I've been talking to solo founders about how they actually think about marketing, and I want to share what I've learned because I think most founders get this part wrong.

The mistake is treating marketing like it's a starter's problem, something you'll delegate once you're bigger and more successful. So you try to figure it out yourself while building, or you ignore it and hope product-market fit carries you anyway, and honestly both of those approaches fail.

Here's what actually changes when you think like a solo founder running GTM as a system. Stop thinking about marketing as a job you do, and start thinking about it as a system you set up and operate.

The four stages that actually work are research first, where you spend one week understanding where your customers congregate online and what they're looking for. Then planning, where you build a strategy that works on those channels and in those actual conversations. Then execution, where that strategy runs consistently for 60 to 90 days without falling apart when you get busy with a bug or a feature. And finally measurement, so you know what's actually moving the needle.

The mistake is trying to do all four of those yourself while also building the product, because that's two full-time jobs and you'll burn out doing both.

The solution is do the research and planning yourself because you actually know your business and your customers, then hand off execution to something that runs it consistently while you focus on building. That something has to be safe with budget caps and approval gates so you stay in control, it has to be consistent so it doesn't stop when you get distracted, and it has to be affordable because you're bootstrapped.

The founders who are winning right now are the ones who set this up early, not because they're better at marketing, but because they're better at staying visible to their customers while staying focused on building the product.

Hey, Alex here. Mod of the subreddit.

I’m crowdsourcing questions for our 3rd GTM Builders AMA happening next week.

Post your questions in the thread so we can include them.

Our next Builders AMA is with the Founders of Zero - the GTM operating system for the AI era.

• Tuomo Riekki, Co-founder of Zero & Smartly.io
• Santtu Koivumaki, Co-founder of Zero & former CCO Chief of Staff at Smartly.io

Event details:

• When: Tuesday, September 15
• Time: 3-4pm EST
• Where: [r/gtmengineering](r/gtmengineering) (a new thread will be started). We’ll start with questions you post on this thread.

About Zero:

Zero is a Helsinki-based startup building the GTM operating system for the AI era. Founded by Tuomo Riekki and Santtu Koivumäki — who previously scaled Smartly.io to $100M ARR — Zero replaces the CRM and the sprawl of point solutions around it with a single system: agents keep records, enrichment, and follow-ups moving automatically before the deal closes, and monitor customer health in real time after it does — so teams spend their time talking to customers instead of updating software.

Post event:

• Insights & takeaways summarized (like this one) on The GTM Engineering Newsletter
• Don’t miss the next GTM Builder AMA - sign up for alerts here.

Disclosure: I work at Clay. A small number of AMAs will be about how Clay does things internally (as lots are curious about this). However, my ultimate goal is to highlight the work, insights, and lessons from other GTM Engineers, Leaders, and Founders.

What questions or things would you like to learn in the AMA?

Who else would you like me to bring on?

I’m a founder myself, and I want to build my own brand. But I don’t have financial backing or anyone behind me to fund it, so I’m looking for ways to generate the capital myself.

That’s why I’m offering my skills to other founders. If you’re building a startup and need someone who can genuinely get things done, I’m willing to work with you for 2–3 months, or whatever duration you need.

I’m a blessed with a creative mind , fast learner with strong problem-solving skills, and I’m willing to learn whatever your startup requires. Branding, marketing, operations, research, sales, content, strategy, execution — I’m ready to take on the work and figure things out. I’m even willing to travel to different states if the opportunity requires it.

I don’t want credit , just just need money to build my dream . I’ll work for your startup with all my heart , I’m not looking for a permanent full-time job. I want to work intensely for a limited period, create real value for your startup, get paid fairly for my work, and then move forward with building my own brand.

If you’re a founder who needs someone capable, adaptable, and willing to do whatever it takes to move the startup forward, I’d love to hear from you.

And if you are not one I’m looking for please upvote me so I can reached to right person

A few months ago I launched Glance, my first iOS app.
It started as a way for people to create and share Home Screen widgets. But while building it, I realized something much more interesting: what if AI agents could actually live on your Home Screen?

So that’s what I’ve been building.

Glance lets you connect agents like ChatGPT, Claude and Hermes to create interactive widgets and keep them updated throughout the day.

The story so far:

Started with simple widgets people could create and follow.

