Founders think that marketing will solve everything. But that's just part of the go-to-market strategy. You need to have product-market fit as well; if the MVP
doesn't solve a major pain point you won't get anywhere no matter how much high-quality marketing you do.
Founders will rarely admit this, because admitting that the idea sucks would hurt their egos. It's easier to just say that the startup would've succeeded if they only had someone good at marketing.
I say this as a technical founder myself, who made this mistake.
Also, from a brief look, your product just seems fake. The AI voice and video, the promises of offering incredible benefits, lack of focus on a particular use case.
Well, this all sounded good until you claimed the product is fake. None of what is on the landing page is fake. This isn't my first product, I'm young but i've been building for a long time. I know better than to deceive people and I'm hoping none of this feels harsh but please don't call it fake.
robocat · 12h ago
Maybe learn to listen better. They didn't say it was fake. They said "Also, from a brief look, your product just seems fake".
Actionable honest feedback, and you're burning them for it. The feel is important, even if it is hard to quantify.
Their comment was helpful, and they don't have to spend 5 minutes of their precious time helping you. Graciousness and thankfulness can be learned.
abilafredkb · 20h ago
I'm genuinely confused and need some perspective from this community.
I spent months building Smarketly after watching my own products fail due to terrible marketing. The problem seemed obvious: technical founders (like me) can build great products but have no clue how to find customers. We waste time posting in random communities, write awkward outreach messages, and generally suck at getting our work seen.
So I built a tool that systematically solves this:
Finds communities where your actual customers hang out
Helps write personalized outreach that doesn't sound spammy
Generates marketing content including videos
Gives step-by-step strategies based on your stage
I thought through every pain point I experienced and addressed them. I validated the idea by talking to dozens of founders who all said "I need exactly this."
But here's what's driving me crazy: people won't sign up. I get traffic, positive feedback, "this looks great!" comments... then nothing. Maybe 2-3% convert to even trying the free tier.
I'm starting to question everything. Maybe the problem isn't as big as I thought? Maybe founders prefer struggling with marketing over using tools? Maybe I'm solving a "nice to have" instead of a "must have"?
I've been building products for years, but this disconnect between expressed need and actual behavior is breaking my brain. When people say they desperately need help with marketing but won't try a free tool that addresses their exact complaints, what's really going on?
Has anyone else experienced this gap between what people say they want and what they actually do? How do you tell the difference between real problems and problems people just like complaining about?
I'm genuinely lost here and could use some brutal honesty from this community.
jamesgill · 19h ago
Your startup...built a tool to help solve marketing problems for startups and...you're having trouble marketing it to startups? Did I hear you right?
bitpush · 19h ago
That's not odd at all? The mechanic who builds and understands cars, need not be the best driver.
Someone who makes tractors might not be the best farmer. Same for a piano and a musician.
Just because you can make a tool doesn't mean you are the best at using it.
jamesgill · 19h ago
Just because you can make a tool doesn't mean you are the best at using it.
Forget 'being best at using'; has the tool worked for you at all? In this case, the answer is no. So why would I buy it, then?
abilafredkb · 19h ago
You're absolutely right, and I appreciate the honesty. The tool hasn't actually worked for me yet - I've been so focused on building features and trying to help others that I haven't spent nearly enough time learning to use it myself properly.
That's probably the real problem. I'm asking people to trust a marketing tool when I'm clearly still figuring out marketing myself.
I think I need to step back, actually use my own product consistently for a few months, and get good at this before expecting anyone else to believe in it.
Thanks for calling that out - sometimes you need someone to state the obvious thing you're avoiding.
No comments yet
ahazred8ta · 15h ago
He's got a plausibility argument that it should work; the jury is still out on whether it does work.
abilafredkb · 19h ago
Sounds absurd but yes.... I'm not even sure how to explain it anymore. Maybe marketing is harder than i thought
owebmaster · 19h ago
What do you want, guaranteed success? Of course marketing is harder than you thought, starting by creating a good product. GPT wrappers for content creation was a thing 2 years ago.
abilafredkb · 19h ago
Fair point about expectations.I definitely thought this would be easier than it is.
On the GPT wrapper comment though, I built this because existing tools weren't solving my actual problem. Maybe I'm wrong about the market need, but it's not just repackaged ChatGPT.
