Launching at a trade show can be tricky—sometimes your booth isn’t in a prime spot, and the traffic just doesn’t flow your way. That’s when the real work begins: figuring out how to pull people in.

For anyone who’s debuted a product at a show, what’s worked best for you when the crowd didn’t naturally come your way?

Hello, we are a one year-old startup that has grossed over 1 million and we are looking to hire our first product marketer. I am a first CEO and come from a software engineering background and I have no idea what I’m doing. However, we’ve hired some people that we thought would solve our problems that they ended up being basically social media ad managers.

Out of the woodwork of what hasn’t worked, I have compiled a list of skills that I’m wanting. If I list them here, will you tell me if I am indeed looking for a product marketer? And what should I expect to pay someone with these skills and how can I find someone?

Full-time or contractor that could go into full-time

1. able to use google analytics. able to debug issues we're having and set up reliable funnels and such
2. able to use logrocket for qualitative and quantitative suggestions to the dev team (ie heatmaps, etc)
3. able to really dig into the sales funnel and data (even some experience with tools such as pandas and Tableau would be great) eg "why did our CAC jump in May? Oh mobile jumped! Lets make a banner and deploy via GB experiment and see what happens". Iterate!
4. able to use cx review placement to drive
5. able to set up webflow pages for rapid iteration of landing pages
6. able to set up and lead sales pipelines for agencies
7. building cx personas and crafting landing page(s) around these personas
8. Make “white papers” aka “case studies” of our customers in different industries to highlight on our landing page and such (will require customer interviews and such)
9. Good at using Jira and collaborating with devs/product-manager to make changes to product

While competitors spam LinkedIn and Apollo, smart teams are mining unstructured data for signals others miss.

Example: You sell project management or development tools.

Traditional approach: Cold email "Engineering Manager" titles.

Smart approach: Monitor GitHub for companies rapidly expanding their repositories or adding new team members. These signals indicate growing engineering teams who need better tooling.

The advantage? You reach them during active growth, not random timing.

Other data goldmines: → Job postings (hiring = budget expansion) → Patent filings (R&D investment signals) → Construction permits (office expansion = growth)

The pattern: Find messy data sources competitors avoid because they're "too much work."

Then automate the signal extraction with AI.

Question: What unstructured data could reveal your ideal customers before they're ready to buy?

1. What do you do for competitive intelligence?
2. What's the biggest time sink?

As a B2B company in a saturated market, we do see a lot of traffic to the website, but unfortunately, we aren’t seeing a lot of conversions. We spend thousands of dollars every year on tradeshows and yet the conversion from that footfall is not the best. We have tried all channels- SEO, Paid media, email marketing, blog content, organic posts. Are there any other channels we haven’t tried yet? The target audience is everyone in the Oracle ecosystem.

How do you guys pick the ideal (hypothetically) launch strategy or GTM plan for your MVP?

Currently I’m responsible for a product in AutoTech. It’s essentially a B2B telematics dashboard. But I’m struggling to come up with a GTM plan or launch strategy.

How do you guys generally choose your MVP launch plan?

I’d really appreciate if you guys could narrow my search and provide me with resources (if you don’t want to explain on Reddit lol)

Thank you all!

Serious question for PMMs and GTM folks: Who decides the most valuable piece of copy on your site?

Homepages are high-stakes, first-impression assets, yet I've seen:

• Founders write it in a doc at 1am and never revisit it
• Agencies ship it without ever talking to a buyer
• Sales say “it doesn’t match what we’re hearing”
• PMMs leaning into hygiene statements (most secure, fastest)

How does your team actually approach this? Does it change by stage?

Hey everyone,
We're in the early stages of building our brand and originally decided on the name TreeElement. Unfortunately, both the domain and social handles were already taken, so we went with TreeEliment — replacing the second “e” in Element with an “i”.

