You’ll be shocked to see how many job postings for only fans chatters are up on Reddit when you search for them (several are posted every hour). Some ads are looking for 10-20 chatters at once.
But the people taking on these jobs are applying for them still. Somehow I find it hard to be sympathetic? Ok I get it the job opportunities in the Philippines aren’t great, but it’s not like you’re being forced to be an OF chatter; you can simply stop being one.
Marketing for founders in 2026: just buy ads and invest into actual marketing. Because everyone else is busy spamming SaaS directories, subreddits and twitter (often with sock puppets) and wasting everyone’s time.
My weekend side project just took over my life. It needs "actual marketing" expertise. As in, I know how to set up search console, semrush, and I know decent SEO concepts to grow organic SERP performance. I am coming up the charts there.
However, I have friendly investor interest. The only place I can imagine spending money on this project is on Google Ads. I have no real idea of how to create and manage Google Ads these days. So, who do I hire? Does anyone have any recs for what I should do? Is there a service, or a go-to consultancy with a small minimum spend requirement?
Marketing is a lot more competitive, convoluted, and rapidly changing. However, in the world of “How to get consumers/customers/clients to buy more” three things still remain and the idea would be to know when to pull which strings.
The three are “Owned, Earned, and Paid” Media. The best is when you own or can control the distribution channels.
You stop paying for ads and the product link disappears. Reason why founders tend to go for reddit is because it gets indexed by Google and LLMs and the link gets 'preserved'.
What is your experience in stickiness of users after acquisition via Ad? Given crack down by reddit mods for posting links - I am considering just buying ads.
Understanding how to run paid advertising well beyond throwing money and a budget at a campaign and calling it a day. It’s generally not covered by most solo or bootstrapped founder guides, but in 2026 it can make all the difference. And it may take WEEKS before a campaign can mature before it shows results; depending on the chosen advertiser… which is a little counter to what people want (immediate results, first 10 users, 100 waitlist signups, etc).
You can still pay someone else to spam your product on social media at a fraction of the cost of paid ad campaigns (and a fraction of the results).
I come from a few years experience in Marktech, but I am also now training a partner of mine to run and maintain ads with zero to no experience. The best way to go about it is using something like Gemini guided-learning, asking it to explain the differences between Google, Meta, Tiktok, Microsoft and LinkedIn ads; deciding which ones to run for which type of audience; how to target intent, rather than keywords; explaining what retargeting is, landing page conversion optimization as well as how PMAX works; and how to optimize for it over a longer period of time. You can make a "Gem" in gemini about this, and continuously advance learning. I wouldn't throw any money at it until you understand those basics, and while I mostly run Google ads, its quite important to understand all the differences and nuances between other advertisers.
Ads are trash unless you already have PMF, and even then they're often still trash if you don't do it right or you don't have the right kind of product.
I consistently launch small vibe codes products. Slap ads on them and after a few weeks decide what to do with them without launching them anywhere else and am seeing good results. I see little to no reason to even launch them any other way at this point.
Which ad network do you use? Google, Meta, TikTok? I imagine you had pre-existing experience especially if it's Google, it's rare to get good RoI out of it unless you really know what you're doing. If you go with the defaults you'll get a few thousand "clicks", zero actual users among them.
Google and Meta. I did work for a Marketing agency for years handling automations development for them. So I have been exposed to hundreds of campaigns across different industries and have seen what works well and what doesn't. Not saying that you need this experience, but once you see stable results from others; and how to protect them, its hard not to chase after them as well!
Do you mean the creatives? I do outsource the creatives. For ads, I largely automate setting up and maintaining them; like rebalancing and demand generation scripts. But here we are talking good old spreadsheet magic not AI.
I do use some AI but its minimal; most scripts are still just algorithmic, but its easy to build them with Claude; while they are super expensive (couple of hundreds to thousands) if you bought them from some established marketeers (like Mike Rhodes demand gen script).
I am starting to believe it’s not OPUS but developers getting better at using LLMs across the board. And not realizing they are just getting much better at using these tools.
I also thought it was OPUS 4.5 (also tested a lot with 4.6) and then in February switched to only using auto mode in the coding IDEs. They do not use OPUS (most of the times), and I’m ending up with a similar result after a very rough learning curve.
Now switching back to OPUS I notice that I get more out of it, but it’s no longer a huge difference. In a lot of cases OPUS is actually in the way after learning to prompt more effectively with cheaper models.
The big difference now is that I’m just paying 60-90$ month for 40-50hrs of weekly usage… while I was inching towards 1000$ with OPUS. I chose these auto modes because they don’t dig into usage based pricing or throttling which is a pretty sweet deal.
I mean, I would, and I will. There are enough people that will allow this. Just look at the OpenClaw hype. I have also seen a lot of my friends build these type of automations for themselves; or attempt to. Which leads me to believe there is a huge market for.
I think the actual question parent wants to ask is "what kind of business user would ever use that", which is a very different thing from "why would a random Twitter user use and post about it"
Awesome, so I no longer have to use Firecrawl or my own crawler to scrape entire websites for an agent? Especially when needing residential proxies to do so on Cloudflare protected sites? Why though?
I have tried theirs... they are NOT proxies.. that means majority of the popular sites actually block scraping... even if they are protected by cloudflare itself.
I can't wait for the days where LLM written articles are indistinguishable from real writing, so people stop complaining about this. I am giving that another 6 months. In a lot of cases its not just lazy prompt -> article, but rather text synthesis through LLMs -> article. But people will still complain /rant (bias: I run a blog with only AI written content, but a loyal audience).
Of course, I guess then this post is more about the category of apps where it doesn't matter that much. But there are still a ton of apps where all they are doing is bringing together a bunch of API keys and profit the difference.
Yes absolutely. A lot of these apps are surface level great, but the you dig deeper and its really just as easy to build the same functionality yourself. Keeping in mind that these are all decently well funded projects.
Often the "issues" aren't even bugs, its more the realization that I want some sort of functionality that they do not have; and immediately realize that if I spend a weekend on my own "base system" for that use case of SaaS; I can just attach anything to it, rather than waiting for them to release something new in 1-2 months.
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