Either way, you're right that good product execution is just the starting line, not the finish line.
npinsker · 19h ago
Sorry if this isn't helpful -- I wish you the best and I think it could work! -- but personally speaking, your website itself would cause me to bounce. To my eye it lacks design sense and feels AI-generated, and looks worse than what a human designer would deliver. If I can't trust your judgment in visual branding, I don't know if I can trust your judgment in product design. I'm sorry if that feels petty, but that's my honest reasoning.
abilafredkb · 19h ago
Doesn't sound petty at all. I've never had a good eye for good designs but I don't think that should invalidate my ideas. I understand your perspective also. In your case what should this look like. Not sure if i'm putting this right but if you could point me in the right direction a bit as a potential consumer i could work on it
npinsker · 18h ago
It doesn't invalidate your ideas, but it severely harms customer trust before you've even had the chance to build up any. It makes me worry that your backend code is also written by AI, without enough oversight from humans. What if your analytics code silently doesn't work also?
You can do a quick Google search to see what works for your competitors. From mine, https://www.blaze.ai/ has a creative and effective homepage.
abilafredkb · 18h ago
yeah, the landing page looks good
owebmaster · 18h ago
yours is indeed much better, but the benefits are overestimated (or plain fraud):
get 10k followers
5x your clients
Rank #1 on Google
Save 10 hours/week
thanks. I'll check it out and see what I can do with it
pyuser314 · 19h ago
Your product should find you customers.
abilafredkb · 19h ago
It definitely should. That's where my frustration comes from. It does everything right but people will just not sign up
al2o3cr · 19h ago
You're trying to market a tool that's supposed to solve "how to market your thing" and the marketing isn't working - are you using the tool?
abilafredkb · 19h ago
yes I do. I use it on reddit like a lot. Its mostly what keeps my reddit active while being reasonably helpful and non spammy. I'm just not getting why people do not sign up. I've followed lots of tips, read lots of resources online and after demoing to a feel people they find it extremely helpful, but it's just not gaining momentum as i expected
abilafredkb · 19h ago
For those of you who've been through this - what would you actually do in my position? I've got a working product that took months to build, some positive feedback, but clearly something fundamental is wrong with my approach.
Should I:
Scrap the current positioning and start over with customer interviews?
Focus on just one specific use case instead of trying to solve "marketing" broadly?
Give up on the product and treat this as an expensive learning experience?
Double down on finding the right communities/channels I haven't tried yet?
I'm torn between "keep iterating" and "cut losses and move on." The hardest part is I genuinely believe this solves a real problem because it solved MY problem, but maybe my problem isn't as common as I thought.
Any advice from founders who've been in similar situations? How do you know when to pivot vs. when to persist? And if you pivot, how do you figure out what direction to go?
I'm at the point where I need concrete next steps rather than more analysis paralysis.
f30e3dfed1c9 · 12h ago
> I genuinely believe this solves a real problem because it solved MY problem
Evidently not.
herbst · 19h ago
Honestly I don't waste any time on 'promotion' via social media for my projects. I try to be more specific, and when I do social media I make sure I actually have something to say.
However I tried to try your product.
1. Personal pricing makes it sound like I am going to pay more than I should
2. 'Failed to save brand. Please try again.' and no error message is where I went stuck. After you IMO already asked way to many questions for a onboarding
abilafredkb · 19h ago
Oooh, I kinda felt personalized pricing would really help founders out there and cater for the needs of different founders since i don't want everyone paying the same price especially if they're just starting out and aren't making any money.
2. I'm not sure why that happened but i'll look into it. There isn't really any onboarding, it's just for calculating the pricing and it's just got enough important questions to understand the business better to give a well deserved price
abilafredkb · 19h ago
EDIT: I fixed the issue in adding brands. You could give that a go again
herbst · 18h ago
- can't create AI campaigns, nothing happens when I click the button
- AI content is very generic, images even more so. Storyline, Strategy, ... All sound very ai'ish and barely focused.
- it just feels undone, and like a test thing with rough corners
I am definitely not your target audience. For basic AI marketing I just built that into my projects myself.
However I feel very lost in your tool, it just generates semi random, semi relevant boilerplate texts.
