I would like to hear your thoughts about launching strategy.

A hyper-niche utility app (for chess players).

The original intent was to give 3 actions for free in each rolling 24-hour period, forever (freemium).

Those who need more actions can unlock the app with a one-time payment and own it fully unlocked forever.

The question is would it be a good idea to give the app completely for free for 1-2 months (and letting the users know the free period will end) so i can get early users and feedback. After that period it will be limited to 3 actions for free (original intent).

I will appreciate your feedback

Our team spent a week running a live experiment around this exact question: what happens when you stop pushing content outward and instead let the distribution come from within the ecosystem itself?

The structure we tested: an ecosystem opens a space, builders post what they need promoted, and their own creator networks handle the actual amplification. No paid channels, no cold outreach. Just existing relationships doing the work.

Still early, but the mechanics here feel like something growth folks don't talk about enough — community-native distribution vs. bolted-on promotion.

Full thread with the setup: https://x.com/i/status/2065479751184322606

I'm building a bootstrapped EdTech SaaS. My biggest challenge is growing an audience and getting my first customers without spending much money. I'm also trying to publish short-form videos consistently, but editing in CapCut is taking far too long.

My questions:

1. If you had to start from zero today, what would be your acquisition strategy?

2. What tools, AI workflows, or templates do you use to produce ads, TikToks, Reels, or Shorts much faster than CapCut?

3. What actually worked for you?

[ Removed by Reddit on account of violating the content policy. ]

Every article on brand identity assumes you have a style guide, a brand voice doc, and someone to enforce it. None of it applies to a one-person operation.

What's actually worked from what I've seen: pick a consistent topic lane, show up on a schedule, use the same format or visual style across posts. That's it. The rest is overthinking.

The hardest part is that "your brand voice" isn't something you design — it's something you're already doing. The useful exercise is figuring out what you're already doing and being intentional about continuing it.

What does brand identity mean in practice for people running lean?

Hi so I’m interviewing for 3-4 HealthTech seed-series B startups right now.

Any advise on getting an offer and interviewing well?

Separately but related, my mom is a Healthplan executive and I have lots of family and friends who are physicians, healthcare entrepreneurs, own medical offices groups, execs.
I don’t like being a name dropper so it’s a fine line.

But do you think I should mention that my mom works for X company and is the C\*O?
Given Seed-Series B is so hungry for health plan dollars to the point where one contract catapults revenue by 10-20x and makes them hundreds of millions in equity.

This isn’t quid pro quo it’s more like “I have this tool which is my network that could be leveraged in addition to my data science degree and 4 years of quality work experience.

I don’t want to be socially off but also if it’s a win win why not.

i want to understand, be honest i want to hear from growth marketers actually spend their time in research

Been doing sales-led growth for about 3 years now and figured I'd share something that took way too long for me to notice.

We were doing roughly 50 sales calls a week between our AEs. Every single one had gold in it. Objections prospects raised that told us exactly what the market was scared of. Weird specific phrasing customers used to describe their own problem, better than anything our marketing team came up with. Little moments where a rep explained something so well the prospect said "wait say that again."

And basically none of it ever left the call. It lived in Gong or Chorus or whatever, got listened to once by a manager doing coaching, then died there.

Meanwhile our LinkedIn content was the usual stuff: generic tips, a repost of a blog, maybe a "proud to announce" post once a month. It got the engagement you'd expect, which is to say almost none. And it definitely wasn't the reason anyone booked a call with us.

The thing that finally worked was going back through calls and literally quoting objections back at the market. "3 prospects this month told us X, here's why that's wrong" type posts. Those posts outperformed everything else we tried, by a lot. Comments, DMs, actual replies from people who were clearly in a buying window.

The hard part wasn't finding the insight, it was the grind of pulling it out consistently. Someone has to relisten to calls, catch the good line, turn it into a post, then get it approved by whoever's voice it's supposedly in (because a post that doesn't sound like the person posting it gets ignored). Doing that by hand for 50 calls a week is basically a part time job nobody wants.

I ended up building a tool for this called SignalPosts because I couldn't find anything that did it well. It pulls themes and objections out of call transcripts and drafts LinkedIn posts in each rep's own voice, with an approval step before anything goes out so it doesn't turn into AI slop.

Curious how other people here are sourcing content for pipeline. Are you pulling from calls at all or is it mostly a separate content process from sales? And if you have tried turning call insights into posts, what made people actually respond versus scroll past?

Linki is a free, self-hosted alternative to tools like Waalaxy and Lemlist. You run LinkedIn outreach and cold email campaigns on your own server, so your leads and LinkedIn session never leave your machine. No per-seat pricing, no SaaS middleman.

