How to promote an AI tool

A guide for AI tool and SaaS builders with something to launch and no budget for ads — an API, a coding agent, a research assistant, a workflow automation, a wrapper you use every day. Five steps, in order. None of them require an audience you do not have yet, and each one can be finished today.

1.Clarify the offer before you promote it

Most promotion fails before it starts, because the thing being promoted cannot be described. Write one sentence: who it is for, what it does for them, and what it costs. Then delete every word that would still be true of someone else's AI tool.

The test is not whether the sentence sounds good. It is whether a stranger can repeat it back after reading it once. If they cannot, more posting will not fix it — it will only spread a message nobody can pass on.

Today: Send your sentence to three people who match your audience and ask them to say it back in their own words. Rewrite until they can.

2.Make one proof asset

People do not act on claims, they act on the thing working in front of them. Build exactly one artifact: a 60-second screen recording of the tool doing its single best trick, start to finish, uncut, with the prompt and the output both on screen.

One is enough, and one is the point — it becomes the attachment on every post, every reply and every message from here on, instead of a new asset per channel. Put it somewhere it opens instantly, with no signup and no waiting list in front of it.

Today: Make it in one sitting and publish it rough. A real, watchable version beats a polished one that never gets finished.

3.Post where your audience already is

Pick three of these and ignore the rest:

  • Product Hunt
  • Show HN on Hacker News
  • r/SideProject
  • Indie Hackers
  • dev.to or a technical writeup
  • the Discord or Slack where your users already argue about tooling

Read what already does well in each place before you post, then write in that format — a launch page, a link-first technical post, a comment that genuinely answers someone's question with your proof asset attached. Announce once per channel. The same link pasted into ten unrelated communities gets removed from ten communities.

Today: Write three posts, one per channel, each in that channel's own format. Same offer sentence, three different framings.

4.Track every link you post

Give every post its own URL, or you will never know which channel did anything. Tag them with UTM parameters: utm_source for the site, utm_medium for the format, utm_campaign for the push, and utm_content for the individual post.

https://yourai.com/?utm_source=producthunt&utm_medium=launch_post&utm_campaign=launch_week&utm_content=demo_video

Any analytics tool will then split arrivals by channel. Without the tags you get one number going up and no idea which of your three posts moved it — which means you cannot repeat what worked or drop what did not.

Today: Build the links first, in a note, one row per planned post. An untracked link teaches you nothing.

5.End on a challenge, not on "check it out"

A launch that ends with "check it out" ends there. A launch that ends with a claim someone can beat keeps moving, because the people who want to beat it do the spreading. Stake something public and checkable — a number, a position, a standing bet — and name who could take it from you.

topdollar.lol exists to make that concrete for AI tools & SaaS: a public paid leaderboard, run as an open challenge. No ads, no algorithm, no revenue share. You list your AI tool, you hold a position, and anyone else can outbid you for it under the published rules.

To be exact about what that is: a public claim with a scoreboard attached. It is not an audience and does not pretend to be one — the board is new, and every position on it is visible to anyone who looks.

Today: Take a public position, then tell the people who could beat it exactly how to.

Founding #1 is $5.

See the live AI tool board →

Whole US dollars · $5 minimum · payments are final · rules