Startup Marketing 101 - skeptrune's corner

skeptrune's corner

SubscribeSign in

Startup Marketing 101<br>I was pretty bad at marketing as a founder, but I've learned a few things since.

skeptrune<br>Feb 24, 2026

Share

Everyone in startups has heard the advice: “don’t tunnel vision on product, make sure you do marketing.” If advice were a horse, that one would have been beaten dead a decade ago. Some version of it appears on my X feed every single day.

I heard this constantly while founding my previous startup Trieve, and I bought into it. You can find old TikTok posts from August 2023, four months before we raised funding or got into YC. Then, ironically, some switch flipped once we became venture backed. The posting stopped. We turned inward and focused on product. It saddens me in hindsight, because our product was getting a whole lot better at exactly the moment we went quiet.<br>What Changed?

Startup media and accelerator programs create an expectation of a “launch” event, think of TechCrunch Disrupt in the Silicon Valley TV show, Supabase’s infamous “launch week”, and of course the OG themselves - ProductHunt.

I’m kind of an idiot and let being “post-fundraise” change my mindset. We felt like we had the capital to just burn money on ads when it made sense and therefore went heads down building in silence for some number of weeks to then pop our heads out once or twice a month and do a big launch event. That was, without question, horrendous strategy and terrible CEOing on my part.<br>The best comparison I can think of is composing a song out of nothing but thirty-second rests and cymbal crashes. People tune you out. Good marketing should feel more like an EDM track: a steady beat with the occasional drop. You want consistent content that people can engage with, punctuated every so often by a big announcement that gets them excited.<br>Executing the Slow Drip Launch

You can post and launch all of the small things you ship along the way to the final product. Get the login page working? Post about it. Add the ability to invite users into your org? Post about it. Put new actionable insights in the dashboard? Post about it.<br>Each of these is a chance to build awareness and improve your yapping abilities, so once your product is finally stable and working, you have the skillset and audience necessary to get a base of people familiar with it and excited to share.

The alternative is to put all your eggs in one basket and wait until you have a big announcement to make. This is the strategy that most startups follow, and it is a high-risk, low-reward play. If your launch goes viral, you can get a huge boost in awareness and users, but content on social media is rarely evergreen and gets buried in feeds quickly.<br>Your best case scenario is a couple days of electricity in return for weeks or months’ worth of work. And, worst case, your launch falls flat and you get literally nothing out of it.<br>Tactic #1: Personal Brands

I hate to quote Roy Lee, but he’s not wrong when he says “most of u tech ppl are doomed to be ngmi forever on x. ur just not funny or sarcastic or arrogant enough for this place”. Founders, including myself, are typically nerdy software-engineer type folks who are boring to the extent that building a personal brand on X or elsewhere is going to be a struggle.<br>However, I’m here to tell you that with enough failure, any skill issue can be overcome. It takes a lot more effort than being naturally interesting, but you absolutely can activitymax your way into an audience by posting a lot, replying, and engaging with people active in your niche online.<br>That’s not to say you can post terrible content nobody likes and succeed, you definitely do still have to aim to entertain, but you can pick that up as a skill over time. You just have to be comfortable posting into the void for a while until you start to figure it out. Failure is part of the process with marketing the same way it is with everything else.<br>The light at the end of the tunnel is that success on social media tends to compound. While it’s true that social media feeds are more competitive than ever and no longer show your content consistently to followers, there will be some people who consistently engage with your content and see it day after day.<br>Their engagement kind of serves as a core that makes your content count as a live shot on goal, so the platform you’re posting on at least tests if your content resonates with a wider audience. The size of that “test group” gets bigger as your following grows, and you therefore start to more consistently go viral over time.<br>Finally, I want to note that you should endeavor to not do this alone. Ideally you hire people or have co-founders and you all have different angles and audiences, so you can test different messaging and content styles to see what resonates as you build.<br>Imagine you have a classical cast - engineer, designer, and businessperson. Engineer can post knee-high sock photos about how you’re...