What's the worst advice you've ever gotten about marketing your product?
I'll go first.
Someone told me: "Just be consistent. Post every day. The algorithm rewards consistency."
So I did.
For six months, I posted every single day. Sometimes at 7am. Sometimes at 10pm. Weekends included. I wrote about our product, our features, our roadmap. I followed all the "best practices" — hook in the first line, three takeaways, call to action at the end.
I got maybe 30 likes per post. A few comments from friends. Zero customers.
One day I got tired. I posted something messy. No structure. Just a story about a deal we lost because ChatGPT had wrong info about our SOC2 status. It was raw. It was specific. It had nothing to do with "consistency."
That post got 40,000 views. Seven people DM'd me asking to try the product. One of them became our biggest customer.
The "consistency" advice was safe. It was easy to follow. It didn't work.
The thing that worked was saying something real. Something uncomfortable. Something that proved I actually knew what I was talking about because I'd lived it.
What's the worst advice you've followed?
Imed Radhouani
Founder & CTO – Rankfender
Replies
A lot of bad marketing advice sounds useful because it removes the scary part, which is actually having a real opinion. Do you think safe advices gets repeated more bcz it's easier to sell?
Rankfender
@ian_maxwell2 Yeah, I think you nailed it.
Safe advice is easy to sell because it never gets you in trouble. "Post consistently" won't get anyone fired. "Talk about your product" won't offend anyone. It's the marketing equivalent of "eat your vegetables." Technically correct. Completely useless without the rest of the picture.
Having a real opinion is terrifying. You might be wrong. People might argue with you. You might alienate the people you're trying to reach. So most advice skips that part. It gives you the mechanics without the risk.
The problem is, mechanics without tension don't move anyone. You can post every day for a year. If you're not saying anything that makes people feel something, it's just noise.
The scary advice is the stuff that actually works. "Say something that makes people uncomfortable." "Admit you were wrong." "Show the failure before the success." Nobody sells that as a course because it's harder to package and people don't want to hear it.
What's the best scary advice you've gotten that actually worked?
@imed_radhouani Probably "post the version that feels a lil too honest". The times I've stopped polishing everything and just said the actual thing, people responded way more. Feels riskier, but usually way more memorable.
"Educate your audience" was bad advice foe me because I ended up sounding like a textbook instead of a person. Do you think being useful sometimes kills personality?
Rankfender
@kyle_bennett6 Yeah, 100%! "Useful" without personality just becomes generic. People don't remember the textbook. They remember the person who said something weird, specific, maybe a little uncomfortable. Useful is table stakes. Personality is what makes them care.
The worst advice I followed was trying to sound "professional" all the time, because it made everything feel flatter than it should've been. Do you think polish often hides the actual signal?
Rankfender
@leah_josephine Polish is the enemy of signal. It smooths out the rough edges, but those rough edges are the only reason anyone would remember you. The stuff that makes you sound different is the stuff that makes you sound like you. Sand it down and you're just another voice in the noise.
@imed_radhouani Exactly, the more polished I made it, the less it sounded like a real person.
I've noticed people remember specifics way more than frameworks, even when the post is a bit messy. Do you think stories win because they feel more expensive to fake?
Rankfender
@miles_anthony2 Yeah, that's exactly it. Stories feel expensive to fake because they come with texture. A framework is clean. It could be copied, generated, lifted from anywhere. But a story about the time your pricing page showed 0 € for 4 hours and 8 people tried to buy? That's yours. You can't fake the embarrassment in that. You can't manufacture the support tickets.
Frameworks are safe. Stories are vulnerable. And vulnerability is the only thing that's actually hard to replicate.
"Don't niche down too much" was terrible advice for me because broad messaging usually just made the product easier to ignore. Did things improve once you got more specific?
Rankfender
@naomi_florence1 Night and day. When we said "AI visibility platform," nobody cared. Too broad. Sounded like another SEO tool. When we said "we help SaaS companies fix what ChatGPT says about their pricing," people started DMing me.
Narrowing down to one problem made everything else click. You can always expand later. You can't be heard if you're saying nothing to everyone.
Btw, the funny thing is that specific problem "the pricing thing" came from losing that deal I mentioned in the thread. Sometimes your best messaging comes from your worst moments.
I think a lot of founders confuse content discipline with content truth, and thety're really not the same thing. Do you think consistency only works after clarity?
Rankfender
@oliver_nathan3 Yeah that's a good way to put it. Consistency without clarity is just noise.
