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Marketing for Founders

TL;DR: This is a collection of practical resources to get your first 10/100/1000 users.


Let’s face it. Marketing is tough, especially if you’re a technical founder moving the first steps with your startup.

While there’s a ton of advice out there, most of the time it's about scaling some VC-funded startup with a big marketing budget to $1,000,000 ARR and 100,000 users.

Inspirational? Sure. Actionable? Not really.

This is why you’ll find here practical guides, tips, and some tools to help you:

  • 🎯 find the first users for your startup
  • 📣 promote your project without a budget
  • 🚀 build your Go-To-Market strategy


Ready to get started? Just pick a topic:

PS. Leave me a star ⭐ or buy me a beer🍺 if you find this useful!


📣 Places To Post Your Startup

Launch platforms, software directories, and communities are an easy way to get eyes on your product and a tiny, steady flow of people to your website. Some of the following may not be relevant for your product, but (hopefully) can give you ideas on what to look for.

Launch platforms:

Software directories:

Lifetime deals platforms & groups:

Subreddits (always check the rules before posting anything):

PS. You can find more ideas here (thanks Sandra) and, if you're running an AI startup, here.
PPS. You can find a few tips for writing a great launch post here.




📷 Social Media Marketing

Managing multiple accounts across all social media platforms can be pretty intense (there’s a reason why it’s a full-time job); however, there are a couple of strategies worth trying: building in public and social listening.

Building in Public - it’s the easiest social media tactic. In a nutshell, it’s about using your personal profile to share expertise, product updates, and behind-the-scenes content:

Social listening - tracking and joining online conversations on topics related to your Startup is pretty helpful to get in touch with users and learn more about them:




❄ Sales & Cold Outreach

Most people hate cold outreach and everything connected with direct sales. Yes, depending on your approach, it might be hard to scale and time-intensive, but cold emails and DMs are the most straightforward way to get in touch with potential users and collect precious early-stage feedback.

So, how can you find people on target? What should you write in your messages? And how can you scale cold outreach? Here are a few ideas:




📈 SEO

Should you focus on SEO in the early days of your startup? Probably not, SEO takes time (and backlinks), but this doesn’t mean you should neglect it either.

SEO is the foundation for many startups, and it can get you a steady source of traffic without having to spend anything other than the time to do it.

These guides and tips will help you get started:

PS. If you're new to SEO and don't know where/how to start check out LearningSEO and The Complete Guide to Programmatic SEO.




💌 Email Marketing

Email marketing can help you with almost anything: onboarding new users, boosting free-to-paid conversions, promoting affiliate/referral programs, and collecting feedback. Plus, it’s often your only option to engage users outside of your product.




🧲 Content Marketing

Just like SEO, content marketing is one of the first growth levers to pull for a startup. This time, instead of creating content to praise search engines, you’ll be sharing it where your audience hangs out and hijacking trends for free exposure:




💸 Ads

Every startup will think about adding a paid channel to their marketing strategy sooner or later and Ads are one of the best ways to accelerate user acquisition.

Here are a few guides to help you avoid burning through your budget before getting any return:




👩‍🏫 Influencer Marketing

Going where the audience is is the first rule of marketing. That’s why partnering with content creators and influencers can help you grow your startup and connect directly with customers.

However, online advice on influencer marketing is often bad and outdated, so let’s take a look at a few firsthand experiences:




💑 Affiliates and Referrals

Word-of-mouth is often the main growth driver for bootstrapped startups. Why? Because affiliate and referral programs are easy to set up, cheap (you only pay if the user converts), and build trust and credibility (when users recommend your product, you’re not only getting traffic, but also social proof that it works).




🛠 Free-Tool Marketing

Free mini tools are your best bet on going viral, generating PR coverage and backlinks, and driving a ton of organic traffic. Plus, it doesn’t feel like marketing (that’s the reason why it’s also called Engineering as Marketing).




🎯 Landing Pages, Messaging and Positioning

Most startup websites are ineffective. They fail to tell who the product is for, what the product does, and why it is better. This means confused visitors, poor conversion rates, and wasted marketing $$$.

Here are a few resources to turn your website into a sales and marketing asset:




🎰 Pricing

“Your product delivers the value added to target customers; with pricing, we capture added value back to build a sustainable business.”

Confused? You’re not alone. Pricing and business model are the toughest things to crack for a startup.

Here are a few frameworks to get your price right:




🔥 Conversion Rate Optimization

Little tweaks can have a huge impact on conversions. Here are a few ideas ready for you to A/B test:




💡 Idea Validation

One of the most common and painful mistakes you can make is having an idea and immediately spending all your time building a product without validating demand first.

Some ideas are great, but most aren’t worth your time. So, how can you validate a startup idea?




🧨 Other resources




👨‍💻 About

This was inspired by Marketing for Engineers (thanks Lisa & Ahmed!) and is created and maintained by Edoardo Stradella (Twitter/X).
All resources, guides, and tools were done by independent authors and companies. All credentials are included.

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Practical resources to get your first 10/100/1000 users

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