[muzani]

"Grill yourself hard on everything you do"

A lot of the techniques that trend go out of fashion really fast too. Waitlists and Product Hunt are actually signals of bad products today.

A lot of these products spent more time in marketing than dev. Some of the AI stuff out there is literally a paragraph put into a wrapper app that calls a single API and doesn't even handle fallbacks.

Most of these advertise the same way, write the same landing pages. A consumer spots it pretty quickly as a scam. Many are not scams, but because they replicate the style of scams, they get unconsciously flagged as one.

Social media promotions are on average, negative, as in you'd get more users by just sitting around and thinking on how to get users, then some idea just clicks.

One of my startups got a ton of traffic just asking blogs if we could use their content, and they were so proud of it that they linked to the site. Then with all these blogs linking to us, it ranked top on Google for the keywords we wanted. It wasn't taught in a book and it's not replicable elsewhere (VCs hated it) but most of these marketing techniques are obvious if you don't crowd your brain with social media posts.