Also the point where you ask for my social media passwords to 'save them in your vault' i have red flags waving.
abilafredkb · 18h ago
can't create AI campaigns, nothing happens when I click the button: ans: most of the functionalities lies in the integrations. To create a campaign you'd have to connect some social media accounts
it just feels undone, and like a test thing with rough corners: ans: yes its not complete yet. Not fully but most of the functionalities do work. Only if you understand them
This isn't basic ai marketing. Maybe you did not describe the brand enough to tailor the content. That's what i found out from experimenting.
The tool is very early and maybe i'd have to document the features properly.
PS: "Also the point where you ask for my social media passwords to 'save them in your vault' i have red flags waving." - this wasn't supposed to go to production yet but nothing shady here
ryanwaggoner · 12h ago
OK, I rarely comment here anymore, but your post caught my eye so I spent a few mins checking out the site. Here are my honest thoughts:
1. I really admire you posting here looking for feedback and taking it with an open mind, without getting defensive. Not an easy thing to do!
2. You've built and launched something, which is way more than most people. Be proud of yourself.
3. The majority of successful startups were once where you are now. This is what it looks like to be pre-PMF.
4. I agree with most of the other feedback here: there's something that's off about your overall visual design. I know that's vague, but to me it feels like a template design, which isn't a bad thing, but parts of it feel like the boilerplate copy on a template that you didn't bother to change. My advice: go look at 100 homepages for B2B SaaS companies in your space, and get a feel for which ones are good and which ones aren't. This is more art than science tbh.
5. There's way too many animations going on for me. You've got the page title that's changing the browser tab constantly, that annoying chat thing in the nav bar, your typing animation in the headline, etc.
6. Social proof is powerful, but can backfire. "7 people signed up this week" is not comforting to me. Nor is a list of startups using the app that I've never heard of.
7. Too many calls to action. Do you want me to put in my email? Click that chat thing? Click to meet June? Schedule a demo? Calculate my pricing?
8. I don't like the personalized pricing thing. It just feels like work, and an immediate signal that this is going to be expensive. Plus the pricing flow has 8 steps! I'd be shocked if hardly anyone finishes it, especially since step 3 has a scary empty text box that wants to know about my business. Why do you need that to figure out how much this costs? My advice: just do two pricing tiers and have a "enterprise: contact us" tier as well to cover anything else. I still have no idea what your pricing is, but my gut would be that this should cost like $29-99 / month on the starter tier, and around 2-3x that on the higher tier.
9. This product feels like it's trying to do way too much. You've got eight features listed there, and most of them are competing with entire huge startups. I'd really figure out what your core differentiator is, and just focus on that. The rest of these features should mostly come via integrations, imo. I don't feel super strongly about that though, maybe these features are fine, but the marketing here makes this product feel complicated. Make it feel super simple.
10. Who is your target audience? Startups? Way too broad. Pick a niche. This ties into #9 below. What single core feature can you offer a hungry niche audience?
11. The "from the founder" section...sorry man, but you should rethink this. That picture isn't great for this (weird expression and wearing a tux?), and why are there five stars shown? That's what I mean when I say it feels like a template where the default content hasn't been fixed.
12. Your domain name and the "frederick@buzzchat.site" email both scream red flags to me. Smarketly isn't the worst startup name I've ever heard, but you need the .com (or .ai or something else that legit startups are using right now), and your email should be "support@smarketly.com" or whatever. Similarly, it's not fair, but unless your target market is startups in Ghana, that phone number is doing you more harm than good. I'd drop it entirely; your target audience is unlikely to call you.
13. Drop all those footer links that go nowhere. They just make this seem unfinished or something.
So, if it were me, what would I actually DO at this point?
1. It sounds like you've had some conversations with your audience, so that's good. Keep doing that.
2. Drastically simplify this homepage. You should end up with about a third as much as what you have here. Make it super simple, get rid of all the stuff I mentioned above that is hurting the initial impression, and make your call to action super clear and singular.
3. If your target audience is companies that would already have a website or social media (which I would think they would), then I would consider having your CTA be letting them drop in their website or social media accounts, and then you crawl that in the background and build them some demo content. Not easy to execute, but it makes it super easy for them to immediately see the value of your product. You could do a thing where you generate five pieces of content, show them the first two, and blur out the last three unless they drop in their email for a free trial.
