Marketing has changed. Here's proof.
I posted a random thread on X about the cost of living in the Netherlands. Nothing about what we're building. Just genuine thoughts about life in the Netherlands.
It hit 1M+ impressions. And here's the weird part we got a ton of signups and paid users for Starnus from it. Without ever mentioning the product.
Meanwhile, my "here's what Starnus does" posts? Way less engagement.
This genuinely messed with my head. I'm sharing the actual X post below đ
What I think happened:
People connected with me as a person first, got curious, checked my profile, found Starnus, and signed up. The algorithm rewards content people actually want to engage with, not content you want them to engage with.
The uncomfortable truth for founders:
Your best marketing post might have nothing to do with your product. The post that drives the most signups might be about rent prices in your cityđ
I'm not saying stop talking about your product. But maybe the ratio should be 80% being a real human online, 20% product not the other way around.
Has anyone else experienced this? A random non-product post outperforming your actual launch content?
Replies
This resonates. We launched a dev tool for web scraping and posted 16 feature-focused posts on our LinkedIn company page. Technical specs, API comparisons, feature announcements. The engagement was nearly zero.
The one post that got actual profile visits was a raw, honest "here is what building a solo SaaS actually looks like" thread on my personal profile.
The 80/20 split you describe is interesting, but for dev tools the ratio is even more extreme. Developers are the most marketing-resistant audience on the internet. They can smell a product post from three sentences in and scroll past instantly.
What worked was something closer to what @krupali_trivedi described -- posting about authentic frustrations. "Cloudflare just changed their bot detection AGAIN and I need to rebuild half my bypass logic" performs infinitely better than "Our tool handles Cloudflare bypass automatically."
The uncomfortable realization: the frustration post IS better marketing than the launch announcement. It demonstrates expertise, shows you understand the pain, and people find the product through your profile. The polished feature post accomplishes none of that.
Starnus
@krupali_trivedi @yukendiran_jayachandiran This is so true, especially for dev tools.
Developers donât want to be âsold toâ, but theyâll happily read (and share) a real problem youâre fighting in public.
@krupali_trivedi @ayda_golahmadi Exactly. The best marketing content I have created was a frustrated rant about spending 3 hours debugging CSS selectors that broke after a site update. Got more engagement than any feature announcement.
The pattern I have noticed: share the problem you solved, not the solution you built. People connect with the struggle first, then get curious about how you fixed it.
For dev tools especially, the decision-maker IS a developer. They can spot marketing from a mile away but will deeply engage with authentic technical content.
This is one of the most honest marketing posts I've seen here.
The "cost of living in Netherlands" going viral and converting into Starnus users is a perfect example of parasocial trust. You didn't sell anything â you gave people a reason to be curious about you as a person. When they checked your profile and found a product, it felt like a discovery, not an ad.
We've had similar micro-experiments with Hello Aria. Our most-shared content is never about features. It's founder stories about productivity failures, burnout moments, stuff people recognize in themselves.
The implication is a bit uncomfortable: people don't want to buy your product. They want to buy into your worldview. The product just happens to be the most convenient way to do that.
People buy from people, and with the dead internet theory being more and more closer to our reality, personal accounts that actually share insightful + relevant (not sales-oriented) posts will become more and more valuable.
Can confirm this works. I recently posted on LinkedIn about a pattern I kept repeating across four companies - building features nobody wanted because I was filtering user feedback through my own bias. Zero mention of what I'm building now. The engagement was 5-10x higher than anything product-related I've ever posted. The reason is simple: product posts are for your audience. Personal stories are for everyone. When someone relates to your struggle, they check your profile. Your profile does the selling. The post doesn't have to.
Kiara Translation
this makes a lot of sense