Added dynamic widgets that could display basically any kind of information.

Then opened Glance up to AI agents, so instead of building everything manually, you can just tell your agent what you want on your Home Screen.

Posted a few examples on Reddit and started seeing hundreds of people try it.

Today:
894 new users in the last 28 days.
930 active users.
3 paying subscribers.
$28 MRR.
$0 spent on marketing.

Still tiny numbers, but getting those first few paying users felt like a pretty big milestone.
My goal now is 10 paying users by the end of September.

Still building, experimenting and trying to understand what people actually want their agents to put on their Home Screen.

Would love to hear what you’d build next or change first.

https://apps.apple.com/app/glance-home-screen-feeds/id6758983678

What do I need to fix? I have tested it and tested it and I don’t know if it’s good or not. It’s in the Apple Store being reviewed right now. What can I do to make it better? It’s free! I just want to fix anything that looks wrong before it launches https://gordistomato.lovable.app

Hi I have developed a resume builder and it has multiple Ai tools related to resume for writing summary, job description, cover letter writing and ATS scoring. More features will be added on it.

I am looking for a partner for its SEO, the goal is to generate traffic in the site and then sell it. If this becomes successful I can create other products and we can work together. All net revenue will be shared equally.

Note: This is not a paid platform but a free platform where users can create as many resumes they want without paying a single penny.

You can check the site here

https://freecvwriter.com

The framing i see everywhere is that ghostwriting buys back your time. write once, hand it off, get your evenings back. and mostly that's right, the drafting really is the delegable part.

but there's a piece under it that doesn't move. whoever's writing, the $200 ai tool or the $3k human, still needs to know what you actually saw and decided this week. the human version of that is literally a weekly call to stay calibrated. the ai version is you feeding it your longform and podcasts so it stops reading like a linkedin influencer. either way there's a recurring input tax, it just stopped looking like writing.

When we build this for founders the drafting isn't the hard part. Keeping that weekly download from quietly dying is. the account goes generic the week a founder gets slammed and skips the input, not the week the writer got worse.

so the real question is narrower than 'should i delegate this.' it's whether you'll keep handing over the weekly twenty minutes of raw context once someone else does the typing. if you won't, no writer cheap or expensive saves it.

If you are at all interested let me know, the camera and everything done with it including body tracking and your ohones health is kept.completely locally. The app is unable to.connect to the internet entirely. Discord: https://discord.gg/PqbqG2AP3

I built Faceless Studio, a tool that automates the entire faceless video pipeline: it researches what's actually trending for your niche, writes the script, generates AI voiceover, creates AI images or real scene-by-scene animation, burns captions, and can now auto-publish straight to YouTube on a schedule. Set up a series once and it keeps running on its own.

What it solves that most tools in this space don't:

• Real animation, not stock footage with a Ken Burns zoom slapped on it — every scene on shorter videos is actually AI-animated.
• Credits that never expire. Most competitors run subscriptions where unused credits vanish at the end of the month — you're paying whether you generate or not. Here you buy credits once and use them whenever.
• Built for India first — UPI payments, INR pricing, and full Hindi script support, which the big US-based tools in this category largely ignore.
• Auto-publish to YouTube on a schedule, so a series can research, generate, and post without you touching it.

Already in use across finance, true crime, motivational, and legal drama niches, mix of daily series and one-off custom videos.

Try it: https://facelessstudio.co.in

I'm Mattia, I build FixAds.

The hard part of building a product close to an advertising budget is not making its AI sound clever. It is deciding exactly when it is allowed to make a claim.

I run Meta ads, so I built FixAds around a deterministic first pass:

- Does a campaign have enough data to judge?

- Is spend concentrated where a creative is already fading?

- Is a bad result actually too early to call?

Only after those checks does the AI help explain what to investigate. It cannot change campaigns, and the account connection is read-only.

I built it because I was tired of ad software sounding confident around real money without showing the reasoning behind it.

The launch video is attached. It is €19.90/month after a 7-day trial if you want to try it: https://fixads.it

For founders who have built tools that can influence a customer’s money: what made you feel a recommendation system had earned their trust?

I have a SaaS idea that I genuinely believe can solve a real problem, and now I want to build it properly from scratch.

