Sami's marketing brain

Before I look at a single channel I check whether strangers want it, what the page says and what it costs.

1. Will my app make money, and when should I stop?

   Do strangers already know they have the problem you solve?

   Six things decide whether a stranger pays. Two can never be missing: a problem they already know they have, and enough trust to hand over a card. When fair tests keep coming back empty, I say stop.

2. Nobody is signing up to my app. What do I do?

   Do the people arriving actually have the problem?

   I look at the page before the channel, and check four things in order: the people, the page, the price and where they drop off. More visitors to a page that does not work is more money for the same answer.

3. People sign up to my app but nobody pays. Why?

   Has anyone who signed up ever reached the checkout?

   A signup only shows that someone clicked a free button. Until money follows it, it is a cost, so I judge a product on payments by source, never on the signup count.

4. What is product market fit, and how do I know if I have it?

   Are strangers paying without being chased, and coming back?

   For a small product the signs are plain: strangers pay without being chased, some come back, some tell others. Signups, compliments and friends using it are not the signs.

5. What is positioning, and how do I work out mine?

   What would your buyers do if your product did not exist?

   A buyer never judges a product alone. They file it beside what they use today. So I want one sentence, written last: what it is, who it is for, what it replaces and why it is different.

6. What is an ideal customer, and how do I find mine?

   Who has this problem now, and already works around it?

   Your ideal customer has the problem now, knows it, and already spends time or money working around it. I check where they talk about it, what they use today and what it costs them.

7. What marketing terms does a founder need to know?

   Are you before launch, with people arriving, or with people paying?

   Twelve terms, in the order a founder meets them: before you launch, once people arrive, once people pay, and the test over all of it. Once I have read your product, I use them on your own numbers.

I rank the places your buyers already gather, free before paid, and you work one of them at a time.

1. How do I get customers for my app?

   Where do the people who need your product already gather?

   Run one channel, where your buyers already are, and fix what the page says before you spend on anything else. If that channel fails, I look at the product and the page before I name another.

2. I just built my first app. How do I get signups?

   Is the price on the page, in the words your buyers type?

   The page comes first: what it does, who it is for and what it costs, in the words your buyers type. Then one honest post where they already talk, asking for feedback, not money.

3. How do I market my app?

   Have you fixed the page before telling your story anywhere?

   I work in this order: the page, the one place your buyers gather, your real story told there, every signup and payment counted by source, and paid ads last, as a small test.

4. How do I market an app with no money?

   What could an hour a day do in the places your buyers already are?

   Spend time instead of money: one honest post, fast replies, and pages that answer what buyers type into Google and ChatGPT. Search only brings buyers if buyers are searching.

5. What is a go to market strategy, and how do I work out mine?

   Who is it for, what do you say, what does it cost, and where first?

   A go to market strategy is four decisions: who the product is for, what you say, what it costs and the one channel you try first. For one person it is a page, not a forty page document.

6. What goes in a launch plan, and in what order?

   Will you be there to answer every comment on the day?

   A launch is a day, not a strategy. Before it, the page is clear and every signup and payment can be counted by source. On the day, one post in one place. After it, count, fix and launch again somewhere else.

7. How do I promote my app on Reddit without getting removed?

   Have you been one of the people you are posting to?

   Tell your own story and ask for honest feedback. The link stays out of the post and goes in the comments when someone asks. Read the community's rules and its filters first.

8. Which distribution channel should I use for a product I just launched?

   Have you tried the free channels before any paid one?

   Fifteen channels, each from the rules of the platform or regulator that owns it. Once you sign up, I rank up to ten for your product, free before paid, and a channel ruled out stays on the list with the reason.

9. What are Reddit's rules on promoting your own product?

   Will this community's own rules let you post it?

   No site wide rule stops you posting about your own product. Each community's moderators set their own rules and do much of the removing, and neither the Reddit Rules nor the spam policy sets a ratio.

10. How do I launch on Product Hunt, and what are the rules?

    Can people use your product today, with no waitlist in the way?

