly. But if you're not actually saying anything, it's just noise. The structure wasn't the problem. The emptiness was!! thanks @umairnadeem
@umairnadeem Exactly this. 'Consistent at saying nothing' — that was me for weeks. The moment I switched from 'here's what we built' to 'here's what happens if you ignore EU AI Act by August' — completely different response. Fear of a €35M fine is a point of view. A product update isn't.
@imed_radhouani Oh man, I feel this. I did the same thing for three months. Posted every day. Used all the right hashtags. Followed the formula. Crickets. then one day I posted a thread about a bug that took down our site for 4 hours and how we fixed it. Total mess. No structure. Just a story.
that thread got more engagement than all my "optimized" posts combined. Still trying to unlearn the "best practices" mindset!!
@joe_reda11 That's the part nobody tells you. The formula works until it doesn't. And the messy story works even when it shouldn't.
I've been trying to figure out why. Maybe it's trust. A polished post feels like marketing. A bug story feels like someone who actually runs something.
What was the bug? I'm curious now.
@imed_radhouani Oh the bug !! A cache issue that made our pricing page show 0 € for about 4 hours. Woke up to 37 support tickets and a very confused Stripe dashboard. Fixed it by 9am but spent the rest of the day explaining to customers that no, we weren't giving away enterprise plans for free.
That thread got way more attention than any of our "we just launched" posts. I think people just like knowing that everyone messes up sometimes.
@joe_reda11 Haha that's both painful and perfect. The 0 € pricing bug is every founder's nightmare but also the most relatable thing you could post. People love knowing that the polished facade has cracks. It makes the whole thing feel real.
Did anyone actually try to buy at 0€ or did they all send tickets first?
@imed_radhouani Oh they tried. We had 8 people complete checkout before we caught it. Had to manually cancel all of them and send a lot of awkward "so about that order..." emails. One guy was pretty upset. Kept asking why we couldn't just honor the $0 price since it was "our mistake." Had to explain that enterprise plans for free wasn't really a sustainable business model.
The support team still jokes about it. Every time we push a cache update someone asks "are we sure we want to do this?"
I've noticed people remember specifics way more than frameworks, even when the post is a bit messy. Do you think stories win because they feel more expensive to fake?
@miles_anthony2 Yeah, that's exactly it. Stories feel expensive to fake because they come with texture. A framework is clean. It could be copied, generated, lifted from anywhere. But a story about the time your pricing page showed 0 € for 4 hours and 8 people tried to buy? That's yours. You can't fake the embarrassment in that. You can't manufacture the support tickets.
Frameworks are safe. Stories are vulnerable. And vulnerability is the only thing that's actually hard to replicate.
"Don't niche down too much" was terrible advice for me because broad messaging usually just made the product easier to ignore. Did things improve once you got more specific?
@naomi_florence1 Night and day. When we said "AI visibility platform," nobody cared. Too broad. Sounded like another SEO tool. When we said "we help SaaS companies fix what ChatGPT says about their pricing," people started DMing me.
Narrowing down to one problem made everything else click. You can always expand later. You can't be heard if you're saying nothing to everyone.
Btw, the funny thing is that specific problem "the pricing thing" came from losing that deal I mentioned in the thread. Sometimes your best messaging comes from your worst moments.
Do you have example on the consistent post and the messy one so we could compare? :D
@driftya Honestly the first one was that classic "excited to announce bla bla.. " post. You know the one. Bullet points. Emojis. All the things you're supposed to do. I think I even used the rocket emoji.
It got maybe 12 likes. Mostly from my mom and people I used to work with.
The messy one happened by accident. I was frustrated about losing that deal and just typed it out at like 11pm. No structure. No call to action. Just "this happened and it sucked and that's why I'm building this thing."
I woke up to 40k views and thought something broke.
I don't know. I guess people can tell when you're actually pissed off about something vs when you're just trying to get attention.
Worst advice for me has to be "talk about your product more" when the real issue nobody cared yet. Do you think founders often explain too early before creating enough tension?
@jade_melissa1 Yeah, absolutely. The "talk about your product more" advice assumes people are waiting to hear about it. Most of the time they're not.
The tension thing is real. You need people to feel the problem before they care about your solution. If you lead with the product, they're not ready to listen. They haven't felt the pain yet. They don't know why this matters to them.
I think founders talk too early because it's easier. Explaining what you built is safe. Talking about the problem, the failure, the weird insight that keeps you up at night? That's vulnerable. It feels like you're not selling. But that's exactly when people start leaning in.
The post that worked for me wasn't about Rankfender. It was about losing a deal because ChatGPT had our SOC2 wrong. People felt that. They'd been there. Then they wanted to know what I was building. Not before.
What's the thing you were explaining too early?
@imed_radhouani For me, it was trying to explain differentiation too early. I was focused on why the product mattered before the pain and had really clicked for the person reading.
🙌 Have been there - worked with the great minds of ChatGPT and posted daily, on the mentioned time in the mentioned platofrms, following the best practices... only to find that impressions were good. Results... I will leave it to your great minds of imagination😂
The worst marketing advice I got was from a "C-level" non-marketing person based on his C-level experience : "Let's finish developing the full product first and then initiate marketing works." 😏
@indu_thangamuthu Oh man that one hurts. "Finish the product first then market it." By the time you're done, you've built something nobody asked for and have zero idea who actually wants it.
Btw the "impressions were good" part is the trap. You start feeling like you're doing something right because the numbers go up. But then nothing else moves. It's like running on a treadmill. You're moving but you're not going anywhere.
What did you end up doing instead of waiting?
