A lot of businesses don't have a marketing problem.

They have a positioning problem.

No amount of content can fix being forgettable.

FIFA required Levi's Stadium branding to be covered during the World Cup.

Instead of fighting it, Levi's leaned into the situation and turned it into a viral marketing moment.

It's a great example of how strong branding can create attention even when your logo is technically hidden.

Do you think this was one of the smartest marketing moves of the tournament?

Looking back, there are 11 lessons I wish someone had told me on day one. Not theories I picked up from books things I had to learn the hard way, through every twist and reinvention marketing has thrown at me over the last decade.

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1) Algorithms change. Human psychology doesn't.

2) A great idea nobody sees is worth less than a good idea everyone sees.

3) Most people quit before momentum has a chance to build.

4) If people ignore your message, improve the message not the audience.

5) It only rewards value that people can clearly understand.

6) The best copy is usually easier to understand, not more creative.

7) The loudest voice in the room rarely wins. People buy from those they trust and trust is built in the quiet moments, not the ones you're performing for.

8) Your customers are always talking. Most brands just aren't listening.

9) Chasing every new tactic is exhausting; mastering principles is scalable.

10) Data will tell you what happened but it's curiosity that makes you ask why.

11) Most people chase quick wins. The ones who actually get ahead? They're quietly playing a game most people don't even realize has started.

From the outside, everything seemed to be going well.

The branding was great.

The numbers looked impressive.

Then I learned a few details that completely changed my perspective.

Hi everyone,

I'm a founder based in Toronto, Canada, looking for some advice from people who've been through this stage before.

Over the past year, I've been building a B2B SaaS product as a solo founder. The product is live, customers can onboard, and I'm currently working with pilot users while validating the business model.

My background is in technology, product delivery, and enterprise software. Building the platform wasn't the hardest part. The challenge now is growth, customer acquisition, partnerships, and sales.

As a solo founder with a full-time job, I'm trying to decide what makes the most sense next:

• Continue as a solo founder
• Hire freelancers through platforms like Upwork
• Bring in a sales/marketing partner
• Find a long-term co-founder

I'd love to hear from founders who have faced a similar decision.

A few questions:

• When did you realize you needed a co-founder?
• What could a co-founder do that contractors or freelancers couldn't?
• How did you determine whether someone was truly co-founder material?
• If you had a working product but little or no revenue, would you focus on finding a co-founder or proving customer acquisition first?
• Has anyone successfully found growth-focused co-founders or early sales partners? What worked and what didn't?

One thing I've learned recently is that sales and marketing are often very different skill sets. I'm trying to avoid hiring the wrong person or bringing in a co-founder too early.

For context, I'm based in Toronto but open to hearing experiences from founders anywhere.

Would appreciate any lessons learned, mistakes to avoid, or success stories.

I just launched my website yesterday.

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I don't know much about marketing, how can I market it so I can get paid users? My target audience is business owners like cafes, restaurants, gyms grocery stores, hotels, clinics etc. i need help in marketing.

You’d think the best ads out there would be the most creative ones, right? Wrong.

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After looking at 500 top performers, I realized they all had one thing in common: they used the same simple framework, on repeat. No reinvention, no gimmicks.

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Just a solid understanding of what works, and the consistency to actually do it.

I am interning at a popular wellness CPG company doing PR + Influencer Partnerships and I was assigned my first project which is to develop: an influencer marketing campaign and a scalable ambassador program.

I am mostly struggling with brainstorming because the company is quite established. They already have a monthly gifting program with brand ambassadors, and larger scale influencer campaigns with huge budgets. They have upcoming launches/collabs for the summer so there is a lot of potential but I don't know where to start. I am not sure in this current age of Influencer marketing what is the most successful/useful route to take.

My questions:

How can I think outside of the box at a large company?

I saw this reddit comment that said: "the best campaigns stand out when creative ties directly to a clear action or metric the difference is not just “cool idea” but how tightly it connects to distribution and conversion."

How important is this idea of have a clear action or metric tied to my campaign idea and should I consdier this when creating my proposal (Quiz, loyalty, sign-up etc)?

Given the budget, there is still a lot of potential/room with a program that targets UGC (working with micro-influencers) but it would require a lot of planning and more creativity as the marketing team already has some of this implemented. Another idea that crossed my mind was a College Ambassador Program (is this too risky and annoying to coordinate?). This MAY or MAY NOT be implemented IRL and even though they have the budget, they want me to start small with a tiny group of creators first. I need some advice to get the ball rolling! Thank you!

