Questions founders asked about marketing
Asked in public, on Hacker News and elsewhere, by people doing marketing without a marketing team. Each one is answered first, then with what the thread said and what we would do. The numbers behind the answers are in the AI marketing statistics.
- How do you handle marketing as a solo technical founder?
Pick one channel where your buyers already talk, and do the unscalable things there by hand: answer their questions, write to people one at a time, and ship a page for each question you keep getting. Use AI to draft and to keep a list of what is next, not to decide or to post.
- How do you do marketing in the age of slop?
Do the things slop cannot fake: show up in the few places your buyers ask questions and answer them properly, write fewer and more specific pieces, and prove claims with something checkable. Cold outreach at volume is the part that stopped working; one-to-one, personal messages still get read.
- Do you use AI for cold email copy?
Use it for research and a first draft, not for the send. Recipients spot AI-written cold email quickly, and the tools all converge on the same phrasing. Write the first line yourself from something the person actually did, keep it short, and send a few a day by hand.
- Are LLMs useful for solo founders?
For marketing, yes for the work and no for the judgment. They draft, research and keep a plan moving; they do not build the reputation or relationships that reach comes from, and fully automated outreach stops working once everyone runs it. Keep a person on what goes out and to whom.
- What should I know before rolling out our first AI SDR?
That it is not set-and-forget. Read every message it writes for the first month, keep a human approving anything that leaves, and expect to spend real time managing it. Agents left alone have invented figures, made promises nobody approved and emailed people about events that had already happened.
- Founders, what was the major sourcing channel for your first 100 users?
Rarely one channel for all hundred. The first ten or twenty come from people you can name: your network, a list you already have, messages written one at a time. The rest come from the one place your buyers already gather, a subreddit, a forum or a newsletter, where you answer questions for weeks before mentioning the product.