Ask HN: How do you do marketing in the age of slop?

[probst]

Hi dear hackernewsfolks, vocal contributors and lurkers alike.

We (that is to say my business partner and I) are building SaaS products, but we are really struggling to find enough users. This is an age old problem, but I find it has gotten particular bad after LLMs made it trivially to make apps and services. Whether these products end up good or bad is mostly irrelevant, the end effect is the same: the market just seems so heavily saturated with new products, that it's incredibly hard to break through the constant drone of people vying for attention (the irony of me finding a way to do the same isn't lost on me).

Even briefly mentioning what we are building in a comment on a "what are you working on" thread yesterday, had my inbox filled with AI outreach from questionable SEO, "How to optimize your product", "let me create a garbage video for you" style e-mails.

My conclusion so far are:

  - e-mail outreach (and particularly cold outreach) really doesn't work, and I never found it quite ethical to start with
  - communities like LinkedIn are also heavily dominated by AI slop and people at corporates who are bored and looking to build an audience (maybe an unfair characterisation and maybe more a view into my feed than the state of the platform as a whole?)
  - indiehackers etc I have never gotten to work, but that might be a skills issue
  - "being present in forums etc where our users are" seems the best bet so far, but very hit and miss
  - we have had some very minor success with influencer marketing
  - paid search ads etc have resulted in lots of clicks but absolutely abhorrent conversions in our case, whereas conversions for the more organic channels like forums etc are excellent (maybe a targeting issue...)

In short: I'd love to learn how you do this and how you think of the role of marketing and how you approach getting customers, particularly now that the very same customers likely have inboxes filled by AI generated outreach.

Lots of love from Berlin

[35mm]

You already know what works: organic forum engagement gives you excellent conversions.

The problem is the hit-or-miss part. That's the actual constraint to solve.

Pick the two or three forums where your ideal customers actively ask questions about the problem your product solves, not where founders hang out.

Spend 20 minutes a day answering those questions thoroughly before mentioning what you build.

This builds trust and relevance. The conversion quality difference you see between paid ads and forums tells you where to focus.

I've also found that forums (in my case private FB groups) are the best source of leads, so I built an app (GTM Intel) to check them frequently and give me a daily list of leads to respond to.

P.S This is very meta / ouroboros but your post is actually one of the ones it found for me today!

[probst]

Heh, nice app! I'll check it out!

[seox0]

"This matches what I'm seeing too. Classic ranking and AI-answer visibility are becoming two totally different games, and most tools only measure the first."

[Festro]

"paid search ads etc have resulted in lots of clicks but absolutely abhorrent conversions in our case, whereas conversions for the more organic channels like forums etc are excellent (maybe a targeting issue...)"

Absolutely a targeting issue. Paid search should be able to produce traffic that converts at roughly the same rate as your non-brand organic traffic (at this stage most of your organic traffic).

How much it costs per click for that quality of traffic depends on your industry, and whether that's profitable depends on your margins. But that's the baseline. After all paid search traffic is the same as organic search in essence, it just depends where the searcher ends up clicking. For you, before you rank highly for core terms, paid search can drive volume you want.

This isn't any advice for the AI slop you're seeking but your line about targeting issues stood out to me as something definitely worth looking at. I don't know how to specifically guide you remotely but if I had to guess I'd advice you to look at your keyword targeting, swapping things away from broad match to exact match, cover more keywords if you can (since exact is narrower than broad) and add negative keywords liberally. Check your search term report for anything irrelevant and apply them as negatives.

If you're not using keywords because Google (or whoever) have pushed you to some 'smart' campaign, then switch to keyword targeting. The smart campaigns are fine but require finesse to handle their blunter settings options.

If in doubt, use AI to figure out keywords to prioritise and negatives to set by default. Or speak to a paid media consultant and get an account review from them, sometimes they'll do this for free.

[probst]

Thank you for your thorough reply! I think we should give it another go and be more restrictive in targeting!

Speaking of paid ads: we tried google, bing, LinkedIn in the past. Do you have a preferred place that you recommend that you have seen better performance at than other places?

[Festro]

Google Ads at first for sure. Their search monopoly just means it's the best place for ads on a limited budget.

Moving to Bing is worthwhile once you've started to see efficiency drop off on Google.

LinkedIn is very expensive and really only worth it for highly targeted ads. Bing and LinkedIn have a slight advantage because Microsoft has all the job title/industry data from LinkedIn for its targeting options, but it charges more for use of that targeting essentially.

That means those ads pay off more for Account Based Marketing where you have a salesperson reaching out to high-ranking decision makers and you want your ads to be hitting them in a small audience campaign to back up the cold outreach approach and warm them up before the rep secures a call. So, B2B marketing for big contract based work mainly.

[probst]

Awesome, thank you!

[nifski]

Hey,

You’re right about it being a bit more difficult to market in an age of constant AI slop.

Personally I have two products that I have created that actually solve a problem, whether or not the product is good or bad doesn’t even matter because getting users is the key.

I would advise you start with friends and family first, just to get some valuable feedback.

Influencer ads and TikTok promotion also is promising — atleast compared to cold outreach or LinkedIn

Hunting for discords or telegram channels or finding where your core audience hang out (not necessarily in real life even though that is useful info) so that you can reach these people and showcase the product.

Ps. I wouldn’t pitch the product like a sale or like you need users. I would pitch it by asking if they could help take a look as I am researching. If you lead with research you will get users

[probst]

Ah, the research angle is good! And my take-away from what you write is mostly the need to be visible, in whatever form, be it in the users communities, or otherwise?

We have excellent feedback from the users who do find us, so there is product market fit for the subset of customers that have a need for our product strong enough to actively search for it, but maybe that's an issue in and of itself: the fraction might be too small, and furthermore, for the (hopefully) larger segment of the user base that don't have a need strong enough to actively go looking, we need to be sufficiently visible for them to chance upon us...? which I guess drives home the message even more that visibility is key...

Thanks!

[fjab]

These are good hints that have worked for us as well.

> whether or not the product is good or bad doesn’t even matter because getting users is the key

I feel this is true more now than it has ever been! Ideas used to be cheap, execution the bottleneck. Now execution (of product development) has sped up so much that distribution is the bottleneck.

[3dsnano]

agree with the premise here (distribution is hard; get users or die) BUT there's no better marketing than a GOOD product that brings people real VALUE

get a 1000 users to your site → 1% conversion → 10 users. if those 10 users have a shitty experience because the product SUCKS, then all of that effort getting them there was wasted.

the alternative is making a GOOD product that people actually WANT to use and can get EXCITED about. you keep it SMALL and work with a limited subset of people who are interested in what you have and are willing to try it in exchange for the PROMISE that it will bring them VALUE. if (and only if) you can truly deliver value for this small group, their excitement and optimism WILL radiate outward. from there, it's about surfing these small waves, paying close attention, and very carefully choosing bigger and bigger waves to surf.

as softwarians we MUST make GOOD products that people WANT to use!!!!! throwing away money on advertisements until you have anything GOOD is a waste of time and effort.

[probst]

I'm all for word of mouth and things radiating out, but doesn't that need some viral factor of sorts that makes the product one that's shareable? We have customers raving about our product actually, and saying they would be incredibly sad should it go away, but are struggling to leverage that into further sales...

Affiliate marketing _does_ work to an extent, and is a kind of rideable wave I suppose?

Do you have concrete examples?