For our next campaign we want to test whether addressing common sales objections earlier could bring in more qualified demo requests but one concern that comes up is how much work setup might involve and pricing is harder to address because sometimes the issue is the cost itself and other times people just aren't seeing enough value.

We're thinking about adding a section to our landing page that addresses one of these concerns while keeping the rest of the campaign the same and our sales team would also track whether the objection still comes up during calls but the only thing we're unsure about is whether bringing it up so early might create doubts that weren't there in the first place.

I want to share this because I remember the feeling clearly, and I’ve seen a lot of people here describe the exact same wall.

I spent 5 months building Targela, a goal-planning app, alongside a full-time job and a master’s degree. No budget, no audience, no connections in the startup world. When the app was finally ready, I launched it and nothing happened. just friends as users.

I spent a few days thinking through every channel. I genuinely thought I had no moves left.

Then I just started posting on Reddit. Not ads. Not “check out my app” posts. Just honest stuff: why I built it, what I was struggling with, what I’d learned, asking people about their goals. I replied to every comment. When someone described a problem Targela was built to solve, I mentioned it once, honestly, and answered their question first.

Less than two months later: 5 users, all free, none of whom I know personally.

I know 5 is nothing. These 5 people found the app because they read something I wrote and it meant something to them. No money spent.

Still a long way to go. But “0 to 5 with no budget” felt worth sharing for anyone else staring at that same wall. So just trust the process.

But how did you get your first users?

Technical founder, B2B SaaS, live. Ads bring me a few trials. Two months of posting on LinkedIn and X, 3 times a week: a bit of reach, then nothing. Zero organic trials.

So here's where I've landed: at this stage, organic is a vanity game. Ads give me data in a week, organic gives me impressions and no users. Every "build in public" story I read seems to come from someone who already had an audience.

I'd like to be wrong about this. If organic actually worked for you early, with no audience to start with, what did you do that I'm not doing?

Most Ramp breakdowns stop at the business model: free software, card revenue. This one maps where Ramp reaches buyers instead.

• Co-CEO Eric Glyman’s LinkedIn posts, which show up as sources in AI answers
• Creator reviews on YouTube
• A finance library that brings 47% of US traffic
• Help center and pricing pages AI tools quote

The exposed side: competitors write most “Ramp alternatives” pages, and Perplexity is Ramp’s weakest AI engine.

If you’re early-stage, which of these would you run first?

There is much growth advice online that it is hard to know which growth advice actually works outside of theory. I am curious, about experiences, especially small experiments that did not require a big budget. What did you try, what happened and would you recommend this growth advice to someone starting from scratch?

Every pitch deck and guru thread claims automation growth is dead or alive depending on what they're selling, and the middle is silent. The platforms crack down harder every year, yet services keep signing people up.. if i run or pay for one this year, is the audience still real people, and what convinced u if it wasn't bot inflation??

I watched a 62-second AI-generated trailer that turned AI lab executives into desert warlords. There's a convoy racing through the sand, one character manning a mounted gun, another wearing pilot goggles, and a llama standing in the background for no apparent reason.

The atmosphere was convincing enough to keep me watching, although the vehicle logos turned into gibberish when I paused the video.

I tried recreating a few desert-chase concepts with Seedance 2.5 through Dreamina, but my results were much rougher. For transparency, Dreamina is my product, so I'm interested in honest feedback rather than presenting this as an independent review.

It got me thinking about creative testing. If a team could turn a rough campaign idea into a short visual prototype in an afternoon, they might be able to compare concepts before committing to a full production. The challenge is whether the generated footage is consistent enough to communicate the idea without distracting viewers.

For growth teams, how do you currently validate video ad concepts before spending on production? Would AI-generated prototypes be useful for testing hooks and overall direction, or would imperfect visuals make the results too unreliable to learn from?

Been wondering something for a while:

Why is it so difficult to make an n8n chat widget match your brand without digging into code?

n8n makes building AI workflows easier, but its default chat interface can feel limiting when you're putting an agent on a real website.

So today we're sharing N8N Chat UI, a no-code builder for branded AI chat widgets.

You can design the widget, preview it live, and connect it to your n8n workflow.

