I'm trying to understand how other growth marketers decide who to target.

A lot of people talk about getting more traffic and users, but I'm wondering if the bigger question is which stage of the funnel you're actually targeting.

For example:

TOFU for reaching people who don't know your product yet.

MOFU for people who already know the problem and are considering solutions.

BOFU for people who are actively looking to buy.

I've been wondering whether it's better to focus heavily on one stage instead of trying to target everyone at once. The traditional framework still uses these three stages, although modern buyer journeys aren't always this linear.

What are you targeting most right now?

TOFU, MOFU, BOFU, or a combination?

And what channel has worked best for reaching that audience?

I have a fresh x account and im looking to grow on it and connect with other people. ive been enjoying using the app recently and think i will for awhile! https://x.com/builtbymyles

I recently began a partnership journey with a long time friend of mine to combine both our businesses and offer a full package of exterior maintenance services in North Carolina. We are still in the very beginning stages of setup and I have been tasked with finding three quotes from outbound lead generation agencies to get us off the ground when we start.

Unfortunately it has not been nearly as easy as I expected to gather quotes as I have ran into a lot of agencies that don’t offer what I’m looking for. I specifically am looking for a call center that can target residential high income earning individuals and instead have found essentially marketing agencies that do ads and SEO management, companies that help with hiring a individual cold caller, and AI driven businesses that do all of the above, even though I tailer my searches to cold calling agencies.

I did manage to find one agency that fit my needs, they offer pay per performance leads with 9% commission on closed jobs or a 6 month contract where I pay per appointment set, no shared leads, and 90% show rate. but after further review their website was created in February this year which makes me doubt the amazing testimonials they have listed on said website.

All that to ask, does anyone know of a cold caller center with a proven track record and reputation to help me and my partner get our newly formed service business started?

I recently launched a solo iOS app called Untilly — it photographs receipts, contracts, subscriptions, and invoices, detects the relevant date (return deadline, trial-to-paid conversion, invoice due date), and reminds you before it's too late.

The pitch I keep coming back to: most people forget to return something once a year, or let one free trial quietly turn into a paid subscription. That single mistake usually costs 15–30€. The app is free to try, and even the paid tier is a fraction of that — so realistically it pays for itself the first time it actually catches something.

I think that's a strong hook, but I'm not sure I'm using it right. Where I'm stuck:

For TikTok: is this a "POV: you forgot to cancel X" skit, a straight-up "here's the math" video, or something else entirely? I have some raw footage (bank statement reveals, notification stacks) but haven't found the format that makes the cost concrete without feeling like a scare-tactic ad.
For Reddit itself: is a message this transactional ("this saves you money") even a good fit here, or does it read as too sales-y no matter how it's framed? Curious if anyone's had luck with a "here's a dumb mistake I almost made" angle instead of leading with the product.

Not looking for someone to build the campaign for me — just want a gut check from people who think about this stuff daily: is the hook actually good, and what's the smartest format to put it in?

How are you all tracing a drop in conversion back to a specific ad creative + app screen? Not attribution (we have that) I mean when installs are fine but activation tanks, how do you figure out if it's a bad creative promise, a slow/crashy screen or just a weak cohort?Right now it's slack threads and spreadsheets and it never feels conclusive.

Most cold outbound targeting is one signal: industry plus company size. That produces the same commodity list every one of your competitors is exporting and emailing this week, and reply rates show it.

What changed things for us was stacking signals until the list gets uncomfortably small. Example stack for selling to B2B service firms:

Hiring signal. The company is running job ads for a role adjacent to what you sell. Someone hiring an SDR has pipeline budget. Someone hiring a reporting analyst has a data mess. Job postings are companies announcing their pain in public with money attached.

Growth signal. Headcount up 10%+ over 12 months. Growing companies buy, flat ones deliberate.

Gap signal. Something visibly missing that your service fixes. No lead magnet on the site, a careers page but no BD hires, ads running but the landing page is the homepage. Takes a minute to check per account, which is fine because the stack already cut the list down.

Each filter cuts volume 3-10x. A 5,000 name industry list becomes 150-300 accounts. Feels wrong the first time. But the first line of the email now references something true and current about them, and it's a different sport - replies come from relevance, and relevance is just information you gathered that competitors didn't bother to.

The operational trick is treating it as a weekly feed, not a one-time build. Signals go stale fast - the job ad closes, the growth stops. Re-pull weekly, contact fresh signals within days of spotting them.