I think people latch onto "post every day" because it's measurable. You can check a box. But you can post 365 days in a row and still not know what you're actually trying to say. The discipline feels like progress. The truth is what actually moves people.
btw the clarity thing took us way longer than i want to admit. We had the product. We had the data. But I kept trying to explain all of it at once. Once we got clear on one thing, the pricing error thing, everything else started working. The posts got easier to write. The replies got easier to answer. People started telling us what they wanted instead of us guessing.
so yeah. clarity first. then consistency. doing it the other way around just burns you out.
Worst advice for me has to be "talk about your product more" when the real issue nobody cared yet. Do you think founders often explain too early before creating enough tension?
Rankfender
@jade_melissa1 Yeah, absolutely. The "talk about your product more" advice assumes people are waiting to hear about it. Most of the time they're not.
The tension thing is real. You need people to feel the problem before they care about your solution. If you lead with the product, they're not ready to listen. They haven't felt the pain yet. They don't know why this matters to them.
I think founders talk too early because it's easier. Explaining what you built is safe. Talking about the problem, the failure, the weird insight that keeps you up at night? That's vulnerable. It feels like you're not selling. But that's exactly when people start leaning in.
The post that worked for me wasn't about Rankfender. It was about losing a deal because ChatGPT had our SOC2 wrong. People felt that. They'd been there. Then they wanted to know what I was building. Not before.
What's the thing you were explaining too early?
@imed_radhouani For me, it was trying to explain differentiation too early. I was focused on why the product mattered before the pain and had really clicked for the person reading.
the advice wasnt wrong tbh, you were just consistent at saying nothing. consistency without a point of view is just scheduled noise. the messy post worked because you finally had something to say, not because structure is bad
Rankfender
@umairnadeem You're absolutely right. I needed to hear that. The advice in factt wasn't wrong. I was. I was consistent at saying nothing, just filling the calendar. The messy post worked because I finally had something to say! not because I broke the rules, but because I stopped hiding behind them.
That's the part nobody tells you. You can follow all the formulas perfectly. But if you're not actually saying anything, it's just noise. The structure wasn't the problem. The emptiness was!! thanks @umairnadeem
@imed_radhouani Oh man, I feel this. I did the same thing for three months. Posted every day. Used all the right hashtags. Followed the formula. Crickets. then one day I posted a thread about a bug that took down our site for 4 hours and how we fixed it. Total mess. No structure. Just a story.
that thread got more engagement than all my "optimized" posts combined. Still trying to unlearn the "best practices" mindset!!
Rankfender
@joe_reda11 That's the part nobody tells you. The formula works until it doesn't. And the messy story works even when it shouldn't.
I've been trying to figure out why. Maybe it's trust. A polished post feels like marketing. A bug story feels like someone who actually runs something.
What was the bug? I'm curious now.
@imed_radhouani Oh the bug !! A cache issue that made our pricing page show 0 € for about 4 hours. Woke up to 37 support tickets and a very confused Stripe dashboard. Fixed it by 9am but spent the rest of the day explaining to customers that no, we weren't giving away enterprise plans for free.
That thread got way more attention than any of our "we just launched" posts. I think people just like knowing that everyone messes up sometimes.
Rankfender
@joe_reda11 Haha that's both painful and perfect. The 0 € pricing bug is every founder's nightmare but also the most relatable thing you could post. People love knowing that the polished facade has cracks. It makes the whole thing feel real.
Did anyone actually try to buy at 0€ or did they all send tickets first?
@imed_radhouani Oh they tried. We had 8 people complete checkout before we caught it. Had to manually cancel all of them and send a lot of awkward "so about that order..." emails. One guy was pretty upset. Kept asking why we couldn't just honor the $0 price since it was "our mistake." Had to explain that enterprise plans for free wasn't really a sustainable business model.
The support team still jokes about it. Every time we push a cache update someone asks "are we sure we want to do this?"
Do you have example on the consistent post and the messy one so we could compare? :D
Rankfender
@driftya Honestly the first one was that classic "excited to announce bla bla.. " post. You know the one. Bullet points. Emojis. All the things you're supposed to do. I think I even used the rocket emoji.
It got maybe 12 likes. Mostly from my mom and people I used to work with.
The messy one happened by accident. I was frustrated about losing that deal and just typed it out at like 11pm. No structure. No call to action. Just "this happened and it sucked and that's why I'm building this thing."
I woke up to 40k views and thought something broke.
I don't know. I guess people can tell when you're actually pissed off about something vs when you're just trying to get attention.