• ⁠Custom themes and layouts
• ⁠Streaming, voice, and file uploads
• ⁠Popup or embedded widgets
• ⁠Plugins for WordPress, Webflow, Shopify, and Wix

It also includes developer tools for custom integrations and managed widget features.

The goal is to make it easier to turn n8n workflows into polished chat experiences without building the interface from scratch.

We just launched on Product Hunt.

We'd love feedback from this community: what feature or integration would make an n8n chat widget more useful for your projects?

Please show your support on PH → https://www.producthunt.com/posts/n8n-chat-ui-3

Drop your website below 👇

I'm building Magnet Engine, an AI Instagram appointment setter that finds potential customers, analyzes their profiles, generates personalized DMs, and helps turn conversations into booked calls.
Before pushing it further, I want to test it with real businesses and get feedback from people who could actually use it.
Here's what I'm offering:
•I'll check out your website and understand your offer.

•I'll find 10 potential leads who could be a good fit.

•I'll generate 10 personalized DMs based on their actual profiles.

No payment, no commitment. Just a chance to see what the software can do for your business.
If you like the results and want to take it further, I'm also testing a $200 offer to send 3,000 cold Instagram DMs over a month, including lead research, personalized outreach, reply handling, and call booking.
The goal is to help you get more sales calls, but results will depend on your offer, audience, and campaign.

Who should comment? Coaches, agencies, consultants, and anyone selling a service through sales calls.

Drop your website below, and I'll pick a few businesses to start with.

saw this story on x, Nadia zueva is a programmer building aesty.ai, an ai fashion app with around 560 paying users, and she treats marketing like a ladder where each rung costs more than the last.

trendwatch, basically free. claude digs through competitors for formats that are landing right now, weighing saves and shares over likes, and only from small to mid accounts where the format is doing the work, not the follower count

carousels, cents per post. test which message and which look the audience responds to. save rate is the tell

video, real money and time. made with kling 3 or seedance 2, and only for messages that already won as carousels

distribution through postiz, driven by claude code

her point about why organic "doesn't work" for a lot of founders: they start at rung 3. they spend the budget on a perfect video for an idea nobody validated, it flops, and they quit.

a message that flops as a carousel will flop as a video too, just for 5x the cost.

by the time she makes a video it isn't a bet anymore.

basically she is doing it in the opposite way, cool growth hack imo. at this stage anything that can keep us going is going to give us return

Hi,

As we know that the internet has changed dramatically since AI tools became publicly available. Until 2023, the formula was pretty straightforward. Rank your website on Google's first page, and boom.. Thousands of leads per month.

[Note: If you've outsourced your marketing, make sure your agency follows these methods. Otherwise, you're paying for marketing while missing out on opportunities to grow your business.]

But now, search methods have diversified. People are searching for businesses on ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and other platforms. Customers' journey doesn't start with Google only.

So, if you want more customers, here's what you need to do.

________

1. Get your business discovered everywhere: Don't depend entirely on Google rankings. Build visibility across Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and the other platforms your potential customers use.

Why it matters: when people search for a service, compare businesses, or ask AI for recommendations, you want your business to have a chance to be discovered. AI recommendations are considered more seriously than even influencers.

__________

2. Now, You Must Understand how to get your business mentioned and cited: Look at the image attached. ChatGPT and Google AI Mode mention many of the same brands, but they cite different sources.

Reddit and Wikipedia account for 50.7% of the citation share shown for ChatGPT across the five sources listed, while YouTube and Facebook account for 37.7% of Google AI Mode's citation share across its five listed sources.

This gives you a starting point. Find out which websites and platforms are being cited for questions related to your industry, then build your presence on the relevant ones.

_____________

3. Publish content that people actually want to read: Answer customer questions, explain common problems, compare solutions, share practical advice, and demonstrate your expertise.

For example, if you run a marketing agency, explain why a business website gets traffic but generates no leads. If you run a law firm, answer common questions potential clients have before contacting a lawyer.

Note: Publish only helpful content, answering your customers' queries or genuinely helping them. Generic and salsy content is marked spam. aka it has 0 value.

________

4. Turn content into a customer acquisition channel: When you consistently publish useful information across relevant platforms, you create more opportunities for potential customers to find you through search engines, social media, online discussions, and AI-generated answers.