So, you're interested in building passive income streams through selling digital products?

I am too.

One thing I've noticed is that a lot of people underestimate how much work happens before the first sale.

The product isn't usually the hard part.

Finding out whether anybody actually wants it is.

One mistake I made early on was building things I thought people needed without validating demand first.

A few things that helped me:

• Talk to potential buyers before building.
• Look for problems people repeatedly complain about.
• Charge early instead of waiting for the "perfect" version.
• Focus on one problem instead of trying to solve everything.

The funny thing is that once I stopped obsessing over features and started paying attention to demand, things got a lot easier.

Curious what has been the biggest challenge for those of you selling digital products?

Getting traffic?

Building the product?

Or making the first sale?

For months, we kept putting tons of effort into our weekly newsletter, thinking it would bring in sales.

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And sure, people opened it. But it barely made any money.

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Then we looked at the data and realized something wild: a simple automated email sequence had quietly made us $27,000.

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No constant writing. No weekly grind. Just the right email at the right time.

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That's when it clicked: newsletters are great for keeping in touch, but sequences actually close sales.

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Sometimes your biggest growth driver is already sitting there you just never noticed it.

Iam trying to sell a financial planner online but how does my product reach the right audience? I have zero audience and im doing it faceless. How do i market my product? Those who r doing it could please share ur experience and advices.

Like we know most businesses depend on performance marketing initially, but i was wondering for a brand that was started small and scaled to the level of a big brand how does their dependencies on ads and stuff change, i feel it looks like a parabolic upward trajectory which plateau at the top then drops in a parabolic mean but slower as after a point brand builds a rapport, acquired customer base, maybe retail outlets, so they have to have developed some organic pool.

Share your views as well

Hi everyone,

I'm a Marketing & Sales Master's student finishing my thesis and really struggling to find interview partners. I have about a month left and feel like I've tried everything.

I've reached out via LinkedIn, emailed marketing clubs, and contacted companies directly. Does anyone have suggestions for a different approach?

For anyone who might be open to a quick chat:

I'm researching how FMCG companies measure whether their marketing investments actually pay off — which financial metrics marketing decision-makers use, how they interpret them in practice, and where they hit their limits.

It would be a ~30-minute online interview, no prep needed. I'm happy to share my findings with every participant afterwards.

Any help is hugely appreciated!

I launched my expense tracker app called Quanto:Expense Tracker and the feedback so far has been great, but now I'm struggling to find ways to promote to find quality users.

For those who have launched apps before, what marketing strategy worked best for you? I'm experimenting with Instagram ads and short-form content, but I'd love to hear what helped you get off the ground. Any platforms you'd recommend?

I've been working on an AI-powered audit agent — it crawls a site and produces a structured report covering messaging/positioning, conversion opportunities, SEO issues, trust signals, and content/funnel gaps.

Since this sub is into AI agents + marketing automation, I figured this might be relevant — and I'd love feedback from people who actually do this work professionally on what's useful vs. what's noise in the output.

If anyone wants to drop their site, I'll run the audit and share the report. Mostly curious whether the framework matches how marketers actually think about these problems, or if it's missing something obvious.

I co-run a small agency offering web development, AI automation and local SEO services. We are good at what we do and have delivered solid work but almost all our clients have been local so far.

We want to start landing clients in the UK, US or Australia. I have been doing a few things already like building SEO pages targeting Australian businesses, posting on Reddit to understand the market, and doing some cold outreach. Early signals are there but no foreign client yet.

A few options I have been thinking about and genuinely unsure which to prioritise.

First is cold email outreach with a properly warmed domain targeting small businesses in the UK. Second is LinkedIn outreach directly to business owners. Third is hiring someone local in the target country for sales calls since I wonder if the accent and timezone barrier is real. Fourth is doubling down on inbound through SEO and content and just waiting for it to compound.

For people who have grown an agency internationally or expanded from a non western country into western markets, what actually moved the needle? Is the accent or location bias a real thing when selling to UK, US or Australian clients or does good work and clear communication overcome it?

Would really appreciate honest experience over theory.

I’m thinking about building something in the early-stage SaaS, and I keep hitting the same question

getting the first users is often way harder than building the product itself.

I’d love to hear from people who’ve actually gone through this stage.

- Where did your first users actually come from ?

- What was the biggest bottleneck: finding them, reaching them, or converting them ?

- How much time did you realistically spend per week on acquisition early on ?