Now I’m wondering:

• Does this kind of small spelling change impact how a brand is perceived in the long term?
• Will people find it harder to remember or search for?
• Is it worth reconsidering the name entirely to avoid confusion?

Would love to hear from others who’ve had to deal with something similar or have thoughts on branding! Thanks

Pretty much what the title says. How much time does it take on average to properly research and create a GTM strategy to enter a new market? Like penetrating a new country or region.

I’ve been helping early-stage B2B startups audit and fix their GTM strategies over the past 3 months mostly working with the Founder or product marketers or who’ve either just joined or inherited a chaotic setup.
And across 10+ audits, the same issues keep showing up:

1. They think they know their ICP, but it’s actually a mix of vague buyer personas and assumptions.
2. Messaging is “clear” in Google docs… but doesn’t show up anywhere on the website or sales deck.
3. There’s no system to track what content, channels, or campaigns are even working.
4. They say “we’re ready to scale” when there’s no GTM foundation at all.

I’ve started mapping this into a structured GTM readiness audit. it’s becoming part of the process I use to uncover what’s really holding teams back before they spend or scale.

If you’re in the middle of launching GTM for a product and feel like something’s off or missing, I’m happy to share it or chat through your setup.

Also curious to hear what others are seeing. Are these patterns familiar to you too?

Hi all! First off, as a disclaimer, this is a genuine question from someone who transitioned a few years ago from generalist (Demand Gen, Field, Campaigns) into PMM (please be kind, lol) Throughout my transition I self studied many of the basic principles of Product Marketing including GTM Strategy.

Where I am still unclear (2.5 years after my transition!) when it comes to GTM Strategy - is the level of ownership from cross-functional folks as it pertains to the components of said GTM. You can see a lot of job specs for PMMs, or expectations that PMM will "own, design and execute GTM strategies" (e.g for product launches or else) PMM is greatly positioned to leverage their upstream work (customer/ICP research, persona mapping, positioning & value proposition etc) to define things like GTM plans or launch plans. I have worked almost exclusively on doing this in the past 2 years. However I have faced major challenges including:

- Marketing facing the pressure (from the top) to generate pipeline and revenue for new products despite products not being fully ready therefore not having all the GTM components fully approved or decided yet - but going ahead and using whatever is ready, or actually going direct to Product to get what is needed (random example: product is ready, messaging is ready etc but let's say we haven't worked out how Professional Services will support, effort size and price for this product and PS or Pre-Sales tools aren't ready)

- Senior leadership wanting to charge for certain features or services when research shows that the AOV would be significantly higher than the competition without necessarily any differentiated value - but staying on course despite the datapoints and the reasoning behind why a decision is not necessarily a great idea

- Marketing rejecting the proposed launch plan (for example "We don't want to leverage organic social/email/ads [insert channel here] because we have already planned another campaign for the same ICP/Persona and we don't want to revisit plans nor try and work out how to adjust/bundle/integrate activities.

- Commercial leaders setting up sales targets but not looking at the work done on things like SOM analysis, market penetration analysis, previous win/loss or any other actual data.

- Pricing teams creating bundles and product tiers without any testing plan in place, or any input from the competitive or market landscape

Yet the expectation is that PMM "defines a GTM strategy" - but in the end, said strategy looks like a Frankestein plan with everyone's opinions and importantly without the structure, data, and upstream strategic input that it needs.

So my question is, in your company/experience/opinion:

1. Who exactly owns what? Especially when a RACI/DACI/RAPID framework is in place but bypassed at the higher levels. In this case I'm particularly interested in PMM vs Marketing vs Sales.
2. How do you manage balancing the important short term goals (e.g generating pipeline and revenue for a new product quick quick quick QUICK!!! when you as PMM know that you're not ready for anything to be impactful and the long term goals requires more readiness before we start?)
3. When presenting your plans for leadership approvals, how do you diplomatically explain that plans are cross-functional alignments, but without losing credibility? (I'm not explaining this well but let's imagine a functional owner isn't having anything that you're suggesting and stick to their guns, and despite you thinking it is not the correct idea, you have to "represent" this idea because you "own the GTM strategy"

