Marketing 102

You built the thing. You told your friends about it. Maybe you even posted on Product Hunt. But now the initial buzz has faded, and you're staring at a flatline graph wondering what comes next. Marketing 101 is about awareness: get the word out, make some noise. Marketing 102 is about what happens after that. It's the grittier, more tactical layer, the one that involves showing up in the right places, getting told "no" repeatedly, and learning how to turn that rejection into something useful. This post is a collection of practical marketing tactics I've gathered and tested. It's not a framework or a funnel diagram. It's a playbook for people who are building something and need to get it in front of real humans.

Outreach channels that actually work

The biggest mistake most founders make is trying to be everywhere at once. Instead, pick two or three channels where your audience already hangs out, and go deep. Here's a breakdown of channels worth considering: Reddit and niche communities. Subreddits like r/SideProject, r/SaaS, and industry-specific forums are goldmines for early traction. The key is to be genuinely helpful before you ever mention your product. Answer questions, share insights, and let people discover what you're building through your post history. Reddit users have an almost supernatural ability to detect self-promotion, so authenticity matters. Facebook Groups. These are underrated for B2C and local products. Find groups where your target customers are already asking questions. Engage consistently for a few weeks before you introduce what you're working on. Group admins will often let you share something if you've already been adding value. Twitter/X. Build in public. Share your progress, your wins, your failures. The "build in public" movement has proven that transparency is one of the most effective marketing strategies for indie makers. People root for founders they can follow along with. Instagram and short-form video. If your product has any visual component, short-form video on Instagram Reels, TikTok, or YouTube Shorts is one of the highest-reach organic channels available right now. Keep it raw and authentic. Over-polished content gets scrolled past. LinkedIn. Particularly effective for B2B products. Write posts that share genuine insights from your industry. LinkedIn's algorithm in 2026 still heavily favors text posts with personal stories and practical advice. Marketplaces. If your product or service can be listed on platforms like Carousell, Facebook Marketplace, Gumroad, or niche marketplaces for your industry, these provide built-in audiences with purchase intent. Direct outreach. Never underestimate the power of simply telling people you know. Friends, former colleagues, people you've met at events. Word of mouth remains one of the highest-converting channels for early-stage products. Ask existing users: "Who is one person you know who would really benefit from this?" That single question can unlock your next ten customers. Affiliate and referral programs. Once you have a product people love, give them a reason to spread the word. Even a simple commission structure (20-30% for one-time sales, 20-40% for recurring subscriptions) can turn your happiest users into your most effective salespeople. Tools like Rewardful or Referral Rock make it straightforward to set up even on a small budget.

Turning rejection into your best feedback loop

Every rejection is data. The problem is that most people treat it as a verdict. When someone says "no," your instinct might be to move on quickly. But the most valuable thing you can do in that moment is slow down and get curious. Here are four questions that consistently unlock useful information:

Once you have that information, you have options:

The key mindset shift is this: rejection isn't the end of a conversation. It's the beginning of a better one.

The art of comparison and anchoring

People don't evaluate prices in a vacuum. They compare. Use this to your advantage. Competitor comparison. If your product is cheaper or offers more value than a well-known competitor, make that comparison explicit. A simple "Competitor X charges $50/month for the same features we offer at $20/month" can be more persuasive than any feature list. Plan anchoring. If you have multiple pricing tiers, your highest tier isn't just for premium customers. It's there to make your mid-tier look like a great deal. This is a well-documented cognitive bias called anchoring, and it works because humans evaluate options relative to other options, not in absolute terms. Value framing. Instead of saying "our product costs $20/month," try "for $20 a month, you instantly get access to the full suite of tools to help you save 10 hours a week." Tie the price to the outcome, not the features.

Selling without feeling like you're selling

Most founders hate selling because they think of it as convincing someone to buy something they don't need. Reframe it. You're not selling. You're helping someone solve a problem. If your product genuinely helps, then not telling people about it is doing them a disservice. A few principles that make selling feel more natural:

Follow-ups are where deals actually happen

Most founders give up after the first "no" or the first ignored email. The data consistently shows that the majority of sales happen after the fifth touchpoint. Following up isn't pestering. It's persistence, and it signals that you actually care. When you follow up, make it useful:

Feedback from follow-ups is gold. Every piece of honest feedback is a free consulting session on how to improve your product, your positioning, or your pitch.

Idea creation and validation

Marketing doesn't start when you launch. It starts when you choose what to build. The best products market themselves because they solve problems people are actively searching for solutions to. Here are some practical ways to find and validate ideas: Look for problems hiding in plain sight. Ask yourself: What irritated me this morning? What's been sitting on my to-do list for over a week? What's something I regularly fail to do well? What did I want to buy recently, only to find out no one makes it? Cross-pollinate from other industries. Some of the best products come from taking a solution that works in one category and applying it to another. Uber took the dispatch model from logistics and applied it to taxis. Notion took the flexibility of spreadsheets and applied it to documents. Look for adjacent opportunities. Once you're in a market, pay attention to what your customers are asking for that's slightly outside your current offering. These adjacent problems are often easier to validate because you already have the audience. Validate before you build. Use tools like AnswerThePublic to see what questions people are actually asking about your topic. Check Google Trends to see if interest is growing or declining. Use Google Keyword Planner to estimate search volume and competition for your target keywords. If you can find 10 people you personally know who would pay for your solution, you likely have something worth building. Test with a landing page. Before writing a single line of code, create a simple landing page that describes your solution and includes a call to action (like a waitlist signup or a "buy now" button). Run a small amount of traffic to it through Google Ads or social posts. If people are clicking, you have validated demand. If they're not, you've saved yourself months of building the wrong thing.

The long game

Marketing 102 isn't about going viral or finding a silver bullet. It's about showing up consistently, learning from every interaction, and building systems that compound over time. The founders who win at marketing aren't the ones with the biggest budgets. They're the ones who treat every "no" as information, every channel as an experiment, and every customer conversation as an opportunity to get better. Start with one or two channels. Get good at them. Listen more than you pitch. And remember that the best marketing doesn't feel like marketing at all, it feels like someone genuinely trying to help.

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