428: Marketing for Founders Who Hate Marketing

Most technical founders I know understand marketing matters—they just hate doing it. They'd rather spend their time building features than fumbling through outreach and content strategies. I get it. I've been there for years.

So today I'm sharing what's actually worked for me: letting machines do the heavy lifting.

From programmatic SEO that turned Podscan's internal data into a signup engine, to AI-assisted customer scoring that tells me who's worth a personal conversation, to treating documentation as a discovery channel—these are systems that market your product while you focus on building it. And here's the counterintuitive part: most of the people who find you through these systems won't be your ideal customers. That's fine. They become your word-of-mouth channel instead.

This episode of The Bootstraped Founder is sponsored by Paddle.com

The blog post: https://thebootstrappedfounder.com/marketing-for-founders-who-hate-marketing/
The podcast episode: https://tbf.fm/episodes/428-marketing-for-founders-who-hate-marketing

Check out Podscan, the Podcast database that transcribes every podcast episode out there minutes after it gets released: https://podscan.fm
Send me a voicemail on Podline: https://podline.fm/arvid

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My book Zero to Sold: https://zerotosold.com/

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- Notion (which I use to organize, write, coordinate, and archive my podcast + newsletter): https://affiliate.notion.so/465mv1536drx
- Riverside.fm (that's what I recorded this episode with): https://riverside.fm/?via=arvid
- TweetHunter (for speedy scheduling and writing Tweets): http://tweethunter.io/?via=arvid
- HypeFury (for massive Twitter analytics and scheduling): https://hypefury.com/?via=arvid60
- AudioPen (for taking voice notes and getting amazing summaries): https://audiopen.ai/?aff=PXErZ
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- ConvertKit (for email lists, newsletters, even finding sponsors): https://convertkit.com?lmref=bN9CZw

Creators and Guests

Host

Arvid Kahl

Empowering founders with kindness. Building in Public. Sold my SaaS FeedbackPanda for life-changing $ in 2019, now sharing my journey & what I learned.

What is The Bootstrapped Founder?

Arvid Kahl talks about starting and bootstrapping businesses, how to build an audience, and how to build in public.

Arvid: 00:00

Hey, it's Arvid and this is the Bootstep Founder. So many of the technical founders I know really don't like marketing. It's not that they don't understand it. They know how important it is to run an effective business. You need to do marketing too.

Arvid: 00:20

But they don't really know how to do it right. They don't know how to leverage their own technical skills to make marketing easier, and they just feel it's kind of evident and obvious to them that their time would be better spent implementing product features and technical solutions than stumbling around the world of getting people to look at their product. I get it. I've been there for years, I think, and I might still be there a little bit. So I want to share a couple of ideas and learnings from my journey as a founder to show just how marketing can work for founders who hate marketing.

Arvid: 00:52

A quick word from our sponsor here, paddle.com. I use them as my merchant of record for all my software projects. So if you really just want to focus on building a product instead of having to deal with taxes, currencies and all that, check out paddle.com as your merchant of record payment provider. The biggest learning for me in now almost twenty years of software entrepreneurship is this. If you don't like to do it and you don't want other people to do it for you, at least you're not at that stage yet, well, then you have to let machines do it for you.

Arvid: 01:23

For us technical founders, that's the easy conclusion of all this. And the best and most obvious way of doing this when it comes to marketing is programmatic SEO. It's making most of the value that you and your business produce internally discoverable externally by people who are already looking for something like it. And I'm gonna give you examples here because this is almost an academic approach to what that might mean. But for PodScan, it was an obvious choice.

Arvid: 01:50

One that I took way too long to implement, took me way too long to make the choice to do it, quite honestly. But I think I talked about this at the 2025, must have been around January when I I remember walking around in the snow last year and thinking about finally taking that step. I made all the podcast and episode pages that I have internally in my dashboard where people can see transcripts and metadata and all of that, and I made them public. And I hid some of the information that people would find most interesting so that they then would sign up. I made it kind of blurted out and stuff.