    Launching is free, from a personal account at least a week old, and you may never ask for an upvote. Product Hunt does not promise the homepage and states no figure for the signups a launch brings.

11. How do I post my product on Hacker News?

    Could someone try it without an account, an email or a card?

    Show HN is for something people can try. Landing pages, sign up pages and fundraisers are off topic, and asking for votes gets a submission, an account or a site penalised or banned.

12. How do I promote my product on LinkedIn and X without getting banned?

    Would you send this message by hand, to someone it is meant for?

    Neither bans posting about your own product. Both ban bots, bulk unsolicited messages and traded or bought likes, and LinkedIn publishes no weekly figure for invitations, only that a limit exists.

I check that search engines and assistants can read your pages, and that your pages use the words your buyers type.

1. How do I get ChatGPT to recommend my app?

   Are the words your buyers type anywhere on your pages?

   Get into the indexes the assistants read, let their crawlers in, and answer your buyers' questions in the words they type. ChatGPT's search draws on Bing among other sources, so Bing matters too.

2. How do I do SEO for a brand new site?

   Does Google get a 200 and real text from every page you want found?

   Google asks three things: the crawler is not blocked, the page returns 200, it has indexable content. Crawling can take a few days to a few weeks, and nobody can honestly promise a date for traffic.

3. How do I get my product cited by ChatGPT and AI search?

   Does your robots.txt let the search crawlers in?

   Let each company's search crawler in, get indexed by Google and Bing, and keep the answer in the page's own text. Nobody sells a place in an answer. Each setting only makes you eligible.

4. Which directories should I list my new product in, and what do they charge?

   Which directories do your buyers actually use?

   List where your buyers look, for them to read: Google counts low quality directory links as link spam. A fee can buy a faster review, and a listing can still be turned down.

5. How do I get my app approved and found on the App Store and Google Play?

   Is the build finished, with a listing that says only what it does?

   Both stores review a product before they list it, and Apple ties over 40% of unresolved issues to its rule on completeness. A new personal Google Play account must run a closed test with at least 12 testers for 14 days.

6. How many apps are on the App Store and Google Play, and how many get rejected?

   Once you are listed, what will bring people to the listing?

   On Apple's count, 23 in every 100 submissions were rejected in 2025, so a rejection is ordinary. Google gives no count of submissions, so the two stores cannot be compared line for line, and a listing is not distribution.

I aim at the payment from the start: who pays, what makes them pay today, and what it cost to reach them.

1. How do I get paying customers for my app?

   What makes someone pay for this today, rather than just like it?

   Paying customers come from people who need it today, not from people who like it. I look for what makes the need bite: a deadline, a rule or a cost they cannot ignore. Then I count every payment by source.

2. How much should I charge for my product?

   What does the problem cost your buyer today?

   Nobody reads a price on its own. It is weighed against what the problem costs the buyer and what else they could do, so set it from the value, then test it. I never change your price. You do.

3. What is a conversion rate, and how do I work out mine?

   3% of what, and from which source?

   A conversion rate is the share who did the thing out of everyone who had the chance. It has to name its step and its source, and while the counts are small, give them as counts, such as 1 of 20.

4. What are onboarding and activation, and how do I measure mine?

   What first action inside your product proves someone got the point?

   Activation is the first moment a new user gets what the product is for. A signup or a login is not it. When people sign up and few activate, they are leaving inside sign up and onboarding, not on the landing page.

5. Is it legal to cold email or DM people about my product?

   Are you writing to a company, or to a person?

   In the UK you may email a company cold, but an individual or a sole trader needs specific consent, and so does a direct message to them. In the US every marketing email needs an honest sender, a postal address and an opt out.

I read who stays, whether the ones who left chose to, and what they have really paid, from your own records.

1. What is retention, and how do I read mine?

   Of the people who started in one month, how many are still there?

   Retention is the share of a cohort still there after a day, a week or a month. A paid channel multiplies what is already there, so I read it before any money goes on reaching more people.