________

5. Think about what your business could look like: Imagine someone discovers your business through Google, comes across your advice on Reddit, watches one of your YouTube videos, and then sees ChatGPT mention your company when looking for a provider.

Instead of depending on a single source of leads, your business has multiple opportunities to get discovered and considered.

That doesn't guarantee leads or AI recommendations, but it gives you more ways to reach potential customers.

__________

The takeaway: 

• Don't just focus on ranking your website. Build your visibility across the platforms.
• Don't treat social media as a store where you constantly post offers and try to sell to people with buying intent.
• Build trust with your audience. Genuinely help them without expecting anything in return.
• Be visible across search engines and platforms like Google, ChatGPT, Gemini, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest.
• More organic social media followers mean greater brand visibility and more growth opportunities.

I hope this helps. Good luck!

____________________________

A bit about me: 15+ years of experience in marketing and sales. Worked with MNCs as well as startups. Earned 5-star reviews across different platforms for my exceptional work. 

__________________

I'm a second-year BCA student in Jaipur, and on the side I'm building a small esports brand and a few small YouTube channels — all organic so far, zero ad spend. Posting has been steady, and a few videos have done okay, but turning steady posting into actual growth feels like a different problem from just putting content out.

The part I'm stuck on: with no budget, what actually moved the needle for you early on? Was it narrowing to one niche instead of trying to cover everything? Was it a Shorts/clips funnel that fed the main content? Was it showing up in a community (Discord, Reddit, game forums) instead of just posting and hoping? Or was it something unglamorous, like fixing titles and thumbnails, or posting on a schedule people could rely on?

And the flip side: what turned out to be a waste of time? I don't want to keep guessing — I'd rather hear what worked for someone starting from near zero, and what you'd skip if you were starting again.

No links or names here, I'm just trying to learn what actually works before I spend more months on the wrong lever. What was the first thing that genuinely moved your numbers?

okay long post ahead

i do website and app development. i know $3670 is not a lot for the number of clients, but i started freelancing only a few months ago and this is how i got 8 clients in a single month without any ad service or paid ads.

what worked for me was visibility. it always worked. here’s everything i did, in detail.

i was spending almost 16 hours a day on all of this (and ofc skipping college classes). i’m not saying you should do that. but the first 2 weeks i was doing it just to figure out what works.

step 1: a portfolio that doesn’t look like AI

first i made a decent portfolio that shows what i can actually deliver. and see, it should not look like AI at all. this is where most people mess up. same purple gradient, same “Hi, I’m a passionate full-stack developer” hero, same 3 cards with emojis. clients have seen it a hundred times and they scroll past in 2 seconds.

what i did instead:

- only 4 projects of my previous work with clients, not more than that. each one has a one-line results which my previous clients got.

- wrote all the copy myself in simple readable english no fancy showoff keywords

- real screenshots, a live link for every project, and a 20 second screen recording on the best one

- one button only: “book a free 15 min call”. no 5 different contact options

- loads in under 2 seconds, so many people underestimate this. i tested it on my phone and other different devices, because most of the clients open links on their phone

step 2: discord (3 clients came from here)

i joined servers where my target clients actually talk: indie hacker servers, startup founder servers, no-code communities, shopify/ecom servers, and a few dev servers. i left the ones where it was only developers talking to developers, because developers don’t hire developers.

my approach:

1. read the #help and #feedback channels first, not #general
2. when someone posts with intent for hiring like “my site is slow” or “can anyone look at my landing page”, i actually opened their site and gave a real answer. like “your hero image is 4mb, compress it to webp and your load time drops, here’s the tool”
3. after 3-4 days of this, people started to recognise u in the community which is very essential
4. only then, if someone asked “who built this / can you help me with this”, i’d say “i build this kind of stuff, here’s my portfolio, happy to do a quick call”

i never dropped a link in the first message. never posted in #self-promo as my main strategy. helping first is what made people dm me.

my 2nd client from here literally dm’d me saying “you helped me in the server last week, can you just build it for me”. that’s the whole game.

step 3: X (1 client)

i followed around 80 founders and indie hackers who post “building in public” updates. every day i replied to their latest posts with something useful.

