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 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.
Lenz
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.