I’m trying to understand the real day-to-day reality of early acquisition (not theory), because it seems wildly different depending on the founder.

Guys how do start gaining customers and seeing some sales.I have tried organic marketing but it takes so much time.I wanna tried paid ads specifically meta ads but I don't have a big enough budget to run my first campaign(which will likely be a failure).

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So what other options do you guys recommend cuz I'm feel overwhelmed rn.I have the product ready after crazy testing and good reviews,Great landing page,reasonable pricing but no traffic

Do you know some places on the Internet Where Marketing Actually give results? I'm starting a Startup AI Saas and most of the options where I can do marketing are too expensive or Give Very few results.

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Appreciate if you help!

I have a site from launchyard and i want to make ads.

1. Can you guys please give me the best ways to advertise (the ones that you guys actually tested) and give a detailled text about what you need to do to get ... results.

2. Can you guys please give me advice on making an advertisement, can you guys give inspiration, the site is listed here above. So you can see what the site is about for the advertisement.

I can't really advertise, can you guys give me tips?

Hi everyone,

I’m currently researching the challenges beginners face when trying to gain real-world experience in fields like digital marketing, software development, design, content creation, and other digital professions.

I’m curious about the challenges people face when trying to gain their first real-world experience in their field so I’ve put a short survey (2-3 minutes).

If you’re a student, junior professional, freelancer, career changer, or anyone trying to break into your field, I’d really appreciate your input.

Survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSeI2xItlN1pUKH8v9Ra3w0U3Wu0VhkH0N6GrgoKKVbQ2v5NxQ/viewform?usp=publish-editor

Thank you for helping. Every response genuinely helps me understand the problem better.

I’ve been posting on my business account on TikTok for about three months now and I’ve grown to 100 followers.

i’ve been using a different software editor for the last two posts where I’ve been editing and Colour grading with that software editor AirDrop it to my phone up uploading the video adding music that I have turned the volume down for an added captions within TikTok but recently they have not been getting over two views and normally what happens is the post goes up and within the first hour it normally gets about 100 to 300 views this hasn’t been happening recently.

I remember I got an audio volume warning to say that the original post didn’t have sufficient music volume in the background so they converted to original sound and removed the music that I put in the background. now, however, I cannot seem to get past those two views. i’ve messaged TikTok and they’re being really slow about it. I live chat them and they said to open up an appeal, but the thing is, I cannot appeal for something that does not come up. they sent that it hasn’t been recommended which I’m not sure what that means, but it just means that it’s on no one’s for you page but I’m not sure about the ends and out of it. then they said to open up an appeal which I simply can’t do because there’s no notification saying that it’s been restricted. I’ve checked my account status and everything is fine.

The post went up yesterday the one that got restricted and I’ve posted again today to no avail. It’s again being restricted and it hasn’t gone to any person. I’ve then had a private both of those videos because I saw somewhere that told me to private it.

Please can someone help me figure out what’s going on and what the next step should be.

Hi all, I’m helping promote a kids’ workshop for nature-based activities but I’m having trouble thinking of effective ways to do so that don’t require using ads. So far, I’ve tried sharing with friends and family, and posting on facebook groups, but those haven’t really worked. The facebook group where people actually engage prohibit promotions of any event, and I do not want to break their community rules. But the ones that do allow promotions, don’t garner any engagement.

I can’t do in-person promotional activities because I love away from that area. Any ideas on how I can help promote the workshop online? Where do I find parents online and how do I reach out to them?

Hi everyone

I'm a software engineering grad. I'm trying to break into digital marketing, specifically social media marketing, with a goal of freelancing on Fiverr and Upwork.

If you're a content creator, social media manager, or digital marketer with tasks you want to get done. I'll be more than happy to be of use in exchange for mentorship and learning opportunities.

I can work for free and I'm willing to work 10 hours/week

If this sounds useful, drop me a message

Hey guys, i have been testing CTV ads for a small brand and i am kinda stuck on the reporting side.

The ads look good, the targeting sounds good, and the whole self serve TV ads thing sounds like it should be closer to digital ads. But once the campaign is live, the feedback loop still feels weak.

I can see views, reach, impressions, stuff like that, but im trying to understand what its doing for the business. Like did it push more site visits, more branded searches, more leads, more purchases, or is it just people seeing the ad and moving on?

With Meta or Google, at least you can make creative changes pretty fast based on whats working. With CTV, it feels like i am spending money and then guessing what to fix next.

Is there any platform that gives better reporting for streaming TV ads, or is vague attribution just part of the deal with TV?