Arvid: 02:27

And that was the big twist. Everything that people had to log in to see, they could now see externally when they searched for something in a search engine and they would be led into registering for an account. And ever since I made Podscan's internal data, this treasure chest of data, the biggest value of the company semi public by giving some of the information away for free through generating these pages for every single podcast and every single episode and linking them with each other and then the site map, well, that generated tens of thousands of potential endpoints for people to find the product through sign ups and searching. That has been spiking quite a bit. People have been finding exactly what they need because they were looking for one particular show and a transcript, and that's exactly where they found it.

Arvid: 03:11

And then the group of people that found it and actually has an interest in purchasing my products is now coming to the product without me having to do any targeted outreach. Of course, there are also people who want to see a transcript and would never buy a Podscan subscription. That's fine with me. I think the first 50% of the MRR that I'm at now, low 5 figures, has been created entirely through my own personal network. That's how every founder starts.

Arvid: 03:39

Right? The first half was, like, all the people on Twitter and the people who are reading my newsletter, that kind of stuff, they figured it out, and they either used it or told people that they know to use it, building in public. But the second half, the other 50%, has been coming from people who just found Podscan through Googling for a transcript or for more information on a podcast. What's the email for this show? That's what people would Google.

Arvid: 04:00

And then since we have a strong email data presence in our podcast data, we would show in those rankings in Google. Or people were googling for some more information about a host and that we would pull up. They found it through my programmatic SEO efforts. So if you have something of value in your product that people really, really crave, maybe it's some kind of data that only you scrape or data that you extract from somewhere else and enrich, make some of it available. Trust that you have put enough of an example of value out there that people will sign up and find reproducible value in your product over time.

Arvid: 04:35

Here's something I learned about this machine based marketing approach that might surprise you. With my programmatic SEO efforts, out of the hundreds of people that sign up for Podscan every day, only a handful of them really is from my ideal customer profile. Right? For me, that is PR agencies and marketing agencies and founders who need podcast data. But the majority of people out there who Google for things, well, they just wanna see a podcast transcript from some show, and they will never sign into Podscan again.

Arvid: 05:03

Obviously at this point you have a choice. Do I embrace that or do I try to prevent this? And honestly, it's fine with me because I know that even though these people are not my customer profile, they now have seen Podscan and they now know that they can go to Podscan and get the transcript of any episode of any show that they ever wanted to look at. So if any professional person in their vicinity, for some random chance, ever mentions that they would like to do more with podcasts because they know that the conversations that their business might be interested in are happening on podcasts out there, well, now that person that prior to this moment was not an interesting customer to me becomes a potential magnifier for the value of Potscan. Because they can tell them, hey.

Arvid: 05:43

So I was looking for a podcast transcript, and I found it here on what was the name of that site? Podcast scanner Potscan? It's kinda how it happened multiple times, the conversations that I have with people. Have you tried that out? Right?

Arvid: 05:54

That's what they can tell their friends or their acquaintances. And now if I have the trust between these two people already established because they know each other and I helped one of them, now I can have this recommendation benefit for my own business. The noncustomer becomes the word-of-mouth channel for me. And that's the beauty of letting machines do the heavy lifting. You're not just reaching your ideal customers, which is great, which you can do with targeted outreach, and you can even automate that.

Arvid: 06:20

But you're building brand awareness at scale. That comes through one helpful interaction at a time, and it will self amplify. Now if you don't have anything that you could show, and you might think that you may not have this treasure chest of information in your own business, which means you don't have any meaningful way to programmatically build something that exposes existing data, you can go onto the generative side of things. This is where it becomes a bit murky because I'm not talking about things like auto generated blogs or auto generated websites because those suck most of the time, if not all the time. It's just not fun to read an article that was clearly written by an AI just as much as it's not fun to watch a video that was rendered by an AI or listen to synthesized audio where you know that no human being ever touched this.

Arvid: 07:05

It just sounds like it. It just looks like it. Right? You don't want that. But there is a subsection of generative SEO that is very interesting, and it ties back to where people go look for information and what they're looking for.