example: someone posted their landing page. i replied “your headline talks about your product, not what the customer gets. try ‘get X without Y’ and move the demo video above the fold. here’s what i’d change” and attached a quick screenshot.

at the end of some replies i’d add “you can dm me if you need any help with this”. not every reply. only where it made sense.

no threads, no “10 tips” posts, no cringe. just useful comments under the right people’s posts. my replies got seen by the founder and everyone scrolling the thread.

step 4: linkedin (1 client, but the best one)

this was the easiest one. i followed founders, startup ops people, and agency owners, then commented on posts where my clients could be found: someone hiring for a website, someone complaining about their developer, someone launching a product.

my rule was no “great post!” comments. every comment had to add one real point or answer a question. 3-4 lines max.

i also turned on notifications for about 20 founders so i could comment in the first 30 minutes of their post. early comments get way more visibility.

the founder who became my highest paying client ($900) first saw me because of a comment i left on someone else’s post. he checked my profile, my portfolio link was in the featured section, and he dm’d me the same day.

step 5: instagram (2 clients)

i searched keywords like “home business”, “handmade”, “cafe”, “clothing brand”, “home baker”, “boutique” and picked pages with 500 to 5k followers (big enough to have money, small enough that the owner reads the dms themselves) and also uses the google map techniques to find the businessess.

i never copy-pasted. i spent 2-3 minutes on each page and found one specific problem:

- link in bio goes nowhere

- they take orders only through dm

- no website at all, just a linktree

- google shows them but with no site

then i’d send something like: “hey, love your products. noticed you take all orders through dm, i build simple ordering websites for small brands like yours, i made one for a cafe recently. want me to send a quick example?”

i sent about 20 a day. around 1 in 10 replied. around 1 in 4 of those replies became a call. it’s low, but those clients were the easiest to close because the problem was obvious to them.

step 6: skool communities (1 client)

i joined tech and startup skool communities where founders hang out. for the first week i only helped. answered questions, gave free feedback on people’s landing pages, shared a few resources i actually use.

after that people started asking “wait, do you do this for clients?” that’s when i shared my work. the pitch was never me going to them, it was them asking me.

how i closed the clients

- every lead got a 15 min call. no long proposals up front

- on the call i always asked 3 things: what’s the goal of the site, are u really into it, what’s the deadline, what have you tried before

- after the call i sent a 1 page message to them with scope, price, timeline

- reply as fast as u can cause clients love the developers which is easier to work with them

how clients became retainers (the part nobody talks about)

one-time projects are a treadmill. you finish, get paid, and start from zero again. so many of my clients ended up on a monthly retainer, and i never pitched any of them. they stayed because of how the project went. i delivered fast, fixed bugs before they even noticed them, and kept their site running smoothly after launch.

what i learned

- be where your clients already hang out, don’t wait for them to find you

- provide value first, pitch second. always

- a small, specific portfolio beats a big generic one

- personalise every message, even if it’s just one line

- consistency matters more than any trick. i did this every single day for a month

if you’re starting out rn: pick one type of client (startups, local brands, whatever) and go deep on them instead of trying to be everything for everyone. simple, not easy.

ask me anything in the dm or comment below or any other idea, would be happy to help you.

you can check out my portfolio: https://www.shreyashtech.me

found this hack on x, check this out, Alex nguyen makes a lot of studytok slideshows and the tip that stood out to me is about slides 2 through 6, not slide 1.

the first slide gets all the attention, then the rest turn into labels. "step 1... step 2... the end." and that's where it starts go down…

his fix is making every slide a mini hook. same info, different line:

boring: "step 2: use active recall"

hooky: "step 2: the trick that feels harder but works 3x faster"

he has claude rewrite every slide so each one makes you want the next, under 12 words, casual, like a real person talking.

his example hook for slide 1 was "i failed every exam until a med student told me this."

then the images come from chatgpt and pinterest, the slides get built in canva, and everything gets scheduled in postiz.

should try myself or not?

The cheapest growth lever in AI search right now might be video. In our 1,000-query study, YouTube was cited far more than its rankings would suggest.

Anyone tested this?

