| ▲ | 90s_dev 4 days ago |
| I've always been under the impression that if you make something truly useful or interesting, it will spread through word of mouth naturally and quickly. This is how my book The Gospel by Gen Z became a best seller in 2023-2024. I did absolutely no advertising for it. People posted tiktoks about it of their own volition, got dozens of millions of views, and that was the source for 100% of my sales. The same thing is true about my project I posted last night, still at the top of Show HN right now apparently. I spent about 6 months during 3 months time writing code that I personally thought was good and useful and powerful and interesting. When I shared it, it all went terribly wrong. I wrote the article in a rush while I was having a very bad day. I forwent polishing it up before releasing it. And yet it got lots and lots of upvotes for some reason. I suck at advertising and promotion. I honestly really do. And to a large extent I feel like that's a good thing. I've always felt uncomfortable with the traditional route of advertising, which is basically to oversell the potential usefulness of your product, to the point of basically being straight up lying. So I guess my only advice is to just make something you personally believe in, and the rest will follow. |
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| ▲ | 90s_dev 4 days ago | parent | next [-] |
| An example of advertising I hate is the infamous "distortion bubble" of Steve Jobs, who could make you believe you he was literally creating paradise on earth. The only thing I would add to my comment is, let people know about it where they are. I posted my project to HN because it's based on a nostalgia we all share. Find a subreddit, or a forum, or a discord/slack or something where your userbase visits regularly, and let them know. |
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| ▲ | andrewflnr 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| How did those first people who made the tiktoks about your book find it? |
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| ▲ | 90s_dev 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I had a tiktok page and my book was due to people asking me to make a book based on my tiktoks. So I made the book and told them when it was done. I don't consider this advertising. | | |
| ▲ | koonsolo 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | So to be fair, you made something you knew people wanted. This is not advertisement, but it is surely marketing. (Marketing starts before you built the product) Congrats on your success by the way! | | |
| ▲ | 90s_dev 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Thanks. And yeah I guess you could put it that way. I just looked at it like, they demanded, I supplied. |
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| ▲ | uh_uh 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | How big is your tiktok following? | | |
| ▲ | 90s_dev 4 days ago | parent [-] | | [flagged] | | |
| ▲ | iLoveOncall 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Lol then your original comment is incredibly disingenuous. You make it seem as if you just posted your book on Amazon, did not mention it anywhere, and people started buying it. You did market it via a direct channel to 300K people. | | |
| ▲ | 90s_dev 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I had such a difficult time getting word out to the 300k people about the book, I would be glad to let even 10% of them know about it to this day. I still have 200 copies lying around and sales are dead. At most I was able to let a few thousand people know, if that. | | |
| ▲ | andrewflnr 4 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Please. Even 1% of 300k is a lot of free targeted advertising. And yes that's what it is, even if you don't want to admit it. It's exactly the kind of promotional bootstrapping that OP was asking about and you pretended you didn't have to do it until we dragged it out of you. | | |
| ▲ | 90s_dev 4 days ago | parent [-] | | I didn't pretend anything. If anything, I'm just an idiot, or I forgot. Don't assume malice where incompetence is sufficient to explain it. That said, the most basic, uninteresting tiktok videos get 300 views, and if you try even just a little, it's not hard to get 3k (the 1% you mentioned) and extremely common. Which sets the bar pretty low. And that's the same amount I was able to reach in my lives. |
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| ▲ | mvdtnz 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I thought you said your book was a best seller? | | |
| ▲ | 90s_dev 4 days ago | parent [-] | | It was. And entirely because of other people's videos. Two people in particular made their own videos which each got over 10M views. I didn't pay them or ask them to, they did it because they found the book funny. Pretty much all my sales came from them. That was about a year and a half ago, and sales are now dead. |
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| ▲ | uh_uh 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Why did you get banned? | | |
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| ▲ | andrewflnr 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | Oh cool, the "have a pre-existing platform" gambit. Very helpful. |
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| ▲ | 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
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| ▲ | dinkblam 4 days ago | parent | prev [-] |
| > I've always been under the impression that if you make something truly useful or interesting, it will spread through word of mouth naturally and quickly. useful or interesting stuff has zero chances in the marketplace even if you spend millions on marketing. you can put in on github for free maybe. it is idiotic (facebook, tiktop, instagram, cat videos, etc) or harmful stuff (all the evil companies) that make the big money. |
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| ▲ | uh_uh 4 days ago | parent [-] | | Time and time again I'm surprised how many different types of cat toys are being advertised on Instagram/Twitter by cat video meme pages. Must be a pretty big market. | | |
| ▲ | ausbah 4 days ago | parent [-] | | most meme pages seem to converge diverge into advertising, either by “sponsoring merch” or selling their account to some scammy company that does dropshipping, crypto, MLM, etc |
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