Where can I self-promote?
Not all forums are open to self-promotion. I built a workaround for this.
We all know how exciting building a product is. Less exciting is convincing other people that our product is the right solution for their use-case.
After coding up the best version of our product, the marketing starts (even if we should have started earlier). Indiehackers, Product Hunt, and Hacker News is the bare minimum we can do to let the world know our baby is ready, and that we want people to try it out. However, what we really want is finding real users that find our product useful. And this is when (of course we should have done it before building our product) we look for forums were we could reply with our fantastic product link and save the day. First thing that comes to mind: let’s check out Reddit! At this point, you think that you are providing at least some value to at least someone. This is what you get:
It makes sense that self-promotion is frowned upon on Reddit.
These are some points from Reddit guidelines:
- You should not just start submitting your links — it will be unwelcome and may be removed as spam, or your account will be banned as spam.
- You should submit from a variety of sources (a general rule of thumb is that 10% or less of your posting and conversation should link to your own content), talk to people in the comments (and not just on your own links), and generally be a good member of the community.
Obsessively replying to Reddit posts with links to your own products is not the best way to keep a conversation going. Reddit is indeed built around a community discussing a topic. You have to be actively involved in many discussions before daring speaking about your products. Have a look at these great blog posts with some advice if you want to do that: https://syften.com/blog/post/reddit/ https://syften.com/blog/post/getting-banned/
Nonetheless, there are cases when your product is a genuine solution for someone’s problem. We understand that good conversations should not be spoiled. There should exist a dedicated platform to post your products that answer questions from conversations online.
A platform to link products to online discussions
I recently tried to do some marketing for my SaaS. I couldn’t help but reply to online forums when my product was a possible solution for a problem. I tried many times to slap my hands, my posts would be flagged as self-promotional.
Therefore, I created a platform where linking your product to online discussions is allowed. In this way, we will not spoil the original discussion. And we will have a dedicated platform where we can post when our product is a genuine solution for a problem.
It works by following up from other online discussions
When we reply with our product link on an online discussion, of course we want the OP (Original Poster) to find our product useful and use it. Nonetheless, what we are ultimately aiming is that people searching for the same problem online will end up finding our link as possible solution.
Hackergrows works as follows
Once you find a forum (or any other place on the Internet) where you would like to mention your product:
- Copy its URL
- Copy the URL of your product landing page
- (Eventually add an explanation why your product is the best fit for the link at point 1.)
- Submit
Your product will be shown on Hackergrows frontpage following the original discussion link you added. Titles will be fetched automatically from the posted URLs.
Search engines will do their magic and will link your product to the original post. This could help to increase your product discoverability.
Test it out. It’s free: https://hackergrows.com and it is opensource on Github.