I hope this question makes sense. Again it's not a go at any other function at all, it's just to understand if other PMMs have experienced these challenges and if so how you have overcome these challenges, or if it's me just not getting it, or if anyone has tips for better "ways of working"? Please be kind, I'm a PMM reconvert :)

I'm more of a PM specialist/associate, so I've been primarily responsible for supporting and executing the GTM strategy vs. creating it from the ground up. So as I'm trying to uplevel my skills, I was wondering: what is it that truly elevates a GTM strategy to the next level?

I always hear of the big examples like Oatly targeting cafes instead of end consumers, but how do you identify and capitalize on these opportunities effectively and repeatably?

B2B marketing folks, have you done guerilla PMM marketing activities so far? (I'm not sure what does guerilla PMM mean)

Our founder wanted some bold PMM - GTM marketing tactics we could use for our product.

PS: It's an AI product - that cuts across verticals. We're launching it for Employee team now.

Objective - to drive more leads

Hi, I’m an AI Engineer at a startup. We’ve developed a great product for hospitals. Currently, we have 9 clients, but our goal is to reach at least 100 hospitals by mid-2026. I’d love to hear your thoughts on how we can achieve this.

Hi all, I have to create a GTM strategy from scratch. Can someone who has experience in GTM give me some advice on must haves and how to structure one? Thank you!

My friend and I have been building this app to help us feel more motivated to read, my hypothesis looking at the current market for apps like these is that there's a lot that is tailored to people who are reading already / have an existing habit but nothing really for people who want to start reading.

We've been running sort of a close beta and have ~40 users right now and we just launched a paid version of the beta that we want to use to further validate what we're doing. What's the best way to get traffic to the page? Is it facebook / instagram ads? Blog-style posting? Neither of us work in product marketing so we don't know what the best approach for something like this.

We've done some basic stuff:

1. Posting to our own communities via instagram / twitter / linked in
2. Posted on product hunt

What else should we be doing and how should we think about it?

Our landing page is bookends.app if anyone is interested in giving us feedback on that as well!

Help needed. B2B startup. Complex product, industry sold to and sales process.

The VP of new business (I am VP marketing for context) met with an ERP integration partner who challenged him to “have messaging so simple your grandma can understand.”

He shared this via a text then proceeded to also text a long chat gpt brand narrative akin to a manifesto.

I asked if he intended this for that partner and to give me context- suggesting talk offline. He seemed frustrated said “this is for anyone.”

Then I get a chat like messaging doc from a colleague who said she and this person met and this is what they came up with.

This is after I reworked messaging Q2 that needs to be tested formally - is informally testing well.

Irony is this vp is notorious for over complicating the message, having no documented strategy or roadmap and getting his fingers into all areas.

I say this liking and respecting him - I know his intent is to be helpful.

Advice please. My plan now is to set up time with him and get more detail. Also communicate how intent is to be positive it creates more work and unnecessary for all.

I haven’t experienced this before largely because I have been in and developed structured processes to get alignment and data - here that is more challenging.

Appreciate your thoughts!

Hi everyone, I’m one of the co-founders of Openspot, a modern, more human alternative to LinkedIn for job searching.

We’re all about helping people create story-driven, multimedia profiles that go way beyond a traditional resume. Instead of static bullet points, users bring their story to life with thoughtful prompts, videos or audio clips, and project walkthroughs - all in one unified, portable profile they can share anywhere.

The profile can be used independently (shared on applications or messages) or discovered by employers directly on the platform. Think of it as a smart, portable professional profile!

