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Comment by fbrncci | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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?

I’m building this for pay as you go agent first GoToMarket engine, but I wonder if I should offer fractional GTM services.

Feel free to contact me through my profile if you need help with this.

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.

What is "actual marketing" these days, if not spamming socials?

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).

Where can i learn more about it?

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!

How do you make the ads themselves? Are you a content creator yourself? Using AI? Hiring someone to make them?

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).

Yes, I was curious about the creatives. You're doing a lot, so I was just curious where you were choosing to spend your time.

Ads as a product validation strategy is old, and used to work great, but now is saturated and produces meh results in most niches.

If you're getting >CLV from your advertising cost of customer acquisition without PMF you're doing exceptionally well.

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