Free live session on the wider picture with Guy Yalif (Webflow) on Wed 28 Oct.

The big part of the session with Guy Yalif, Webflow’s Chief Evangelist, on Wed 28 Oct: https://slatehq.com/workshop/how-ai-search-works

Been wondering something for a while:

Why do non-technical teams have to rely on code reviews or mockups to know if a website change is what they asked for?

You might trust the pull request, but it's hard to judge the result if you can't read code.

So today we're launching Ovren Live Preview, our attempt to make that easier.

It lets you describe a frontend change in plain words, preview it on your real page, and test it before your team merges the pull request.

• ⁠Describe the change
• ⁠Preview and test the page
• ⁠Request edits or approve
• ⁠Let developers review and merge

No localhost, install, or deployment needed.

We'd love feedback from this community: would seeing the real page before approving a change make you more confident in AI-generated code?

Please support on PH →

https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ovren-live-preview

I ran babylovegrowth for a full 30 days on one of my sites. Here’s the Babylovegrowth review.

What Babylovegrowth Actually Is:

It’s marketed as an all-in-one AI SEO + GEO autopilot. You connect your site, and it handles:

• Keyword research & content planning
• 30 AI-written articles per month
• Auto-publishing to WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Wix, etc.
• Basic technical audits
• Some tracking of brand mentions in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini

Price starts at expensive $99/month for the Grow plan.

Cons:

• Content quality is mediocre most articles still need heavy manual editing and often sound generic
• Backlink exchange feels like they just buy low-quality links from third-party.
• Trustpilot practices are shady - the company has been flagged for offering incentives for reviews, and the rating is suspended or marked as a breach of guidelines

TL:DR Ran BabyLoveGrowth for 30 days. Content is mediocre and needs some editing, but the real deal breaker is their Trustpilot guideline breaches and review incentives that permanently killed any trust I had in the company.

So I'm comparing this two chat support tools. Which one is better in your opinion?

Both seem pretty similar to be honest for price/quality?

I'm a developer, and I've spent a fair amount of time building my own SaaS, Sitewatch...

It's a website monitoring platform that goes beyond basic uptime checks. It monitors broken assets, SSL certificates, redirects, critical pages, etc. Basically, things that can break on a website even when the server is technically still up.

I genuinely think I've built something pretty decent.

But getting people to actually discover it? Fuck me, that's a different story 😂

I'm barely ranking on Google, organic traffic isn't where I'd like it to be, and I'm struggling to figure out where to focus my efforts.

And I keep catching myself doing what I know best: building more features instead of figuring out how to get people through the door.

So I'm curious to hear from other founders who've been in the same situation.

• How did you get your first real organic traffic?
• What actually worked for building backlinks without paying for a bunch of spammy ones?
• Are there communities worth participating in for developer-focused SaaS products?
• Would you focus on SEO, content, outreach, partnerships, or something completely different?

I'm not expecting some magical growth hack. I'm genuinely interested in what worked for you, especially if you started without an existing audience or a big marketing budget.

If you were in my position, with a working product but very little distribution, where would you start?

Creating a product is easier than ever.

But getting people to discover it, use it, and pay for it?

That's still hard.

You need to research competitors, find winning ideas, create enough ads to test, launch campaigns, and figure out what's actually working.

And then do it all over again.

We kept asking:

What if AI could handle the entire marketing workflow, from research to results?

So we built Fastlane 2.0.

An AI-powered marketing platform where you can:

• ⁠Research your brand and competitors
• ⁠Find trends and winning creative ideas
• ⁠Generate AI video and image ads
• ⁠Launch campaigns on Meta
• ⁠Publish content to TikTok, Instagram and YouTube
• ⁠Analyze results and create more of what works

It also comes with Senna, an AI agent that works alongside you throughout the process.

Instead of juggling multiple marketing tasks and tools, you get one workflow that learns from your results and helps you make smarter campaigns.

The goal is to help businesses test more ideas, create better ads, and spend less time managing marketing.

We launched Fastlane 2.0 on Product Hunt.

Curious: What's your biggest marketing challenge right now finding ideas, creating enough content, launching campaigns, or knowing what to scale?