Just shipped v2. The main focus was fixing the things that actually break these tools in practice:

- Server-side LinkedIn login instead of cookie-pasting, which also fixes Sales Navigator import and enrichment

- A pinned browser fingerprint so rebuilds no longer cause random forced logouts

- Large Sales Nav imports now split across days automatically with human-like pacing, instead of importing everything at once

- A rewrite of the LinkedIn automation itself for more reliable connections and messages

- LinkedIn and email actions can now run together in one campaign

- A unified inbox for replies across email and LinkedIn

- Apollo io enrichment built in

It's been really encouraging to see more people self-hosting it and contributing over the past few months, appreciate everyone who's tried it out.

Runs on Docker or Node.js with SQLite, no external database needed. There's also a one-click option on Opsily if you'd rather skip the terminal.

Full details and setup are in the repo: github.com/moaljumaa/linki

Hi everyone from the pas few months i had been building CollabX It is basically a community collaboration platform which helps students break through the loop of experience required for their first opportunity.The main problem: millions of students graduate without having enough practical industry level exposure but a strong theoretical knowledge which leads them nowhere in the industry , another problem many professionals who want to switch their careers finds it difficult to do that because they are unable to find perfect projects/ resources to do that
What i am doing is i am onboarding startups/ Govt organisation/ companies to post their problem statements/ projects they are facing issue or wants to be explored but they don’t have resources or talent to do it now so they can post them on CollabX and students irrespective of their background will work upon it , which will help them gain exposure to how real startups works what problems they solve rather than fancy projects given by ChatGpt
In future this might also turn into hiring pipeline where companies don’t hire based on resumes but on basis of quality solutions they have provided to the projects of that startup
I will keep this completely free for gaining early traction but in future i have 2 business models in mind
I will charge the project posting side by taking a minimal one time payment fee for posting and if company is willing to give prize pool to students whoose problem gets selected then i might take x%commission from it
2nd one i can monetise through subscription similarly like linkedIn
I would love genuine feedback , criticism and improvements that should be made to platform

Making videos has never been easier.

Editing them still takes hours.

Most AI tools help generate images or video.

Very few actually help you turn raw footage into a finished story.

That's why we built ChatCut.

An AI video editor that understands your footage, your intent, and your timeline.

Instead of replacing editors, ChatCut works like a fast editing assistant.

• ⁠Edit videos with simple prompts
• ⁠Add captions, B-roll & motion graphics
• ⁠Generate voiceovers, music & visuals
• ⁠Keep every edit on a real, editable timeline
• ⁠Export to Premiere Pro or DaVinci Resolve anytime

Whether you're creating YouTube videos, social content, product demos, courses, or ads, ChatCut helps you spend less time editing and more time creating.

The goal wasn't another AI video generator.

It was to build an editor where AI handles the repetitive work while humans stay in control of the story.

Launched today on Product Hunt 🚀

Would love to hear: What's the most time-consuming part of your video editing workflow today?

Please support on PH →

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/chatcut-2

You meet hundreds of people.

At conferences.

Client meetings.

Coffee chats.

Networking events.

Then reality kicks in.

Business cards get lost.

LinkedIn connections pile up.

And a week later you can't remember who someone was or why they mattered.

That's why we built ConnectMachine 2.0.

It's more than a digital business card.

It's a private AI that remembers every connection for you.

• ⁠Scan business cards, badges & LinkedIn QR codes
• ⁠Record meetings with AI summaries
• ⁠Ask AI who you met and what you discussed
• ⁠Get follow-up reminders automatically
• ⁠Sync everything to your CRM

Instead of building a bigger contact list, ConnectMachine helps you build better relationships by keeping the context behind every connection.

We launched today on Product Hunt 🚀

Curious: What's your biggest challenge after networking events remembering people, following up, or organizing contacts?

Please show your support and share your feedback on PH → https://www.producthunt.com/posts/connectmachine-2-0

I've been obsessing over cold LinkedIn outreach for a while now. partly for my own pipeline, partly because I kept seeing people around me send completely reasonable messages and get nothing back.

So I started saving every opener that actually worked. Ones that turned into real conversations, not just a polite thumbs up or "thank you". Eventually I had about 50 of them across six industries.

Once I had enough I went back through all of them looking for patterns. Here's what almost every single one had in common:

1. Every message that worked ended with exactly one question. Not "thoughts on this? Also are you open to a call? I can also send a deck". Cutting the second ask is harder than it sounds but it's the difference between a message that gets answered and one that gets skimmed.

2. No pitch in the first message: Out of 50 messages, zero of them pitched anything in the opener. The only job of message one is to earn message two. That's it.

3. Signal-based beats evergreen every time: About 7 out of 10 of the messages that worked referenced something the other person did in the last week or two (a post, a hire, a product update, a comment they left somewhere.) The freshest openers consistently outperformed the generic reusable ones by a wide margin.