4. Make it dead simple to understand this product and get immediate value from it. You're selling automation, but right now your landing page just makes it seem like figuring this out and setting it up is going to be MORE work, not less. What would it look like if I could spend literally 60 seconds setting this up, and then never touch it again? That might not be feasible, but it might be useful as a brainstorming exercise.
5. Remember that what you're trying to do here is HARD. Creating a product like this is not easy, and getting actual customers to enter their credit card and give you money is even harder. Adjust your expectations, and decide if this is something you really want to grind on for months.
OK, that was a lot! I hope some of it helps. You can drop me an email if you want to chat more, my email is in my profile.
Good luck!
abilafredkb · 5h ago
This was a lot of good info.. Thank you so much and i'll definitely work on them
Founders will rarely admit this, because admitting that the idea sucks would hurt their egos. It's easier to just say that the startup would've succeeded if they only had someone good at marketing.
I say this as a technical founder myself, who made this mistake.
Also, from a brief look, your product just seems fake. The AI voice and video, the promises of offering incredible benefits, lack of focus on a particular use case.
I recommend listening to this podcast https://www.gettacklebox.com/podcast
Actionable honest feedback, and you're burning them for it. The feel is important, even if it is hard to quantify.
Their comment was helpful, and they don't have to spend 5 minutes of their precious time helping you. Graciousness and thankfulness can be learned.
Finds communities where your actual customers hang out Helps write personalized outreach that doesn't sound spammy Generates marketing content including videos Gives step-by-step strategies based on your stage
I thought through every pain point I experienced and addressed them. I validated the idea by talking to dozens of founders who all said "I need exactly this." But here's what's driving me crazy: people won't sign up. I get traffic, positive feedback, "this looks great!" comments... then nothing. Maybe 2-3% convert to even trying the free tier. I'm starting to question everything. Maybe the problem isn't as big as I thought? Maybe founders prefer struggling with marketing over using tools? Maybe I'm solving a "nice to have" instead of a "must have"? I've been building products for years, but this disconnect between expressed need and actual behavior is breaking my brain. When people say they desperately need help with marketing but won't try a free tool that addresses their exact complaints, what's really going on? Has anyone else experienced this gap between what people say they want and what they actually do? How do you tell the difference between real problems and problems people just like complaining about? I'm genuinely lost here and could use some brutal honesty from this community.
Someone who makes tractors might not be the best farmer. Same for a piano and a musician.
Just because you can make a tool doesn't mean you are the best at using it.
Forget 'being best at using'; has the tool worked for you at all? In this case, the answer is no. So why would I buy it, then?
No comments yet
You can do a quick Google search to see what works for your competitors. From mine, https://www.blaze.ai/ has a creative and effective homepage.
https://landerx.framer.website/
Scrap the current positioning and start over with customer interviews? Focus on just one specific use case instead of trying to solve "marketing" broadly? Give up on the product and treat this as an expensive learning experience? Double down on finding the right communities/channels I haven't tried yet?
I'm torn between "keep iterating" and "cut losses and move on." The hardest part is I genuinely believe this solves a real problem because it solved MY problem, but maybe my problem isn't as common as I thought. Any advice from founders who've been in similar situations? How do you know when to pivot vs. when to persist? And if you pivot, how do you figure out what direction to go? I'm at the point where I need concrete next steps rather than more analysis paralysis.
Evidently not.
However I tried to try your product.
1. Personal pricing makes it sound like I am going to pay more than I should
2. 'Failed to save brand. Please try again.' and no error message is where I went stuck. After you IMO already asked way to many questions for a onboarding
2. I'm not sure why that happened but i'll look into it. There isn't really any onboarding, it's just for calculating the pricing and it's just got enough important questions to understand the business better to give a well deserved price
- AI content is very generic, images even more so. Storyline, Strategy, ... All sound very ai'ish and barely focused.
- it just feels undone, and like a test thing with rough corners
I am definitely not your target audience. For basic AI marketing I just built that into my projects myself.
However I feel very lost in your tool, it just generates semi random, semi relevant boilerplate texts.
Also the point where you ask for my social media passwords to 'save them in your vault' i have red flags waving.
it just feels undone, and like a test thing with rough corners: ans: yes its not complete yet. Not fully but most of the functionalities do work. Only if you understand them
This isn't basic ai marketing. Maybe you did not describe the brand enough to tailor the content. That's what i found out from experimenting.