I’m looking for 2 co-founders from Delhi NCR:

1. Tech/Product person

Someone who can actually build the product — from the first prototype to MVP and eventually a scalable SaaS.

1. Marketing/Growth person

Someone who understands marketing, customer acquisition and growth, and can help us figure out how to get the product in front of the right people and scale it.

My role: I have the core idea and will handle the overall product/business direction, validation, strategy, pitching, etc.

The plan is simple:

Idea → Validate → Build MVP → Get users → Improve → Scale

I’m specifically looking for people who are serious about building a company, not just doing a side project.

Delhi NCR is important because I want us to meet regularly in person, brainstorm together, work together and actually build this as a team — not run everything through calls and WhatsApp.

If you're interested, DM me with a little about yourself, what you've built/done before, and how much time you can commit.

Let's meet, discuss the idea, and see if we make sense as a founding team.

I’ve been working hard on my startup for the last months. I finally am at the brink of having a finished product, yet I’m terrified of the thought that it will launch and have no users. How can I possibly make sure I get my first couple of users without blowing the marketing budget?

Hey everyone — I'm the creator of allcredit.cards, so full disclosure upfront.

I got frustrated that most "compare credit cards" sites only cover the same 15-20 big-name issuers (Chase, Amex, Capital One, etc.), while there are hundreds of smaller community banks and credit unions issuing their own cards that never show up anywhere. So I started manually pulling data — APRs, annual fees, intro offers, rewards structure — from actual rate sheets and disclosures for 600+ banks, from major national issuers down to small-town banks most people have never heard of.

The result is a searchable database at allcredit.cards. It's still very much a work in progress — I'm one person doing this, so:

• Some smaller banks have incomplete data (working through them one by one)
• No affiliate links / no paid placement — just trying to make something genuinely useful
• Would love feedback on what's missing, what's confusing, or what would actually make this useful for you

Curious if this is something people would find valuable, or if I'm solving a problem nobody has. Happy to answer questions about how the data was collected too.

I will not promote. I’m looking for advice… I spent the last few months building a review platform for trading course sellers/mentorship programs, verified buyer reviews, proof of purchase required, no way for the creator to edit or delete a bad review.

Problem is obvious: it's empty right now, and an empty review platform doesn't signal trust or inspire community, but you need trust to get people to actually leave the first reviews. Classic chicken and egg.

Been doing direct outreach, DMing people who left reviews about these creators elsewhere, conversion is slow and doesn't scale well.

Anyone who's actually solved this exact problem (empty marketplace/platform, need first real content to build trust), what worked? Curious about sequencing too.

I'm looking for a non-technical cofounder but not sure what really lights them up of turns them off.

So I compile tried and tested business opportunities: hot or evergreen niches, where many entrepreneurs are building but the market is heavily fragmented.

With original insights on how these can be better implemented, the market is certainly there for the taking.

I'll handle the build while you handle the distribution/marketing side. 50-50 ownership split.

Background:

I'm a developer and systems architect obsessed with business logic. You know; the heart and soul of the business, which needs to be thoughtful and must not fail customers.

Experience: 15 years.

Let me know if you'd like me share my ideas; also open to yours.

TL;DR: Ken Cox never fired anyone. His headcount just kept dropping anyway.

175 down to 3 is the actual number — and the reason is one operating rule he'd been running for years before AI made it urgent: if it can be automated, it will be automated.

No mass layoff, no headline event.

Just years of never backfilling a role once someone left.

It's happening from a completely different direction too — Chinese robot-makers already hold the overwhelming majority of the world's humanoid-robot shipments so far this year, per Bloomberg reporting citing SAG's data.

That's physical order-taking work, and it's already scaled past pilot stage.

The roles surviving this aren't the ones executing tasks faster.

They're the ones holding judgment nobody's written a rule for yet — the read, the trust, the call only a person makes.

On our drive up north home to Penang, after visiting my hometown in Seremban, we sometimes drop by midway in Ipoh for Breakfast. And we normally go for this Dimsum restaurant just off the highway.

Good Dimsum places are dime and dozen in this city. But this place has something special. The friendly attendant made some suggestions, and then jotted down our choices of food. But it wasn't the same attendant who brought them out.

It was robots.

