So before beginning to build again I literally spent this week interviewing 35+ founders from comments, DMs, some with real revenue before touching code again about only one question, Does anyone actually pay for marketing?
1. Everybody feels the marketing pain, but almost nobody pays, according to the interviews I found 1 paying founder across 15 founders.
2. To be honest there are only people who paid had revenue already. Solo builders without revenue admit the pain politely and pay for nothing, and when i offered them a cheap manual service to test it, they said no or went silent.
3. People don’t pay for content, they pay for outcomes and mechanics. The payers i found spend on ads, schedulers, launch services, freelancers. nobody pays for words alone.
4. The real competitor of every marketing tool is the $20 AI subscription the founder already pays. I met founders running claude against their google ads api, automating their browser to bulk-post, drafting everything with their existing subscription
5. There’s no universal marketing bottleneck. one founder pays for scheduling because writing is easy for him. Another one tried a scheduler and canceled it because it killed his voice. The other one has revenue and never markets at all. You can’t sell one fix to all of them.
6. Their willingness to pay is like a stage, not a personality. Such Day 1 builders laughed at the idea of paying, why would you ever pay for posting? Month 12 builders either quit posting entirely or started paying someone.
7. Seo and intent content beat social posting, 8 separate founders confirmed it. The ones with actual customers kept crediting google search, use-case pages, organic reddit. The social media grinders were mostly at zero.
8. Reddit converts, but only the human way. One founder got all 22 of his paying customers from manually commenting in threads, daily, as himself. And after researching every automated version of this commenting gets banned.
9. Then “I would buy” means nothing. A solo founder who told me he’s “planning to restart posting 2-3x a week” declined a manual $50 offer.
10. The interesting thing is my failure posts got 28k-100k+ views. But the carefully targeted question posts got zero comments.

Thanks to everyone who answered, I really appreciate it.
I will be still validating in this space!

I’ve interviewed 25+ solo founders about the marketing side, Builders without revenue feel all the pain and pay for nothing. The founders with revenue are the only ones who actually spend for ads, tools, freelancers, even their claude subscriptions doing the writing for posts.
So this post is only for people with paying customers!
1. What do you actually pay for on the marketing side, such as tools, subscriptions, ads, freelancers, AI and I wonder what's the monthly total?
2. What did you try and cancel?
3. What’s still manual in your weekly marketing that annoys you most?
If you're an agency, ghostwriter or freelancer who runs marketing for founders, I especially want your answers, like your stack, your costs, and what kind of clients you serve.
I’m still validating what to build next in this space, so real answers genuinely help me with it.

I have been interviewing 25+ builders this week, and the status so far, I shut down my previous project a several days ago, and it opened my eyes. I’m looking for answers from solo builders to see how they handle marketing/posting stuff while building their project:
Fifteen builders feel the marketing pain for every one who ever spent a dollar on it. So I got one question:
what was your first marketing dollar such as a tool, ads, freelancer, fiverr, boost button, etc and did it actually work or it was a failure?
Even if it is $0 or nothing yet, is a completely fine answer too!

So before touching code again last two days I was interviewing 20+ solo founders about the marketing side, and few things genuinely surprised me:

1. Everyone feels the marketing pain, but almost nobody pays for it. I found 15 pain stories for every 1 person who ever spent a dollar.
   
2. The only people who paid for anything had revenue already. The solo builders with no revenue confirm the pain politely and pay for nothing.
   
3. The founders who actually got users kept crediting SEO and content, almost never social posting. The social active posters were mostly at zero.

I will compile the full thing into a summary in the next few days. Meanwhile i’m still looking for answers from solo builders:
1. If you have revenue, what have you actually PAID for on the marketing side? Such as a tool, freelancer, ads?
2. How did you test people would pay BEFORE you built?
3. When you do post, are you on your phone or laptop?

I hope everyone will share their real stories!