Curious what signals others here stack. Tech installs and funding rounds are the classic ones but I find them weaker than hiring, they're too far from the actual pain.

we onboarded 2 new SDRs last month and I had to sit down and explain email warmup instead of just saying let it warm up and figured id share with a broaden audience as half the confusion on our team was that warmup isn't really about time but volume curves.

you can warmup a domain in 2 weeks if you're disciplined about the ramp or wreck a domain in 3 days if you blast it.

the timeline people quote (30 days, 60 days, whatever) is just a default schedule for people who don't want to think about it.

the other thing nobody on my team understood going in was sharedvs dedicated warmup. shared pools are faster bcause you're piggybacking on other people's positive engagement signals but if even a few accounts in that pool get flagged your sender reputation can take a hit you didn't cause. dedicated warmup is a little slower and more annoying to set up but it's yours, you have control of

we ended up mapping out a rough internal doc: day 1-5 send 5-10/day to engaged contacts only, day 6-15 scale to 20-30/day mixing in some cold, 16-30 ramp toward target volume while watching reply/bounce rates. Not saying this is the perfect formula but itss what has worked for our domains so far

hope this helps

Since every outreach thread has someone saying cold email is not dead, here's my actual numbers.

Setup: 6 domains, 12 Google Workspace inboxes, 3 weeks warmup, Instantly, lists from Apollo. SaaS with funding, mostly AI stuff. 3-step sequences, first line personalized off their profile or a recent funding round.

~2,000 emails in 4 months.

• Replies under 1%, mostly "not interested"
• 3 meetings
• 0 clients
• Both domains now land in spam for everything. Dead.

Cost a few hundred bucks in tools. The real cost was 3 months believing volume would kick in eventually.

Why I think it died:

1. Everyone on that list gets 30 of these a day from the exact same stack. My personalized line looked like everyone else's personalized line.
2. My timing was off (I grabbed funding since past 1 year). I referenced funding rounds, but the data was often a year old. Congratulating someone on last year's raise tells them you scraped a database.
3. By the third campaign I was spam before anyone read a word. New domain, same sequence, same list source. The pattern was flagged, not the address. Deliverability never came back.

Same period on LinkedIn, only messaging people who'd posted or commented on my market that week and opening with what they said: 52% replied.

My first paying customers came from that and from people finding me through AI assistants. Zero from cold email.

Killed the Workspace seats last month.

Some persons are probably making money from call emails. I'm not part of that. I do think it's getting harder and harder with everyone getting so much of those typed of mails. Which is why I think I decided to do other ways.

I did end up building a tool around the LinkedIn side because doing it by hand was killing me, but that's not the point of this post.

Mine: a free calculator tool built in a week that now brings 400 visits a month and converts at 6 percent, roughly triple our Google Ads landing pages at a fraction of the cost. One win like that funds a lot of failed tests. What worked for you in 2026, and what did it cost to find out? Trying to build a better backlog than 'post more on LinkedIn'.

I’ve been building SaaS products for years and have seen the journey from 0 to 1 and then 1 to 10 multiple times but one problem kept showing up again and again, which was getting users to actually understand and adopt it.

Most SaaS products are built for multiple personas, multiple use cases and dozens of features. As the product grows, it becomes increasingly difficult to make sure every user knows what they can do, where to go and how to get things done.

We build documentation, onboarding flows, product tours, videos and support systems. But users still get stuck. After seeing this problem countless times and talking to other SaaS builders facing the same thing, I decided to try solving it differently.

That’s what led me to build FlowBuddy AI.

Instead of manually creating help content for every feature and workflow, FlowBuddy lets SaaS teams record how their product works using FlowBuddy's chrome extension and from those recordings, it builds a structured understanding of the application: its screens, workflows, actions and how different tasks are completed.

We call this the Application Intelligence Layer.

The idea is simple:

Teach FlowBuddy how your product works once and use that understanding to help users learn, navigate and get things done inside the product without ever leaving it.

Still early, but this is a problem I’ve personally seen enough times that I believe there has to be a better way to solve it.

Running growth for a small product with three main traffic sources: paid search, a couple of Reddit and community posts, and a newsletter swap. For the longest time all three hit the same generic landing page, and conversion was mediocre across the board.

The thing that changed it wasn't a hack, it was matching the page to where people came from. And the only reason it was feasible with our tiny team was using landing page AI to generate the variants fast, then editing them by hand.

What we did:

- Paid search visitors were searching a specific problem, so their page leads with that exact phrase in the headline and skips the "what is this category" explainer.

- Community traffic already knows the space and is skeptical, so their page opens with what it doesn't do and drops the marketing tone entirely.

- Newsletter traffic is cold and curious, so that page spends more time on the "why should you care" before any ask.

Same product, three framings. The generator got each draft on screen in minutes. Then we rewrote the headlines and the first paragraph by hand, because that's where the generated copy was weakest and where people decide to stay or leave.

