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 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 ;)
Rankfender
@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 :)
Rankfender
@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.
Rankfender
@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).
Rankfender
@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.
I tried your advice and told my story of how the app was created. There were a lot of changes, written in human language without AI, and still very little. Creating the app was the easiest thing 😅
Rankfender
@mateusz_mlynarski Man I feel this. Creating the app is the easy part. Getting people to care about it is the hard part. You can build something solid, tell the story honestly, do everything right, and still end up talking to yourself.
The "written in human language without AI" thing is interesting. We think the problem is the tone. But sometimes it's just that nobody knows they need it yet. Or they don't trust you enough to try it. The trust thing takes time. No shortcut.
We're building RASE v1.0 right now, Rankfender App Store Engine. It's a whole engine that tracks how apps show up in AI answers and store search, do keywords research and Keywords intelligence... Would love for you to test it when it's ready. People who've built and shipped get what we're trying to do.
Hang in there. The app that sits quiet today might be the one people discover next month.
What's the app called? I'll go check it out.
@imed_radhouani Thanks man, really appreciate that, you nailed it.
It’s definitely more about trust and timing than just building something.
My app is called Travel Rules, it’s basically an AI travel assistant that helps you plan trips, check rules, and not forget important stuff while traveling.
Still early, but improving it every day.
RASE sounds interesting too, especially the AI visibility part, that’s exactly where things are going. Would love to test it when it’s ready.
Rankfender
@mateusz_mlynarski Travel Rules sounds like one of those things that feels obvious once someone builds it. The "not forget important stuff" part is the thing that gets everyone. You plan for weeks and still forget the visa or the adapter or whatever.
The trust and timing thing is real. You can build the right thing at the wrong time and it just sits there. Or you can build it too early and people aren't ready. Or too late and someone else already owns it. No formula for getting it right.
We're still early with RASE. Just getting the basics working. But I'd love for you to test it when it's ready. I'll let you know.
What's the biggest lesson you've learned from Travel Rules so far? Something you wish you knew before you started building it.
@imed_radhouani I’d start by promoting the app and generating interest in it right from the very beginning of its development. :)
The consistency framing gets this exactly backwards. Posting every day doesn't build trust — posting something worth reading does. The advice I'd push back on harder: "lead with your best feature." Most AI tools do this, and it's why they all sound the same. The product that sticks is the one that starts with the problem you recognize, not the capability you've built. Features are claims. The problem is the thing your audience already knows is true. Lead there first.
"Build first, market later" was the worst advice I followed.
By the time I started marketing, I had no audience, no feedback, and no distribution.
Now I am doing the opposite. Sell early, build in public and grow distribution every day.
One of the worst pieces of advice I was given wasn’t a tactic. It was a mindset.
It takes the form of “let’s do this big marketing push…” often coming from old-school C-level thinking used to spending large budgets without defining what to expect or how to measure. After that - no idea what we learned.
And then there’s the other part that often gets overlooked: the product.
The product is marketing. You can’t treat marketing as something separate and expect it to work in splendid isolation.
Worst advice I followed: "Email is dead, focus on social media instead."
Spent 6 months building Twitter presence. Engagement was great. Conversions? Near zero.
Then I tried something different. Sent a raw, story-driven email to 200 people. No fancy design, just a real story about a pricing bug that cost us $12K in 4 hours.
That email got 8 replies. 3 became customers. One became our biggest deal.
The "email is dead" advice ignored something critical: email is the only channel you actually own. Social platforms change algorithms. Your email list? That's yours.
But here's the thing - most founders send terrible emails. Corporate-speak. Feature lists. "Excited to announce..."
The emails that work? They read like a DM from a friend who actually gives a damn. Raw. Specific. Sometimes messy.
Anyone else find email works better when you stop trying to sound "professional"?
Worst advice I followed: 'build in public from day one.' I posted updates for weeks before anyone cared. Zero traction. What actually worked was one specific post about a real problem — EU AI Act deadline, €35M fines, and 90% of SMBs doing nothing. That got the first real responses. Turns out people don't share your journey, they share their own fear.