I left a comment that got me dozens of signups

Last week I left a reply to a post that even though it didn’t get many impressions drove almost 100 new subscribers to my marketing case studies.

Most people I know are afraid to self-promote online. They don’t want to be perceived as spammers. There’s some truth to that but it doesn’t mean you should never do it.

I don’t self-promote often but when certain conditions are met I do.

The difference between being a spammer and being useful when you self-promote online comes down to three factors: solution, audience and timing.

In this case it was the right solution (a simple way to help people get better at marketing) for the right audience (Josh’s followers who are mostly founders building something) at the right time (when people were actively reading the comments out of curiosity to see how others were solving the problem).

Since all three conditions were met the ratio between impressions and people who took action was incredibly high.

I came across that post by chance but it actually gave me an idea for a product someone should build.

A listening tool that monitors the web in real time to identify when someone is asking a question where pitching your product wouldn’t be seen as spam but as genuinely useful.

There are already a lot of tools that do this but as far as I know they’re all triggered by keywords.

That approach doesn’t work well. In my example keywords wouldn’t have triggered anything unless you’re crazy and decide to add something generic like “marketing” and get a ton of false positives.

But now we have AI and it could move beyond keywords to analyze the conversation and identify the best opportunities.

For example if someone says something like “I’m discouraged because as a technical founder it’s so hard to market my stuff” the AI could understand that sharing my case studies with them would be a perfect fit.

I think a lot of marketers would pay for something like this.