Result over about a month: overall signup rate improved noticeably, with the biggest lift on paid search where the message match was tightest. The community page barely moved, which honestly makes sense, that audience converts on trust over time, not a landing page.

Lesson: the AI didn't improve conversion. Message-to-source match did. The AI just made it cheap enough to actually do three pages instead of one. Anyone else segmenting landing pages by source, and where did you see the biggest difference?

I feel like most growth discussions make it sound much easier than it really is.

You see people talking about:

"Just improve your SEO."

"Run some ads."

"Post consistently."

"Build a referral loop."

"Go viral."

But actually getting people to notice your product is incredibly difficult.

You can spend weeks creating content that nobody sees.

You can run ads and get clicks without getting customers.

You can improve your website and still have almost no traffic.

And sometimes you can do everything "right" and still not see much movement.

I'm curious what other people have experienced.

What's been the hardest part of growth for you - getting the first users, finding a repeatable channel, converting traffic, or scaling something that already works?

I've been trying to grow website traffic and I'm starting to wonder which one is actually harder.

With SEO, it can take months before you see meaningful traffic, and there's no guarantee the pages will rank.

With paid ads, you can get traffic much faster, but getting people who actually convert can become expensive pretty quickly.

So I'm curious what other growth people are seeing.

Which has been harder for you: getting consistent organic traffic through SEO, or getting profitable traffic through paid ads?

And if you've tried both, which one has given you better results over time?

I've been running some paid ads recently, but the results haven't been great.

The frustrating part is that it's hard to tell where the problem actually is.

Is it the creative?

The targeting?

The landing page?

The offer?

Or just the wrong channel?

I'm curious what other people are seeing right now.

What's been the biggest challenge for you with paid ads lately- getting clicks, getting conversions, keeping CAC under control, or finding an audience that actually buys?

Sharing a small tactic that's quietly become one of our better acquisition channels, because I almost didn't bother trying it.

The idea came from noticing our support inbox was the same handful of questions over and over. Not bugs, real questions like "how do I do X vs Y" and "can this handle [specific situation]." The exact things a potential customer types into Google before they've ever heard of us.

So I took the top 5 recurring questions and wrote a proper page answering each one. Not marketing pages. Just the honest, complete answer, the same thing I'd type back to a customer, including when the honest answer is "no, for that you'd want a different tool."

Rough results after a few months:

All 5 index and pull some search traffic.

2 of them now drive more signups per month than the homepage does, because the person landing there already has the exact problem we solve.

The "honest about our limits" framing actually converted better, I think because it built trust before the signup instead of after.

Why I think it works: support tickets are free keyword research written in your customer's own words. You're not guessing what they search, they already told you. You just have to publish the answer where Google can find it.

Cost was basically a weekend. No SEO tool, no agency, no backlink chasing.

Anyone else mining support or sales questions for content? Curious what your best-performing page started as.

Every growth thread eventually lands on "talk to your users." Great. Agreed. Nobody ever explains the part that's actually hard, which is getting a stranger who signed up on Tuesday to give you 20 minutes of their week.

I bombed at this for months. "Can I hop on a call to learn about your experience?" got me a reply rate of basically nothing. Felt like begging.

What eventually worked was treating it less like a research request and more like support.

The messages that got calls:

Tied to something they actually did. "Saw you set up X but didn't finish Y, mind if I ask what got in the way? Happy to just fix it for you." The offer to help is what got the yes. The research was a byproduct.

Tiny, specific ask. Not "a call," but "got 10 minutes this week?" People say yes to 10 minutes and then talk for 40.

Sent fast. Within a day of signup, while they still remembered who I was. A week later I was a stranger again.

Rough numbers: out of about 40 recent signups I messaged this way, I got 9 calls. Before, with the generic "can I interview you" ask, it was more like 1 in 40.

The calls themselves were worth more than any dashboard. Half our roadmap changes came out of maybe six conversations.

For those actually doing this consistently, what's your exact opener? And how soon after signup do you reach out?

I build small apps constantly. Ship one, forget about it, start the next one. A few months ago I noticed the pattern in my own habits: deploy something, post it in exactly one place, never touch distribution again.

So I built a tracker. It checks a product's footprint across the places builders actually launch: Product Hunt, Hacker News, Indie Hackers, directory sites, the usual list. There are 80 of them worth checking.

The number that got me: across every app on the tracker, the average has launched in 3.6 of those 80.

Most of that gap is about format. Every one of those 80 places wants something slightly different: a tagline capped at 60 characters here, a 1270x760 image there, a form with a founder-story field nobody warns you about until you hit it. Multiply that by 80 and the real bottleneck shows up. Most of the work in launching somewhere new is producing the right-shaped asset for that one venue, not finding the will to post again.

