How to Market
Software

Every few years, someone discovers a marketing channel that works unusually well. They write about it. Other people copy it. The channel gets crowded. The platform notices and starts charging for access. The channel's effectiveness declines. Everyone moves on. AI compressed this cycle from years to months.

Marketing has never been easier to do and has never been harder to do well. The tools are better than ever. The competition is fiercer than ever. The platforms take a larger cut than ever. And buyers have developed defenses that are themselves increasingly sophisticated.

What remains scarce is judgment about which problems are worth solving, expertise deep enough to be genuinely useful, and the patience to build trust over a timeline longer than a quarter.

Product Hunt solved a specific problem: good products are hard to discover. For a while, this worked. Then it stopped working.

Services sell fake upvotes openly. Comment sections fill with AI-generated enthusiasm. Launches are won through coordination, not quality. This is Goodhart's Law applied to product discovery: when a ranking becomes a target, it ceases to be a useful ranking.

The platforms that work best for discovery in 2026 are the ones where the ranking mechanism is either opaque enough that gaming is difficult or distributed enough that no single score determines visibility.

Before AI writing tools, sending a good cold email was comparatively expensive. The friction was load-bearing. It kept volume low enough that the channel worked. AI removed the friction -- and in doing so, broke the channel for everyone.

The trajectory of organic reach on every major social platform follows the same curve, converging on zero at different speeds. This isn't a conspiracy. It's the business model working as designed.

Social platforms make money from advertising, not from your free content performing well. Limiting organic reach is the feature, not the bug. Building a marketing strategy around organic social distribution is building on ground that is subsiding by design.

Pretending it isn't happening is expensive.

Advertising costs have been rising steadily, and in software they've been rising faster than most industries. You are not being overcharged. You are being outbid.

AI tools reduced content production cost to approximately zero, which removed the natural quality filter. The result is a search landscape where the same basic answer appears across dozens of sites, each generated by a similar model, producing content that is technically correct and functionally useless.

By the time a buyer fills out your "request a demo" form, the evaluation is largely over. You are not being auditioned. You are being verified.

The buyer's colleague mentioned your product in a team meeting. They read a Reddit thread. They asked in a private Slack group. None of this will ever appear in your CRM. The "source" field will say "direct" or "organic search" because the buyer typed your URL after deciding to check you out.

Product-led growth is what happens when you remove the wall between the product and the customer. You let people use the product before they pay. If the product is good, some percentage convert without anyone from your sales team being involved.

The speed at which users reach the "aha moment" determines almost everything about the economics. If it takes five minutes, you have a self-sustaining acquisition engine. If it takes five weeks, you have a free trial with a high abandonment rate.

Human brains are built to trust people and to be suspicious of institutions. Corporate accounts post content and people scroll past it. The same content, posted by a person with a name and a face, gets read. The gap has widened to the point where it's difficult to justify spending on brand-channel content if you have a founder who's willing to write.

The conversations where buyers actually form opinions have migrated into spaces invisible to most marketing teams: private Slack groups, Discord servers, invite-only communities. A VP of Engineering asks their peer group "has anyone used X for Y?" and that conversation matters more than any case study your marketing team has ever produced.

Traditional outbound works like this: you compile a list of companies that match your ICP, email all of them, and hope some percentage happen to be thinking about the problem you solve. If 3% are actively evaluating, 97% of your outreach is noise.

Intent data is an attempt to solve the timing problem. Instead of guessing, you look for behavioral signals that suggest a company is already evaluating solutions.

Integrations compound and advertising doesn't. When you build a deep integration with another product, you create switching costs that didn't exist before. Each new integration makes the existing ones more valuable. This is a moat, and unlike most things that get called moats, it actually functions like one.

Vertical SaaS companies command 2-3x higher valuations than horizontal counterparts because niche expertise creates defensible moats. Instead of competing with everyone for generic keywords, you become the undisputed authority in a specific domain.

The vertical market for SaaS is projected to exceed $720 billion by 2030. When you own a niche, your marketing becomes dramatically more efficient -- you know exactly who to reach, where they gather, and what language they use.

AI search engines are replacing traditional search for a growing number of queries. Combined AI search now drives approximately 6 billion monthly visits and is growing 15-20% per quarter. Being cited by AI models is becoming as important as ranking on Google.

The pattern: a company tries content marketing for four months, gets impatient, pivots to outbound, runs that for three months, gets impatient, adds PLG, gets impatient, hires a growth hacker, gets impatient, and eventually runs out of money while doing five things badly instead of one thing well.

One motion, executed with enough depth and consistency to reach the compounding phase, will outperform five motions that each get abandoned during the plateau.