🎯 What are modern marketing approaches that work?
by•
Making a product is one big challenge. But shifting your mindset from building to marketing it might be an even bigger one.
As makers, we spend so much time improving the product. Then comes the question: How do we get people to discover it - and ultimately turn that attention into real customers and sales?
I'm not sure traditional approaches like email marketing and constantly posting on social media are enough anymore. The way people discover products is changing.
So I'm curious:
How do you approach marketing your product?
And for the marketers here:
What would you consider a modern marketing approach in 2026-2027? What would you advise an early-stage founder to focus on?
I'd love to hear different perspectives...
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For me the shift is from smm calendar to small repeatable experiments.
One idea → 3–5 formats → different channels → see what actually gets a reaction... then double down.
I also think distribution has to start before launch now. Commenting, talking to other founders, sharing what you’re building, otherwise you launch into silence
@ira_motorina I like your approach of running tests to see what works better. I personally think that different experiments can sometimes bring surprisingly useful results.
some core principles of marketing will never change: never offer your product to someone who is not interested, dont shout out your product on every spot, know peoples needs and demands etc. At first I was a bit naive to think: the best product just dominates and a good product does well- but that was killed by ultra SEO/GEO/modern marketing maxing which got driven by the rise in number of founders. Of course that is a logical market movement. But I think there is a way to shift it to "who satisfies demand" again rather than "who has most investment capability" and/or knowledge, tools etc. play the game: Just note down every tool or way you see which people use to boost their products (visibility). learn about strategies/ways, which nowadays is just chatting and thinking with claude,gemini or chatgpt tbh. Now I am in no point of telling you what works, because I just started too. My only credential is that I study this shit called economy. I think no-one is in position to tell anyone how it works. But I think I got a good analysis on the current market of founders/vibe-coders. one plan could be: analyse every tool/way there is and recreate/rethink it. is there someone offering you a affiliate program? that is not outside your capabilities as long as you can use AI. is there someone maxing SEO? you can too. Once you notice that 99 percent of modern founders dont really have a unique idea or way/system than it all really shifts to thinking yourself fr. try to outplay the game: offer an actually well thought and good product. apply everything you learned on the product. stand out by doing random stuff that most people do not do. the options for this differ on every product. it depends on the possibilities which are unique to your product. there is no one-line answer to your question and it is not easy, personally I try to apply some good old theory. but one can only try to figure it out in my respective opinion. No-one has it figured out and no-one will, thats just what someone wants you to believe to get to your money or to some sort of a (social) standing. everyone just hides behind big words and slangs, but thats just mostly compensating with a failure of understanding (mostly). that never changes, this fact ignores all changes that occur on any time. it is all growth and experience. I would say: dont chase, play. good question, stay real. (I genuinely cannot answer your question, and I dont think there is an answer. that would imply that there exists one and that was never the case)
@mein_buero Wow! Thanks for this kind of comment - it really gave me a lot to think about again!
I can’t disagree with any of the points you mentioned.
I’m a big fan of experiments, and in my opinion, marketing is largely about experimenting with modern tools and finding what actually works =)
I saw your product - congrats on the launch! Does it work with German structures only?
If you had unlimited money and time, the answer would be all of it. Everyone knows that. But you are an early founder, so you have neither, and the real question is not which channel works. It is which channel AI can accelerate for you right now.
That test settles it quickly. Short video and live selling are where the attention is, and AI is close but not there: you still have to be in front of the camera, still have to edit, still have to show up again tomorrow. Written work crossed that line. With AI I can research, draft, and publish at a volume I could never reach alone, and the machine does not need me on camera at 9pm.
So I stopped doing video marketing entirely and went to writing only. On one of my own services, search clicks went from about 2,000 to about 16,500 in a four week window over three months, roughly eight times.
One honest caveat, because the number alone would mislead you. Signups over the same period only doubled. Traffic multiplied faster than customers did, which means the extra readers arrived with weaker intent. Volume is the part AI gives you cheaply. Deciding what is worth writing is still yours, and that is now where the whole game is.
My advice for 2026 and 2027: pick the channel where AI removes your bottleneck rather than the one that is fashionable, then spend the time you saved on choosing the topics, not on producing more.
@hisashispace Thanks a lot for sharing such valuable and detailed experience!
I completely agree with what you said about video versus written content, especially the difference between traffic and actual users. And of course, I'm taking your advice for 2026 - 2027! =)
What are you building? Do you handle your own marketing, or have a dedicated marketing specialist?
@adana Thank you for reading it properly, and for asking.
Since 2004 I have run something like Upwork for the Japanese market. Video platforms did not exist back then, so there was no choice: I did SEO, relentlessly, for years. That is the reason the business is still alive 22 years later, and it is why I answered your question the way I did.