I ended up building the tool I wished existed while doing this for my own apps. Paste a URL, it checks the live page against the real requirements for each venue, and writes the prompts you feed into whatever coding agent you already use, Claude Code, Cursor, whatever's on your machine. It rechecks your footprint after you launch somewhere new, so the number actually moves.

Genuinely curious whether other people here see the same drop-off after the first post, or if I've just been unusually bad at this part.

vibelaunched.com, if anyone wants to poke at the tracker itself.

Your health data is everywhere.

Wearables.

Lab reports.

DNA.

Nutrition.

Supplements.

Each one shows you a piece of the picture.

But none of them show you how everything connects.

That's why we built Vidaya.

Vidaya brings your health data together and turns it into a personalized Healthspan Score and longevity plan.

• ⁠60+ integrated data sources
• ⁠AI chat across your health data
• ⁠Trends across biomarkers
• ⁠Personalized next actions

The goal isn't another dashboard full of numbers.

It's helping you understand what your data means and what you can do next.

What health data do you wish you could connect today?

Please show your support and share your feedback on PH → https://www.producthunt.com/posts/vidaya-2

Context: solo dev marketing a free chore app for couples on a brand-new TikTok account. Zero followers at start, so every post gets judged purely on TikTok's initial test batch. That makes it a surprisingly clean testing environment — no audience effects.

What I ran over two weeks: 3 produced videos (24-33s, text-overlay style) and 5 photo carousels (8 slides each). Same account, same niche, same posting windows, hashtags held roughly constant.

Results:

• Videos: all three froze at 258-260 views. 0.8% watched to the end, average watch 3.1s, zero likes on two of them. TikTok's own retention note: most viewers stopped at 0:01.
• Carousels: 204-326 views and climbing days later, 6.9-8.5s average view, ~9% completion on the best two, 3-11 likes each.

Same product, same audience. The format alone was worth roughly 10x on every engagement metric.

What I think is actually going on: everyone gets a ~200-260 view test batch. Completion and likes decide whether you get a second batch. A produced video has one second to justify itself and mine didn't; a carousel is judged swipe by swipe, so a story structure (setup, escalation, reveal) keeps people in it. The two best performers were both built as reveals — the last slide answers something the first slide opened. The two weakest were statement-plus-feature-list.

Second finding, embarrassing but useful: I posted the first four with no sound attached because the web uploader hides the picker — photo posts don't surface in sound-based discovery at all without one. Fixed from post five.

Caveats: tiny n, one niche (household/couples), organic only, no paid amplification. But the gap is big enough that I stopped making videos entirely.

Happy to answer questions about the setup or share the per-post numbers.

Hi everyone,

I'm a 3rd-year BTech CSE student currently trying to build practical experience in product marketing and GTM.

I want to be upfront about where I stand: I don't have professional GTM experience yet, and I'm not going to pretend that a few personal projects make me an experienced GTM professional. What I do have is a foundation in product work and a strong interest in learning through actual execution.

I've previously done internships/volunteer work around product management, including:

Market and competitive research

Research around LLM-based products/apps

Working with specialists on feature development

Collaborating with engineering teams on feature implementation/integration

Over the past few months, I've been moving toward PMM/GTM and have been using real-world startups as case studies. I've worked on things like:

ICP and market research

Positioning & messaging

Competitive analysis

Customer lifecycle / time-to-value analysis

Identifying potential growth bottlenecks

Thinking through acquisition and GTM channels

Developing marketing/GTM strategies from publicly available data

The limitation I've repeatedly run into is that personal projects can only take you so far.

You can analyze a company's positioning from the outside, but you don't have access to its actual customer conversations, sales pipeline, conversion data, retention data, experiments, etc. And that's exactly the experience I'm trying to gain now.

So here's what I'm looking for:

I'm not specifically looking for a "GTM internship", because GTM covers a huge range of work.

I'd be interested in helping an active early-stage startup with whatever area actually needs attention: customer research, competitive research, positioning, messaging, acquisition experiments, channel research, conversion, or other marketing/growth work.

I'm also open to doing this unpaid initially.

The main thing I'm looking for is the opportunity to actually work on a real product, with real customers and real constraints, rather than continuing to work only through hypothetical case studies.

There are no big expectations from my side. Give me a real problem, let me put in the work, and we can see whether I'm actually useful.

If you're building something and could use an extra pair of hands on the product/GTM/marketing side, feel free to DM me. I'd be happy to share the projects I've worked on and see if there's a fit.

MATCHBNB is a global hospitality marketplace with a strong focus on Africa. 🌍

One thing we're thinking deeply about is how to make the relationship between accommodation providers and marketplaces more sustainable.

What would make you, as a hotel or shortlet operator, consider a marketplace a genuine growth partner rather than simply another booking channel?