🎯 What are modern marketing approaches that work?

Great question, Adana. For me, engineering as marketing is probably the strongest one right now.

Claude Fable 5.1 drops → everyone is talking about it and wants to see what it can actually do. So you use that attention to showcase your own product. For example: “How I rebuilt RunEvr’s landing page using Fable 5.1.”

A few days later, OpenAI releases a new model? You can do the same thing again. Same with Grokbot or whatever new tool is getting attention.

I think this kind of educational marketing through products and new tools works extremely well in 2025–2026. You’re teaching people something they already want to learn about, while naturally directing that attention toward your own product.

And of course, pSEO + free tools around the core product still work incredibly well too. Build relevant pages for different categories/use cases, create useful free tools, and incorporate your main product into them through branding, a watermark, or a CTA that sends traffic back to the core product.

I’m facing the same challenge right now while marketing my own product. What I’ve noticed is that tactics that worked even a year ago no longer deliver the same results.

It’s not enough to show a relevant ad to the right audience anymore. People simply don’t engage: there’s so much noise, and almost anything can distract them from your message :-(

The only approach I currently see working is repeated exposure—showing the same product to one person three, five, or even eight times until they finally become curious. But that gets expensive very quickly.

Another option is using AI agents to maintain a presence across relevant comments, communities, chats, and discussions around similar products. But I haven’t yet figured out how to do that in a genuinely useful and authentic way—or whether it’s worth doing at all.

I think that "traditional" has become modern. As people have become more online, it seems totally unusual to me when an online company holds an offline event, especially a pop-up store.

For me, the shift has been from "marketing the product" to "documenting the process." Posting finished features gets ignored posting the actual decision-making (why we built X a certain way, what we got wrong, what a real user said that changed our roadmap) gets engagement, because it's the only thing AI can't easily generate a competitor version of.

For an early-stage founder, I'd say: picking one narrow channel where your ICP already has a real, specific conversation happening (not a broad platform, a specific community within it), and spending a month contributing before you could actually promote anything. That might create a difference in my opinion.

The angle nobody's mentioned yet: just writing in public, consistently, under your own name. I've been doing a regular newsletter for the product I work on, and the compounding part is what surprised me - a post from week 3 still brings in a trickle of signups in week 10 because it got indexed, shared once, or someone finally got around to reading their backlog. Riding a model launch or a viral moment gets you a spike, but it resets to zero the next week. A newsletter or blog you actually keep publishing to becomes an asset that keeps paying out long after you wrote it, even if any single post is much smaller than a viral hit.

AI visibility is definitely part of the play. Post relevant, detailed, up-to-date content on your website + make sure your website is visible to crawlers + reach media/review platforms = customers will find you through ChatGPT/Claude/etc.

most challenging thing for many solo founders and start-up, I think these days being on social media is key. Much more inbound vs outbound!

I recently launched Monument Patron — a living visual diary where people can explore iconic monuments from around the world in a more interactive way.

Alongside the monument experience, brands, founders, and products can patron individual monument plates, giving them a distinctive place inside the collection and a new form of long-term brand visibility.

The idea is to combine:

• interactive monument discovery

• visual learning and history

• digital patronage

• brand visibility beyond traditional ads

I’m currently experimenting with the concept, distribution, SEO, and finding the right audience for it.

Ask me anything about the idea, building the product, launching it, monetization, or what I’m learning from the launch.