The tool is very early and maybe i'd have to document the features properly.
PS: "Also the point where you ask for my social media passwords to 'save them in your vault' i have red flags waving." - this wasn't supposed to go to production yet but nothing shady here
1. I really admire you posting here looking for feedback and taking it with an open mind, without getting defensive. Not an easy thing to do!
2. You've built and launched something, which is way more than most people. Be proud of yourself.
3. The majority of successful startups were once where you are now. This is what it looks like to be pre-PMF.
4. I agree with most of the other feedback here: there's something that's off about your overall visual design. I know that's vague, but to me it feels like a template design, which isn't a bad thing, but parts of it feel like the boilerplate copy on a template that you didn't bother to change. My advice: go look at 100 homepages for B2B SaaS companies in your space, and get a feel for which ones are good and which ones aren't. This is more art than science tbh.
5. There's way too many animations going on for me. You've got the page title that's changing the browser tab constantly, that annoying chat thing in the nav bar, your typing animation in the headline, etc.
6. Social proof is powerful, but can backfire. "7 people signed up this week" is not comforting to me. Nor is a list of startups using the app that I've never heard of.
7. Too many calls to action. Do you want me to put in my email? Click that chat thing? Click to meet June? Schedule a demo? Calculate my pricing?
8. I don't like the personalized pricing thing. It just feels like work, and an immediate signal that this is going to be expensive. Plus the pricing flow has 8 steps! I'd be shocked if hardly anyone finishes it, especially since step 3 has a scary empty text box that wants to know about my business. Why do you need that to figure out how much this costs? My advice: just do two pricing tiers and have a "enterprise: contact us" tier as well to cover anything else. I still have no idea what your pricing is, but my gut would be that this should cost like $29-99 / month on the starter tier, and around 2-3x that on the higher tier.
9. This product feels like it's trying to do way too much. You've got eight features listed there, and most of them are competing with entire huge startups. I'd really figure out what your core differentiator is, and just focus on that. The rest of these features should mostly come via integrations, imo. I don't feel super strongly about that though, maybe these features are fine, but the marketing here makes this product feel complicated. Make it feel super simple.
10. Who is your target audience? Startups? Way too broad. Pick a niche. This ties into #9 below. What single core feature can you offer a hungry niche audience?
11. The "from the founder" section...sorry man, but you should rethink this. That picture isn't great for this (weird expression and wearing a tux?), and why are there five stars shown? That's what I mean when I say it feels like a template where the default content hasn't been fixed.
12. Your domain name and the "frederick@buzzchat.site" email both scream red flags to me. Smarketly isn't the worst startup name I've ever heard, but you need the .com (or .ai or something else that legit startups are using right now), and your email should be "support@smarketly.com" or whatever. Similarly, it's not fair, but unless your target market is startups in Ghana, that phone number is doing you more harm than good. I'd drop it entirely; your target audience is unlikely to call you.
13. Drop all those footer links that go nowhere. They just make this seem unfinished or something.
So, if it were me, what would I actually DO at this point?
1. It sounds like you've had some conversations with your audience, so that's good. Keep doing that.
2. Drastically simplify this homepage. You should end up with about a third as much as what you have here. Make it super simple, get rid of all the stuff I mentioned above that is hurting the initial impression, and make your call to action super clear and singular.
3. If your target audience is companies that would already have a website or social media (which I would think they would), then I would consider having your CTA be letting them drop in their website or social media accounts, and then you crawl that in the background and build them some demo content. Not easy to execute, but it makes it super easy for them to immediately see the value of your product. You could do a thing where you generate five pieces of content, show them the first two, and blur out the last three unless they drop in their email for a free trial.
4. Make it dead simple to understand this product and get immediate value from it. You're selling automation, but right now your landing page just makes it seem like figuring this out and setting it up is going to be MORE work, not less. What would it look like if I could spend literally 60 seconds setting this up, and then never touch it again? That might not be feasible, but it might be useful as a brainstorming exercise.
5. Remember that what you're trying to do here is HARD. Creating a product like this is not easy, and getting actual customers to enter their credit card and give you money is even harder. Adjust your expectations, and decide if this is something you really want to grind on for months.
OK, that was a lot! I hope some of it helps. You can drop me an email if you want to chat more, my email is in my profile.
Good luck!