Arvid: 07:18

And that section is what I consider to be pattern exposure. For me, that means the more customers you serve, the more data you ingest from all kinds of directions, either from your customers or from the projects that they're building, or if you do something for your customers and your customers interact with your product in a way, you get insights into your industry in some measurable way. And the more of that data you source from all these different origins, the more you have generalizable information that turns you from a simple product offering in the industry for these specific people into a data aggregator that also works for people outside of your ICP profiles. Right? You're an industry insider.

Arvid: 07:57

You're an actor in an industry with a unique perspective because you have the data to prove it. And now, obviously, you have to juggle with how much of the stuff that you know about your customers you're willing to and are allowed to share, but there is something really valuable in showing industry trends or behavioral patterns. And let me give you some examples here too. Let's say you're working in the tourism industry and your software as a service business facilitates bookings or scheduling tours or something. Now you can say, with all the data that you have, on a per country basis, in this season or over the last five seasons, any trip is this many percent likely to be canceled or to be fulfilled.

Arvid: 08:36

You can create a chart, a worldwide map based chart of trip cancellations to those destinations and their likelihoods. And while this seems to be extremely specific, somebody out there is looking for this data because they need insight into trips and scheduling and bookings. That's exactly what you provide. And through the angle of looking at it from this generalized data, they might become a customer. Right?

Arvid: 09:01

It's incredibly valuable information that nobody else could produce because only your data can source this information. Or let's say you're in the logistics industry and you help people optimize the routes of their trucks between warehouses or deliveries or something. Well, you can highlight traffic congestions and the likelihood for them to appear or which roads are barely used for long haul traffic. Maybe from those calculations, if somebody wants to have a vacation road trip, they wanna know which roads to avoid, where trucks are currently going. Right?

Arvid: 09:30

You could provide that. You could provide a map. Again, there's so much data here. And all of a sudden, you can make a pattern visible that others without your data could just not have made visible or even understood. And that with proper search engine technical optimizations, like turning it into something that Google will index, well, you can turn your almost, like, sterile niche product into something that really helps somebody else find meaning and useful insights, again, generating brand awareness, which is one of the big pillars of marketing.

Arvid: 09:59

You want people to know what your brand is. You want to have mindshare. So the name of the brand, the name of your product becomes something very positive, something that they will share with other people until it finds the right person, which is your ideal customer. Between letting machines create the output for you, the programmatic stuff, and letting machines help you find more and better customers, I think that's another powerful approach that I want to share. So one of the tricks that I see that a lot of founders do right now involves AI assisted marketing and outreach and sales.

Arvid: 10:31

It works pretty much like this. You take your existing customer base, usually by grabbing all the names and emails, all the domains that people sign up from, and you throw them into a prompt in some smart AI system somewhere, and you say, hey. These are my current customers. Who are they? What are similar businesses?

Arvid: 10:48

What are the lookalikes here? Who are the people that I need to communicate with? Where do they hang out? What are the places that people from these companies find new things to learn from or find community with others? Where are those people exchanging information?

Arvid: 11:02

That will then allow you to find these places and see what kind of content is created there, which you can then put into your own content creation efforts. You can either write these things yourself or you can outsource them to professional freelance writers or you can outsource some of this to AI assisted writing tools. But just figuring out where to speak and what to speak about, AI similarity and lookalike prompting is a great move for this. If you have no idea how to do marketing, if you don't have these deep insights into the customer psychology that you might need, well, an AI system might help you. Because just knowing where people go and what they're interested in, we can always ask an AI for that stuff.

Arvid: 11:41

You don't have to do massive research. AI can do the research for you, particularly if you use research capable AI systems like Claude or like Gemini, the pro version or OpenAI ChatGepty Probe whatever the thing is called now. It will give you maybe not the perfect answer, but definitely a good one to start from. And I also recommend using something like this internally to allow you to focus on the high likelihood to commit prospects that you have. You can do AI scoring.