Please show your support on PH → https://www.producthunt.com/posts/fastlane-2-0

Clay went from $1M to $100M ARR and now counts 17,000+ customers, including 80% of the Forbes AI 50. We broke the run into eight plays. A few that stood out:https://slatehq.com/teardowns/clay

• Naming a role. Clay coined “GTM engineer” and built the guides, job board and community around it.
• Creators doing the selling. YouTube and LinkedIn creators teach Clay workflows, and local Clay Clubs carry it offline.
• Answer-first pages. FAQ and guide pages earn about half of Clay’s AI citations.
• A gap it leaves open. Competitors write most of the “Clay alternatives” pages, so Clay doesn’t control that conversation.

Which of these would work for a company without Clay’s funding?

getting decent traffic from a couple launches this month, but we keep losing people between the signup form and actually getting them on a call.

right now it is just tally forms dumping into a google sheet, and then someone has to manually email a booking link. leads sit there for half a day before anyone replies, and by then people move on. our incubator has a deal for hubspot so we could just run forms and meetings in one spot, but i really do not want to waste two days setting up a whole system if it is total overkill for an early product.

anyone who used it early on, did having everything under one roof actually fix your drop-off, or did you just end up with a bloated tool you barely touched?

Have worked with 100s of founders and marketers to launch and scale their affiliate prgrams (full trasnparency I work at Rewradful which is a SaaS affiliate marketing softwrae) and almost everone expects affiliate marketing to behave like paid ads. They launch the program, recruit a few partners, wait 30 days, and when it doesn’t produce a spike in signups, they decide it’s too expensive or not working.

In the first couple of months, most startup affiliate programs are in validation mode, not growth mode. Early referrals usually come from existing customers, friendly creators, or people who already trust your product. You’re testing tracking, commissions, positioning, and figuring out whether anyone is actually willing to promote you. It’s not flashy, and it rarely looks profitable right away, but it’s laying the groundwork.

The real shift usually happens several months in. Blog posts start ranking. Reviews get picked up in niche communities. Affiliates optimize their own funnels and comparisons. Unlike paid ads, where traffic disappears the moment you stop spending, affiliate content keeps working in the background. That’s when things start to compound.

What ultimately determines profitability is retenrtion. A commission can look expensive in month one, but if that customer sticks around for a year, the math changes completely. In my experience, most SaaS affiliate programs don’t feel meaningfully profitable until somewhere between months three and six, and they often look much stronger after that.

Affiliate marketing isn’t a launch tactic. It’s an asset that matures. If you evaluate it like a short-term experiment, you’ll probably shut it down right before it starts working.

How long did it take others here to see real ROI from affiliates?

It's been over one year since I launched and it has been quite a journey. No exponential growth or huge user spikes but rather slow and steady growth. But in my opinion that is the best for building something actually valuable because you can react to user feedback along the way and constantly keep improving the app.

One thing changed recently:

I basically got all my users from reddit, by posting in relevant communities but in the last two months I did almost no posts and the app still grew further. That's actually the biggest success for me, because SEO is finally starting to pay off. This can develop into actual leverage because growth no longer depends on posting three times a week. I'm really curious where this will go...

Of course I will not stop here and I am already working on the next big update for IndieAppCircle which will benefit all the community. More is coming soon.

For those of you who don't know IndieAppCircle:

I've built IndieAppCircle, a platform where small app developers can upload their apps and other people can give them feedback in exchange for credits. I grew it by posting about it here on Reddit. It didn't explode or something but I managed to get some slow but steady growth.

For those of you who never heard about IndieAppCircle, it works like this:

• You can earn credits by testing indie apps (fun + you help other makers)
• You can use credits to get your own app tested by real people
• No fake accounts -> all testers are real users
• Test more apps -> earn more credits -> your app will rank higher -> you get more visibility and more testers/users

Since many people suggested it to me in the comments, I have also created a community for IndieAppCircle: r/IndieAppCircle (you can ask questions or just post relevant stuff there).

Currently, there are 4546 users, 5114 tests done and 1349 apps uploaded!

You can check it out here (it's totally free): https://www.indieappcircle.com/

I'm glad for any feedback/suggestions/roasts in the comments.

PS: I recently changed the UI a lot... Would also love to hear some feedback about that :)