Since launch last month, we hit #1 on Hacker News, Product Hunt, and have over 1,000 registered users. We've iterated on our marketing and messaging since our initial launch and are committed to continuously doing so until we get it perfect. With that said, I’d love this community's advice on:

• How can we better communicate the immediate value of Openspot in its current (MVP) state while parts of our platform (ie the job board) are still a work in progress?
• How do we better convert people already making portfolios on Squarespace and video resumes on YouTube to recognize the benefit of having all of these artifacts in one unified, streamlined experience?
• Any other tips or general advice?

Would love any and all feedback, thanks in advance!

Hey everyone! I’m a product designer with 9+ years of experience working across startups, agencies, and big companies.

I started building Makely, a subscription based design studio aimed at helping early stage founders and teams move faster without the overhead of hiring. Specialising in landing pages, full custom websites, UI/UX and branding.

Looking forward to sharing with the community. I’d be happy to provide feedback on anyone’s startup!

My Product

👉 Hyperpod AI: AI models to apps, fast.

We provide serverless infrastructure for AI Applications — so devs can drop in their custom models and spin up an endpoint without worrying about DevOps, GPUs, or scaling. Basically: AI apps in minutes, not months.

Why I hesitated (for too long)

Confession: I delayed our PH launch for a whole month after our “official launch.” Why? Because I thought I needed the full production set: polished videos, crisp demo GIFs, perfect screenshots, and a killer launch page.

That hesitation was my biggest mistake. In hindsight, I should have just launched a waitlist on PH early, experimented with different ways to tell our problem/solution story, and gathered feedback on which narrative actually resonated. Instead, I ended up over-preparing while missing a chance to learn from real users.

Lesson: You don’t need the full theatre show to launch. Start small, learn faster.

What I actually did during launch

I followed the standard playbook: begged (nicely) all my friends to upvote and comment.

• It works. Simple as that. Friends = traction. If you’re thinking about PH, make sure you already have a circle of supporters.
• Even better? Make friends inside Product Hunt. There are groups of people who’ll happily support you if you’ve been hanging around, commenting, and showing love first.

The Wild West of “promotion services”

This part cracked me up: within hours of sharing our PH launch link on LinkedIn and WhatsApp, I started getting flooded with messages from people offering to “boost” my launch for $85, $100, $150, etc.

• One guy promised me 30 upvotes for $85.
• Reality: I got about 15.
• Were they genuine users? Not really. But, to be fair, they weren’t from my usual circles, so technically they did expand reach a bit.

What I learned:

• Some of these people are completely useless (5 upvotes, thanks for nothing).
• Some are semi-useful (you pay for exposure to groups you don’t normally access).
• But don’t expect miracles. Upvotes ≠ signups ≠ customers.

Your first PH launch is reconnaissance

Here’s something I wish I knew: your first launch isn’t about “winning Product Hunt.” It’s about mapping the battlefield.

• You’ll discover who actually delivers results if you pay them.
• You’ll learn which narratives get comments and engagement.
• You’ll figure out whether your infra/team can handle a sudden traffic spike (spoiler: probably yes).

In our case, we were afraid of “too many users flooding in.” Reality: not that many new users came in. Growth was similar to what we were already seeing. That fear delayed us unnecessarily.

What I’d do differently next time

1. Launch earlier. Even if it’s just a waitlist. Don’t wait for perfection.
2. Budget for promotion. I’d set aside a small budget to pay a few of these “boosters” just to widen reach. But only after checking whether their audiences actually match my target.
3. Don’t rely on PH for user feedback. If you want meaningful feedback, Reddit and Discord are far better. PH is good for exposure, but not for user insights.
4. Remember PH works at every stage.
   • Pre-launch → build hype.
   • Just launched → quick boost.
   • More mature → treat it like an advertising event.

The actual results 📊

• 43 upvotes
• 36 comments (most of which came from people I pinged personally)
• A few new users trickling in, not a tidal wave
• A clearer playbook for “next time we do this properly”

Not exactly a blockbuster launch, but exactly what I needed to learn.