@imed_radhouani Seeing that 3 -4 digit impressions always feel like Oscar-nomination moment.😂
And the mind starts writing speech already - " I'm damn good in this. I'm in the right path." 😏 (perks of marketing mind seeing 4 digits in impressions)
And in response to your question :
Well I believe in 1 principle : Always let people own their decisions and let it teach.👻 🤪
@indu_thangamuthu Haha the Oscar speech moment is real. I saw 40k views once and was already planning my keynote. Then the next post got 400 and the speech got deleted.
The "let people own their decisions" thing is hard. You want to help. You want to tell them what works. But you're right. People have to learn it themselves. Most advice just bounces off until you've felt the pain.
"just be consistent" is dangerous because it sounds so reasonable.
i posted daily across 5 platforms for 2 weeks. most of it: under 20 views. the one that resonated was raw GA numbers — no structure, just honest data about what was actually happening.
worst advice i personally got: "don't show anything until it's polished." cost me weeks of community building i could have been doing instead.
@nerdkick11 That second one hurts to read because I did the same thing. Spent months polishing before showing anything. By the time I launched, I'd missed so many early conversations with people who could have helped shape it.
The "don't show until it's polished" advice comes from a good place — don't ship broken stuff. But it gets interpreted as "hide until perfect." And perfect never comes.
Raw GA numbers with no structure working better than polished posts is the data point more people need to see. People trust mess when it's honest. They ignore polish when it's empty.
@imed_radhouani appreciate that, Imed. "people trust mess when it's honest"
— that's basically the thesis behind this whole launch.
just went live on product hunt today:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ideadose
you said you'd check it out — would love your take.
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ideadose @nerdkick11 checked and upvoted ;)
@imed_radhouani appreciate it Imed, means a lot 🙏
The worst thing I did was to ask AI what to do. I am a developer and the marketing is like a black-box with magic inside.
I am working on an elderly monitoring app, and the AI suggested to go in multiple caregivers groups in facebook, reddit, everywhere and start posting messages about the product. Even though my aim is not really the promotion, but to try to really help people, all the AI did was a big disaster. My messages were blocked, I was banned. Then it suggested to go on other, more developer related pages, but, again no results.
What really got me annoyed is that it suggested that I need to start helping caregivers with problems and to pretend that I am not doing a 'promotion', just to mention somewhere that there is a good product, like it is part of the honest conversation. Pure evil!
As it was written in an article I read: the AI amplifies. It amplifies the success, of people who know what are doing. It amplifies the failure of people who don't know what are doing ;)
@stoyan_minchev Oh man, that's brutal. The "pretend you're helping" suggestion is exactly the kind of thing that makes people hate AI marketing advice. It's not just bad advice. It's actively harmful. Gets you banned. Wastes your time. Makes you feel like a spammer when you're actually trying to build something that helps people.
The "AI amplifies" line is spot on. If you already know what you're doing, AI makes you faster. If you don't, it just helps you fail faster and harder. There's no shortcut for understanding where your people actually hang out and how to talk to them like a human.
The elderly monitoring app sounds like something that genuinely matters. Caregivers are exhausted and skeptical of anything that feels like a sales pitch. AI doesn't understand that. It just sees "caregivers + groups + post = traffic." It doesn't see the trust that takes months to earn.
What ended up working for you? Did you figure out a way to reach them that didn't feel like promotion?
@imed_radhouani As I wrote a did a lot of mistakes. I am still in early access state, waiting the application to pass closed testing and subsequent approval. Looks like I started with the campaign to make people aware of the existence of such application too early. I see that there is no magic trick and I need to go the whole path. I will start with a few post in places where there are more fellow developers, rather than caregivers. hoping at some of them might be interested, because they need it, or because there are intrigued by the 11 layers of securities that prevents the android-based OS to kill the application (Android based OS are aggressive, trying to save some battery). I hope that I will get a few people from Reddit (r/SideProject, for example). I hope I will get a few people from here as well. One by one. Each one I will try to find personally and ask for feedback. I truly believe that personal attention, if possible, is really important. People like to be listened and feel that somebody is interested on their opinion (like you do right now ;) ). Having a few feedbacks, and happy people, I will extend the target groups and start searching professional caregivers, or Lively, or some other in that area and try to do a B2B2C model. Of course, trying to be flexible all the time. :)
Something like that :)
@stoyan_minchev Yeah I did the same thing. Started posting way too early. Felt like shouting into a void. The one by one approach is the only thing that actually worked. Slow as hell but you learn what to say and who actually cares.
The 11 layers of security thing is your hook. That's the kind of detail devs stop scrolling for. Not "we help caregivers" but "here's why Android doesn't kill our app." Real problem. They've felt it.
Reddit side project is a good start. Just don't drop a link and run. Hang out in the comments. Answer stuff. Be useful. The post that works is the one where you're still there a week later helping someone else.
You've got the right mindset. Slow, personal, flexible. Keep going.
What's the most useful thing you've learned from the early convos?
Scade.pro
I think the fact that you posted every day, including this post, played a role here. On its own, it wouldn't have gotten 40,000 views.
@maria_anosova You're probably right. The daily posts created a baseline. People got used to seeing the name. Then when something real showed up, they didn't scroll past.
But the thing is, those daily posts were mostly forgettable. 30 likes. Friends commenting. Nothing moving. The consistent output didn't make the messy post work. It just meant there was someone there to see it when it finally landed.
It's like watering a plantt every day. Doesn't mean anything until one day it flowers. But you still have to water it...
Scade.pro
@imed_radhouani Life is often like that—you take small, routine steps every day, and at some point, they lead you somewhere (whether it’s 40,000 views or winning a race).
@maria_anosova Yeah exactly. You don't see the routine steps. You just see the spike and think it's magic. But the spike doesn't happen without the months of quiet posting that came before it.
The hardest part is keeping the routine when nothing is happening. When you're posting to 30 people and wondering if it matters. You just have to trust that something will eventually land.