More recently I have taken on a new challenge and started shipping Mac apps and several new SaaS products. The Mac side is SpaceDeck, a browser that gives every web app its own space so two accounts of the same service stay signed in side by side, along with Kagemusha, Caltimate and Koffret. The web side is Rizaflow, Pinateca, Halict and Tsudoo.
On your second question: all of it myself, and the reason is older than the business. When I was young I was the one who was good with computers, which made me useful. Friends and people senior to me kept turning up with a business they wanted me to build for them. After enough of that I stopped wanting partners at all. I also just like working at my own pace.
Underneath that was a belief: that one person could build something big without a team and without funding. For most of those 22 years that was a bet I was quietly losing and surviving anyway. AI is the first thing that has made it actually true. I am still one person, but with AI staff my output is something like a hundred times what it was. I do not mean that as a figure of speech.
@hisashispace I'm really impressed by your background and the products you've founded.
Yes, I think this is the best era for one-man bands nowadays! シ
Wishing you lots of success! And I'm curious, are you planning to launch your products here on PH?
@adana Yes, at some point I'd like to show what I've built.
But plenty of people here already have a product and are thinking exactly the same thing, and if everyone only promotes their own, the place gets worse for everybody. I run a platform myself, so I know how that goes.
I've only been here a few days. For now I'd rather read threads like yours and get to know a few people properly. Your question about what broke while building is the one I've enjoyed most so far.
Good talking with you.
We use a combination of social media and in-person marketing, especially in universities and sponsoring hackathons.
@abhinav_mahata Is your product related to education? I’m especially interested in the part about introducing it in universities. How does that work?
@adana Not at all actually. Our first employee is a student at one of the largest state universities in the country that has a large entrepreneurship program. Many students already have their own small businesses, so that is an easier audience to market to since they're young and want to bootstrap their businesses.
@abhinav_mahata that's really interesting! Thanks for the answer
I think something important is to really niche down to an absurdly specific icp
@jake_moshel Finding the icp is definitely a path that needs to be walked =)
I've been doing web and SEO since 2002, and the one thing that has held up through every change is this: answer the exact question someone types, in the language they type it in. For us in Kuwait that means writing in Arabic properly, not translating. Arabic search in the Gulf is far less crowded than English, so a useful page there gets found much faster. Search is still the channel that keeps paying after you stop pushing.
@almoosawi Yes, search is still very relevant, especially the point about using the language people actually search in.
Do you also integrate any modern tools or AI into your workflow?
@adana Yes, a lot. I use Claude every day as a working partner: it writes and checks the code, drafts the blog posts in English and Arabic, and handles the routine work like submitting new pages to Google and Bing. ChatGPT makes the photos for the posts. And I run my own day through UTTER IN, so every idea for the next post goes in by voice the moment I have it.
The tools changed how fast things move, but the judgement is still mine. I approve every post and every change before it goes live.
@almoosawi That's great! Wish you lots of success =)
For an early product I would pick one audience and show one complete task from start to finish
Then track who actually tries it and comes back
That would tell me more than spreading the same launch post across ten channels
@al_kub Agree! That’s a smart way to understand your market.
We make a catalog of small browser extensions (addonschrome.com), so our marketing problem is "many tiny products, one small team". What we lean on: one landing page per extension that answers a single search question, a 30-second demo video for each, and listing every tool on free stores and directories instead of betting on one launch day. Paid ads rarely make sense for a free tool, so discovery has to come from search and from people who already have the problem. Showing up in threads like this one is part of it too.
@yasin_muratogullari How do you usually find people who have the problem you're trying to solve?
For an early-stage founder I'd add one unglamorous channel: Search Console as a to-do list. Filter for pages ranking 4–20 that already get impressions. Google already thinks they're relevant, and a page moving from position 9 to the top 5 usually gets several times more clicks without any new content. Better titles, merging pages that compete for the same query, and a few internal links do most of the work. We're doing exactly this on our own site right now.
And if you build links, count indexed ones, not published ones. Across 34,382 link placements we tracked, only about a third of the linking pages ever got indexed by Google. The rest look fine and pass nothing.
@ksanyokm Got it!
Thanks for sharing your experience!
@adana Thanks! If you try that Search Console filter on RunEvr's own pages, I'd be curious which ones show up in the 4–20 range. It's often not the pages founders expect.
Great thread, Adana! One angle I don't see mentioned much: listening before publishing.
Most founders treat comments, DMs and support emails as something to "handle." But they're the best marketing research you'll ever get — for free.
What's worked for me:
🔁 If the same question shows up 3+ times → it becomes a post or video
💬 Use the customer's exact words in your copy, not your own jargon
🧩 Connect feedback across channels — a YouTube comment, an email and a sales call often describe the same pain
It also fits what @Aruna Sahoo said about documenting the process: sharing "a user told us X, so we changed Y" is content nobody else can copy.
The hard part is remembering all of it over months — that's actually the problem I'm building Memoraxis around. 🧠
Curious — does anyone here have a system for turning audience feedback into content, or is it mostly gut feel?