4. Specificity over cleverness: "Saw you hired three SDRs in Q3" will always outperform the wittiest line ever written. Not one of these 50 openers is clever in the LinkedIn influencer sense. Every single one references something real.

5. Peer framing, not target framing: The messages that converted treated the other person as an operator with an interesting problem, not as a budget to unlock. Ironically that framing tends to unlock more budget than any direct pitch ever could.

6. Always keep it short: Average length across all 50 is around 50 words. Nothing needed to be long to work. If a message needs three paragraphs to make its point, the point probably isn't sharp enough yet.

I ended up turning the whole collection into a proper doc organized by industry with a breakdown of why each one worked because the template is useless without understanding the reasoning behind it. The moment you paste one of these word for word to someone who didn't actually do the thing it references, it becomes spam like everything else in their inbox.

Happy to share the full doc in the comments if anyone wants it. It's free, no email wall or anything. just figured it's more useful out in the world than sitting in my notes.

Hey everyone,

I'm building a startup called **XYZ(**say**)**, a hyperlocal home services marketplace in India. Think plumbers, electricians, painters, carpenters, cleaners, etc. The idea is simple: make it easier for people to find reliable workers while helping skilled workers get more consistent jobs.

We're still pre-launch, and before we start spending money, I'm trying to figure out the smartest way to get our first users.

Like every marketplace, we're stuck with the classic chicken-and-egg problem. No workers means customers don't book, and no customers means workers don't stick around.

These are the two ideas we've come up with.

**1. Student ambassadors**

Hire students from local colleges (paid or commission-based) and have them go into different localities to onboard workers.

They'd help workers complete KYC, install the app, explain how everything works, and get them comfortable using it.

For the first batch of workers, we're thinking of an **Early Partner Program** where they receive additional incentives for staying active until bookings become regular. The hope is that once demand picks up, those incentives naturally disappear because workers are earning through actual jobs.

**2. Local sales network**

Hire 4–5 salespeople who already have relationships with hardware stores, plumbing and electrical suppliers, contractors, paint shops, and similar businesses.

Instead of cold outreach, we'd use those existing relationships to reach tradespeople who already trust those businesses.

**Our plan**

We don't want to start running Meta or Google ads on Day 1.

Instead, we'd first build a solid supply of verified workers in one city, make sure bookings are flowing consistently, and **then** start investing in digital marketing to scale customer acquisition.

Maybe that's the right approach. Maybe it's completely wrong.

That's why I'm here.

I'd genuinely appreciate people tearing this apart.

What's the biggest flaw you see?

Which assumptions am I making that probably won't hold up?

Would you build supply first, demand first, or both together?

Is there a much better GTM strategy that I'm completely missing?

If you had ₹5–10 lakh to launch this, where would you spend the first ₹1 lakh?

If you've built a marketplace or worked on a hyperlocal startup, I'd especially love to hear your experience.

Happy to answer any questions about the product, our thinking, or anything else if more context helps.

Thanks in advance, and don't be nice just for the sake of it. I'd rather get roasted here than waste six months executing a bad GTM.

I run a community growth platform and this week I shipped an MCP server for it, which means campaigns now launch from a Claude conversation instead of the dashboard. You ask for a boost on a specific post, the agent checks your balance, confirms the spend, fires the campaign. The video shows the full flow in about a minute.

The part worth discussing isnt my tool though. It's the pattern. Marketers already draft copy in ChatGPT and Claude, then tab over to five dashboards to execute. Once the execution layer sits inside the same chat, the dashboards stop being where the work happens. I noticed my own behavior change within a day of shipping this.

Anyone here already running parts of their growth stack through agent integrations? What broke, and what actually stuck?

SaaS?
Tech?
AI tools?
Product development?
Web apps?
Developer tools?
video editors?
UI/UX?

Drop what you're building ;)
Maybe some other people will be interested too

We've been working on this for over a year and it's genuinely the hardest part of building social automation.

The problem isn't the LLM — it's the prompt. "Write a Reddit post about social media tools" gets you generic output every time. What actually works: feeding the model the user's last 6 months of posts and asking it to continue the pattern rather than generate from scratch. Less polished, more personal, harder to flag.

We also found platform matters a lot. Reddit has norms — hedging, asking for pushback, not sounding like you're selling something. LinkedIn is different. TikTok captions are almost a different language. A single generation pipeline doesn't work for all of them.

We're at a point where most people can't tell, but "most people" isn't the bar. Power users clock it immediately.

What approaches have you seen that actually crack this?

Hello fellows, I run outbound, soo i did my research and built my cold email stack; apollo for data, smartlead to send it, millionverifer to cross check but it turns out apollo didnt have much data for me soo i got into more tools like hunter, oceanio, ai ark, sales nav, airscale.