2. What is churn, and how do I work out my churn rate?

   Did they choose to leave, or did a card simply fail?

   Churn is the customers who left in a period divided by those you had at its start. Two sums give two answers, so I say which one I used, and with 8 customers one cancellation is 12.5%.

3. What is customer lifetime value, and how do I work out mine?

   What have your customers really paid you so far?

   Lifetime value is the monthly payment divided by monthly churn, and until customers have had time to leave it is a guess. With a short record I count what they have really paid to date.

I treat paid ads as a faster way to learn, with the spend and the result that stops them set before the test starts.

1. How can I advertise my app?

   Do strangers use it for free before you pay to reach more?

   Start in one free place where your buyers gather. If your product is bought on the page, pay for ads only once strangers use it for free. Shops and phone games are the exception: they sell through ads from day one.

2. Should I run ads before anyone has paid?

   What result will stop the test, and did you decide it first?

   Ads do not make anyone want a product. They only show you faster whether strangers do. If your product is bought on the page, a test gets about 5% of your marketing budget and one week, and stops if nobody pays.

3. How do I run a first Google Ads campaign without getting it disapproved?

   Does the ad promise only what the page it lands on delivers?

   Every ad is reviewed before it runs, against a finished page Google's crawler can load. There is no minimum spend, but on most campaigns a day can cost up to 2 times your daily budget.

4. What are Meta's rules for a first ad on Facebook and Instagram?

   Does your ad describe the product, and never the reader?

   An ad must not assert or imply the reader's health, age, money troubles or name, and must match its landing page. An ad set usually leaves the learning phase after about 50 results in a week.

5. How do I run a first Reddit Ads campaign without getting it rejected?

   Have you posted on Reddit for free, within its rules, first?

   Reddit's own teams review each ad, typically within a day, though another of its pages says up to 48 business hours. An ad group can spend up to 20% over budget, and a suspended account loses its ads too.

6. How do I run a first TikTok Ads campaign without getting it rejected?

   Do you have a short video with sound, and a page you will not change?

   A campaign budget must exceed $50 and an ad group's daily budget must exceed $20, so one week is at least $140. The ad has to match a finished landing page that you then leave alone.

7. What are the rules for paying an influencer to post about my product?

   Does the post say it is an ad, right at the start?

   A post you paid for, or gave a gift or any incentive for, must say it is advertising, in the UK and the US. Free access to your product counts as payment, and the brand answers for it as well as the creator.

8. What are the rules for a referral or affiliate programme?

   Is the reward smaller than what a customer pays you?

   You answer for what your affiliates post, and each must disclose the commission. In the UK, asking customers to forward your emails needs the friend's consent, and neither store allows a paid review.

9. What is customer acquisition cost, and how do I work out mine?

   What did each paying customer cost you, channel by channel?

   It is what you spent to win customers in a period, divided by the people who paid for the first time in it. A cost per signup is a different figure, and with nobody paying there is nothing to divide by.

I read official tables, company reports, surveys, one founder's record and AskSami's own numbers for what each does and does not count.

1. What do the figures really say about new businesses, apps and startups?

   Who counted that figure, and what exactly did they count?

   Official tables count businesses still trading, never why one closed. I give every figure with who counted it and when, call a survey a survey, and say so where sources disagree.

2. How many new businesses survive one year, five years and ten years?

   Is that frightening figure about businesses like yours at all?

   In the US, 51.4% of new employer establishments last five years. In the UK, 38.4% of new registered businesses do. Neither table counts software products, and closing is not the same as failing.

3. Why do startups fail, according to the surveys?

   Do enough people want your product, and would you know early?

   Surveys and post mortem counts put running out of money anywhere from 25% to 70%, by sample, and none of it is official data. Under different names they come back to one thing: not enough people wanted the product.

4. How much software is being built in the AI era?

   With this much being built, what sets your product apart?

   GitHub counted 121 million new repositories in the year to August 2025, and no count here shows users or revenue. My own reading, not any source's: reaching the people it is for is what now sets a product apart.