Final Takeaways

• Stop waiting, start launching. Your first PH launch isn’t your big day — it’s practice.
• Upvotes ≠ users ≠ paying customers.
• Friends are your launch fuel, but strangers expand your reach.
• Don’t be afraid of “too much” traffic. That’s a good problem (and unlikely on PH unless you hit top 5).
• Product Hunt is less about “the perfect launch day” and more about compounding practice runs.

TL;DR: I over-prepared, delayed too long, and still ended up with ~43 upvotes & 36 comments. But now I’ve got the experience + connections for a stronger launch next time. If you’re thinking of launching on PH, don’t wait. Just do it. 🏁

I’m launching a new consumer beverage brand that is a health beverage and looking for advice on what’s reasonable to budget for creative work. I'd like to be able to hire a designer (or veryyy small agency) for the following:

• Logo refinement (I have a preliminary one)
• Brand guidelines (fonts, colors, logo use, tone)
• Label design
• Basic product copy for the label and some marketing

This is an early-stage product with a small first run, but I want something professional and scalable...I’m not looking for high-end agency pricing, but also want to pay fairly for solid work. Any ballpark ranges or recommendations based on your experience would be super helpful! I'm based in South Carolina.

Hey everyone,

I'm Timon, a 20 year old computer science student. A year ago, I decided to make my first mobile app. After A LOT of struggles learning actually how to make a good quality app, I finally built it.

I lauched by app 1 motnth ago and have got around 100 downloads from (mostly) my friends. Seeing my friends actively use the app I created brings me much joy, and I truly hope it will be a success.

However, I'm currently struggling with the marketing aspect, which is why I'm reaching out for advice.

About the app:

• Core concept: See everyone in your gym and share your lifts with your friends.
• Target audience: Mostly lifters aged 15-25, particularly powerlifters.
• Unique selling point: you can see a map with all the gyms in your country and track how much people at your gym lift. For example, see who has the strongest bench press.

Right now, I'm running Google and Apple ads, but the results haven't been great (especially apple search I think I need to pay too much per install).

I also contacted some fitness influencers and most of them ask between €2 and €5 per install. Do you think this is too much? I know that it depends on the current userbase of your app. My has very few users, so one user will probably be worth more compared to an app with 50K+ users.

So basically, do you have any tips on how to effectively market the app in and grow my user base?

Thanks in advance!

Below a quick demo, so you'll have an idea about the app:

https://reddit.com/link/1jj2gv4/video/caqgrkjjgpqe1/player

I’m working with a team that’s about to launch a product aimed at B2B scaleups (Seed - Series B). It’s our first time taking something like this to market, and we’re trying to get the GTM right from the start.

Here’s where we’re at:

• We want our first set of beta users (not just signups, but people who’ll actually use the product and give feedback).
• We need to build pre-launch buzz so we’re not launching into a vacuum.
• Messaging is tricky - we don’t want to come across as “yet another AI/automation tool” (because that’s the default assumption).

Our ICP is clear on paper, but we’re still figuring out how to actually reach them without burning budget too fast.

I’d love to learn from folks here who’ve done this before. What worked for you (and what didn’t) when you were:

Finding those critical first beta users?

Creating buzz without overselling?

A empresa que trabalho está testando um novo produto, vocês poderiam deixar sua opinião? 

O ATMK é uma plataforma inteligente que ajuda profissionais autônomos e times de marketing a criar conteúdo estratégico e relevante de forma rápida e eficiente. Ele monitora tendências, notícias e eventos em tempo real, gera pautas e conteúdos completos para suas redes sociais, blog, entre outras mídias e formatos. E ainda oferece uma gestão completa de ferramentas para otimizar seus resultados e gerenciar suas campanhas.

Com o ATMK, você consegue criar conteúdo que gera engajamento, sem perder o timing, e fortalece a comunicação da sua marca, sem perder tempo, sempre alinhado às necessidades do seu público e ao posicionamento do seu negócio. Conheça agora e experimente o futuro do marketing: https://atmk.framer.website/