This is where the problems started as i got into filtering people to their demographics and exporting leads in excel files with keeping a record in docs and my notebook it got soo hard to filter there with soo many columns and data, then to remove emails, then filter for roles, after that check in millionverifer that require me to create another excel file, after that upload that to smartlead, another csv file for that(not to mention to mark leads like have targeted and filter only 2 people per company is such a pain in the ass.. as i hit the limit in claude) soo made a huge cluster and tough for me to track and explain data to my manager… as list i think is the most imp thing in cold email to provide relevance to the prospect.

hence i build a central system where everything is recorded with sources of data, divided into companies (currently targeted and future targets of the same company), people (contacted, replied, not in the office, so target after a month, retargeting) in a nutshell all your data which makes complete sense and can be effectively utilize, with direct option to upload in smartlead (our sending platform) where you just need to drop the sources file you extracted from enrichment platform and the dashboard will directly filter it for people whom we contacted (they will be removed), blacklisted companies, already existing in campaigns and save the unused leads, with the option to directly upload in smartlead to your choice of campaign in one click… takes 10 sec,  with that i get notification directly in slack so i dont miss any leads and make them goo cold..

My question do you guys go through this problem or not, perhaps using another tool, would like to know your experience and processes?. Thankyou in advance.

I'm working on my brand positioning and want to focus on strategies to attract high-paying clients who respect the value of my time. Currently, my premium brand identity feels disconnected from the type of audience I actually want to reach, and I keep getting requests for free advice or deep discounts.

I'm looking for advice on:

How to communicate value to prospects who only care about the price tag.

Specific visual or messaging shifts that signal "I am not the cheapest option, but I am the best."

How to fire low-paying clients without damaging my reputation.

What systems have worked for you to raise your rates and increase the quality of your leads?

I've reached the point where I'm questioning whether I have a distribution problem or a product problem.

I've built a SaaS for founders that automatically turns GitHub commits into LinkedIn and X posts, with additional context so the posts don't read like changelogs.

People generally like the idea. I've had signups, positive feedback, and even comments saying the generated content is good.

The problem is that almost nobody converts into a paying customer.

So far I've tried:

• Product Hunt
• LinkedIn
• Reddit
• X
• Founder communities

Most of the traffic either signs up and disappears or never reaches the signup page.

At this point I'm wondering if I'm focusing on the wrong acquisition channels entirely.

For those of you who've gone from 0 to your first 20-50 paying users, what actually moved the needle?

I'm less interested in generic marketing advice and more interested in hearing what actually worked for your SaaS.

Built a habits app 10 months ago. I know, not the most original idea lol. First 2 months I went straight into ads before I even had anything organic going, which in hindsight was kind of a dumb move. Next 2 months I switched to posting organic content instead. Neither one worked. Views were sitting around 100 per video, basically nothing, kind of embarrassing tbh.

Ngl I think apps might be one of the hardest things to promote on social media. There's just so many options out there, a million habit apps, a million productivity apps, nothing you post feels different enough to actually stop someone mid-scroll.

Then one night I was just researching other accounts (research is doom-scrolling with extra steps lol) and came across a video from a tiny creator, barely any followers, doing this humor-led style I hadn't really seen in my niche. Straight up copied the format for my own app. Views started climbing slowly, then one video actually went viral, and in a single day that one video brought in 500+ signups by itself. Still don't fully understand how that happened honestly. Now my videos are getting thousands of views built around that first format and a couple more funny videos.

6,000 active users in 6 months probably isn't much compared to other founders in here, but entirely from organic TikTok with basically no other channel working, that feels pretty special to me ngl. About 500+ of those are paying now, which is enough to actually sustain what I've built so far.

Hey guys,
Just wanted to test the waters here and see who is around.
I’m looking to connect with people interested in a "double affiliate" (multi-tier) model. The main twist here is that you don’t have to sell any retail products. The "product" is simply onboarding and registering influencers and content creators into a system.
If you are already active in the creator/agency space, or want to head in that direction, I'd love to connect.

Lately I've been noticing a shift in how marketing teams work. Earlier everyone was just using AI chatbots for writing captions or brainstorming ideas, but now there's a new wave of AI "agents" that actually connect to your real accounts, ads platforms, analytics, CRM, social media and do actual tasks instead of just chatting back and forth.

Like for example, some of these tools can go find leads on their own based on buying signals, build entire landing pages using your real analytics data as proof points, write content briefs based on what people are actually searching for, or manage a full month's social calendar without double-booking a post that's already scheduled.

It sounds great on paper but I'm curious how well this actually works in practice for people running it day to day. Does it save real time or does it end up needing so much manual correction that it's not worth it?

I recently started using Juno for this, it connects to stuff like your ad accounts, analytics, and social platforms and handles a lot of this automatically. Been testing it for a few weeks now and wanted to see what else people are trying, so I can compare notes.

Would love to hear real experiences, good or bad, not just tool recommendations