When I started Campfire, marketing was easy.

This is because my co-founder Jackson made it so, and because YouTube influencer marketing was a goldmine at the time—people would actually trust the product recommendations of their favorite YouTubers, at least in our niche.

I launched Rehance with my co-founder Ernesto in January 2024, and it's been a very different experience. We've tried all sorts of marketing channels (albeit with a low budget), including:

• Google Ads
• X/Twitter Ads
• Newsletter Sponsorships
• Affiliate Directories
• Hacker News
• Reddit posts
• Cold Email
• SEO (programmatic and organic)

We've had basically no luck even getting any significant traffic, never mind conversions. With so many products out there and our audience being so specific (product owners or founders at small software companies) it's proving to be a significant challenge just getting Rehance in front of the right people.

This company is my first foray into the B2B world and compared to B2C it's like night and day. Where consumers build communities around basically everything—from subreddits about creative writing to Discords about music or stock trading—there are no such communities for the B2B audience we seek. Only the occasional podcast, newsletter, or similar might have a reasonable concentration of the target audience as listeners/readers, but no true communities of them.

This makes things very tricky. So far, shockingly the most promising approach has been cold email, which I would have never guessed could actually be efficient. But, as a company created by two engineers (despite being founder/CEO of Campfire I certainly consider myself a builder at heart), I have of course now built a system for finding the right leads, figuring out how to get their attention, and automating follow-ups. It remains to be seen whether this will work, but we've at least gotten a sign-up from our preliminary emails, so we'll see.

I Hate Cold Outreach

This process has taught me that I love building products but I hate trying to put them in front of people who aren't already interested. The whole process behind outreach—researching companies, finding the right contact, reaching out, facing rejection the vast majority of the time—sucks. Not because it's depressing, but simply because it feels like time wasted. Why spend so much time talking to people who don't want to hear from you when you could just build something else?

So, whenever I start my next company, I suspect it'll be back in the consumer space, where it's easier to get some preliminary excitement even from just a handful of people.

In business, nobody cares!

I Hate Social Media

In launching Rehance, I realized just how important distribution is. If you have a marketing channel (say, 10,000 Twitter followers who respect and admire you) you can get 100 customers for a new product in a heartbeat. If you don't, you generally can't. Even forums that used to be good at surfacing the latest awesome stuff (ProductHunt, Reddit, HackerNews) seem ever more gamified, saturated, or infiltrated by ChatGPT.

So I started doing some more Tweeting. Maybe, I figured, I could build up some followers and eventually have audience to launch new products to.

But social media sucks. I hate logging in and scrolling around looking for something interesting to comment on. I hate consuming intellectual garbage. I do things with a purpose, and frankly, if I didn't think a following would be beneficial to success I wouldn't be wasting my time scrolling around Twitter. I'd be doing what I love—building! The same goes for places like HackerNews. I'm not there to make friends, I'm there to share what I'm building and see it get a fair shake at some views! ProductHunt is the one place we haven't shared to yet, as we were hoping to reach a certain number of customers before launching there so we can refine the pitch and the pricing. But soon we'll have to launch there if we can't get any traffic through other organic means.

I am aware that this all sounds like cope, but it is what it is. Builders love to build, but products don't sell themselves. People sell products, by spending a lot of time talking to a lot of other people. And I'm just not a fan of that.

The dream scenario is having a reputation like the guys at 37Signals do where I can just post a founder letter on a website and get thousands of sign-ups. Maybe one day.

Until then, I build products, and force myself to spend time in the trenches marketing them to get them off the ground.