5. Why AskSami exists

   Are you spending to buy a signal, or to buy hope?

   One founder's own story, as he wrote it: a product built for six months that never had a paying customer, and one that sold after one honest post. I hold it as one case among many.

6. The founder's numbers, dated

   Is every figure you quote dated, with where it came from?

   Every figure the site quotes about the founder's four products, each with when it was true and where it came from. Nothing is rounded up, averaged or invented, and a figure with no date says so.

7. What I posted on Reddit while Ancestorii failed

   Does a rising signup count feel like progress while nobody pays?

   Five posts written on Reddit while Ancestorii failed, word for word, without the replies. If your product is heading the same way, this is what it looks like from the inside.

8. Where AskSami's signups come from

   Can you say where each of your signups came from?

   AskSami's own signups and payments, by source and by month, counted the way I count them for every product I read: first touch, kept from the first page, money beside the signups. The numbers are small, dated and never rounded.

I say plainly what I read, what I keep and what I will never do, and when something else is the better pick.

1. How AskSami works

   Is your product's code in a GitHub repository I can read?

   Once you sign up, I read what you give me, free the first time: your GitHub repository, up to 40 pages of your live site, your files. Then I write the honest read and a ranked plan. I never post, spend or write to your code.

2. Is there a tool that works like a marketing expert sat next to me?

   Have you launched, and is nobody signing up or paying?

   AskSami is software that works like a marketing expert sat next to you, because it reads your product first. I am not a person, I promise no customers, and I never post or spend.

3. AskSami's site reader

   Does your robots.txt let me read the pages that matter?

   AskSami's reader takes at most 40 pages of one site, reads robots.txt first and obeys it, asks only for public pages and never logs in. It keeps facts with the page each came from, not a copy.

4. Who runs AskSami

   Do you know who is behind the advice you are taking?

   AskSami is run by Ancestorii Ltd and built by one person, who wrote my rules from what four products cost him. I am the expert inside it, and I am not AskSAMIE or the Sami ad tool.

5. What are the ways to get your first users, and what does each cost?

   Has anyone paid yet, and who should do the work?

   Eight ways to get help, from doing it alone to an agency, set side by side with what each cost on the day it was read. None of the eight can promise customers.

6. AskSami or ChatGPT: which one for getting your first users?

   Do you want one assistant for many jobs, or this product read first?

   ChatGPT is the better pick for one assistant across many jobs, or before you launch. I am for a launched product you want read first and held to one ranked plan.

7. AskSami or GrowthMentor: which one for getting your first users?

   Do you need someone who has run your channel for years?

   Pick GrowthMentor for a person's judgement, a specialist in one channel, accountability or a network. I have read your product, not lived your problem, and I introduce you to nobody.

8. AskSami or Native: which one for getting your first users?

   Is the open question who will post, or whether it can sell?

   Native is the better pick when you know your buyers and what to say, and want the posting and the Meta ads done. More posts will not tell you why nobody buys, and I never post or spend.

9. AskSami or an analytics tool such as DataFast: which one for getting your first users?

   Do you have the traffic for a dashboard to count yet?

   An analytics tool is the better pick when you already have traffic and need to see where the revenue comes from. With few visits it has little to count, and my read starts from your product instead.

10. AskSami or a fractional CMO: which one for getting your first users?

    Is there a team to lead and a budget to manage yet?

    When there is revenue or funding, people to direct and a budget to manage, hire a fractional CMO. I lead nobody and answer to no board. I am for the stage when it is only you.

11. AskSami or a marketing agency: which one for getting your first users?

    Is there a channel already proven that someone could scale?

    Hire an agency when your product already sells, you know which channel brings the buyers, and you have money and no time. While nobody has paid, there is nothing proven to scale.

12. What did you build, and who is it for?

    Ready to tell me what you built?

    Say it in your own words. I reply, then ask the one question that matters. Free, no account, 8 messages, and nothing of yours is read until you say so.