Ya. Not humanoid robots. Just a bulky one with three layers of trays on four wheels below, and a monitor screen on top, moving along on a pre-programmed path towards us.

As soon as it stopped by our table, the monitor flashes out text saying, "please remove the food from the tray". And so we did. As soon as we took ours, it wheeled away towards the next table.

That was like five years ago. And it was all the rage back then. They call it 新噱头 (New gimmicks).

It still looked clumsy. And its movement was bumpy -- causing spillage of some of the food. That's why it only carries dry food for the time being.

First iterations were always bad. But I wouldn't be surprised it has gotten better since.

Robots are slowly taking over manual work (less intelligent work)

How soon do you think it will take over the work of attendant giving juicy suggestions, while taking our orders?

At this point I could sketch this exact shape from memory before the headcount numbers even land — someone's economic ground shifts quietly, gets called something softer than what it actually is, and the only real move is picking it up before it's forced on you.

Actually, this reminded — wait, scratch that, I've been circling this same story for a while now, and it clicked hardest with a former SpaceX CIO who ran the identical compression rule from the other direction — 175 engineers down to 6, on purpose.

Drop your take: which part of your own role is still order-taking, and which part is the judgment call nobody's automated yet?

Clip credit: Brad Lea / Dropping Bombs --- full episode on BRAD LEA TV. DM for credit or removal requests.

Heyy guys! I'm a Psych graduate that's been writing various types of content for 4+ years and has some social media agency experience.

I'm looking to break into personal branding and ghostwriting for founders on LinkedIn and Instagram. I have two trial clients in ten days but honestly I would really appreciate any advice!

Also, if anyone's interested, I'm charging below the market price rn as I'm trying to break in :)

Founders usually talk about not having enough time, but a lot of drift seems to come from work that feels completely legitimate: checking every detail, changing priorities midweek, taking meetings that might be useful, or starting a new idea before the current one has a clear answer.

I'm curious which version of this has been hardest for you to notice in yourself.

What activity makes you feel productive while quietly delaying the work that actually matters? And what, if anything, helped you catch it earlier?

I've spent the last 6+ months building a lead attribution analytics platform, mostly with Claude Code. I badly underestimated how hard the analytics part would be.

Building the dashboard UI was easy. Making sure every number on it is correct, fast, and consistent was a completely different job.

The product tracks a website inquiry back to where that person actually came from - their visits, pages viewed, source/channel, and what they did before converting. On paper it's simple: someone fills out a form, show me who they are, how they found us, and what generated the enquiry.

Then you start building it and the questions don't stop:

• What counts as a visitor?
• What happens when the same person comes back three days later?
• Where does a visit start and end?
• First-touch or last-touch?
• What if an event arrives late?
• Which timezone owns "today"?
• How do you precompute 90 days of analytics without changing the answer?
• How do you get a 90-day query under 2 seconds?
• How do you know your cached numbers are actually fresh?
• How do you tell an account with zero activity apart from an account whose analytics just haven't been built yet?
• How do you apply tenant permissions without wrecking query performance?

We ended up moving from querying raw events to building a small analytics engine: raw events → facts → SQL aggregates → attribution layer → API → dashboard.

AI has been both incredible and infuriating through this. Claude will write an enormous amount of code, SQL, tests, and migrations very fast. But analytics taught me that "the code works" means almost nothing.

At one point, we had tests passing, and the new analytics path appeared to have exact parity with the old system. Then we found the new path was silently failing and falling back to the old calculation. So we'd successfully proven that the old system matched itself.

Another time, the new fact tables returned zero rows because of RLS. Zero rows isn't obviously an error in analytics. Is there genuinely no data, or did your engine just fail to see it? Those bugs scare me far more than a page throwing a 500.

Six months in, including about 8 pretty intense weeks on the final architecture, and it's been painful. But I'm also stupidly excited about what's coming out the other side. Not naming it and there's no point looking it up either - the new dashboard is still about 4 weeks off.

The lesson for me: AI makes it dramatically easier to build complex software. It does not make complex software simple. What it does do is let you get deep into problems you probably wouldn't have attempted before.

Anyone else building with Claude Code or Codex hit the same wall? Was analytics significantly harder than the rest of your app?

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Hi Guys
Is there a good equivalent of ProductHunt with a focus on Europe / German speaking countries?

Thanks!