Arvid: 12:10

Whenever somebody signs up to PodScan, I score them a couple hours into their first activities into the platform. Once they sign up, they may or may not search for something, might check out the API, might not, might turn on the Firehose, might not. Right? Might set up an alert at this point and maybe get some mentions already. I track these steps internally and then a couple hours into it, I send over a prompt to an AI that has a couple of guidelines on how to score my customers, zero to 10.

Arvid: 12:36

And the higher the score, the more likely that they are the perfect prospect, and I should be reaching out to them with customer assistance. And I do the same thing a couple days into the trial that they're on and readjust my score to see if I learned more about them along the way. And that is a way for me to figure out who my high profile customers are because I have so many people just signing up from Google. If I didn't have this kind of b to c angle where people can sign up from anywhere, I probably wouldn't have to score. But since there are so many sign ups, I have to dig through all of them manually and that just takes too much time.

Arvid: 13:12

I have a scoring system that helps me at least flag the ones that could potentially be high profile. And then from there, I can try to talk to them and see how did you come to the product, what are the social platforms that you usually go to. Maybe I can put some ads there. Right? Maybe I can be present there.

Arvid: 13:28

Where did you go before PodScan to find podcast information? Who are my competitors? What are they doing? So I can talk to them. I can ask them, and I can see what kind of content and what kind of outreach I would need to create to reach people like them better.

Arvid: 13:40

And the lookalike audience is always a great idea. Like, here are the domains of the people who signed up over the last week. Give me five times as many domains that are competitors of theirs so I could reach out to them and say, hey. Your competitors are using Podscan. Shouldn't you too?

Arvid: 13:55

Right? That is so easy because you have all this data and AI systems are really smart at it. And then if you use MCP systems like Apollo or instantly, like, all these cold outreach or, what is it, know your customer tools that are out there, it is incredibly powerful. So that's the, let's call it, automated process side of things. Another thing you can do as a technical founder when it comes to marketing, surprisingly, is let your documentation do the talking.

Arvid: 14:23

I don't just mean API docs. I'm talking about a good SEO friendly knowledge base. That's documentation both for people and for machines. That is great. Any kind of documentation, even your API docs, FAQs, any knowledge based system.

Arvid: 14:38

A good knowledge base like this is a marketing tool because it will start ranking on Google if it is well linked. And when people have questions about your product, right next to their query appears this well written and well documented answer. And if you have Google AI search results, that kind of stuff, they might pull exactly from your docs. So people have a question about your product and they pull the information right in there. This gives people not just insight into your product, but also hope that if they ever have a question, well, that will be clearly and quickly answered for them.

Arvid: 15:09

So documentation is trust building at scale as well, particularly with the AI search preview that these search engines currently have. And any chat GPT and Claude will pull this data too. And then finally, well, marketing is quite repetitive. Marketing is really just reaching the right people with the right message at the right time. And since your competitors are doing a lot of the work already, maybe you should feel inspired by what they're doing.

Arvid: 15:35

Right? This would always work. Sometimes you need to stand out significantly in an overcrowded Red Ocean market, but tracking what your competitors do and finding ways to do it yourself is generally a good idea. Think about social, think about podcast tracking. Podscan might help you here, obviously.

Arvid: 15:51

But also look at things like YouTube, TikTok, and wherever people from your best ideal customer profile are being targeted and marketed to and how that works. You will likely find something there that will resonate. For b to b software businesses, LinkedIn is still a great platform, still a great effort to do paid ads on from what I see. It's just a place where people hang out. So find the right places for the right people and be there with the right content at the right time.

Arvid: 16:17

Just easy as that. Now, obviously, all of this is hard, but it at least gives you a framework on what to go for. Right? What the low hanging fruit are. So let me bring this all together.

Arvid: 16:27

So we're talking about letting machines do the work for you with programmatic SEO, exposing the data that you already have or patterns from the data. Then we have letting machines help you score and reach out to the people who are already kind of on the hook. Then leveraging your documentation as a discovery channel and doing competitor research just blatantly copy what they do, find the right routes. I would suggest if you're just starting out and want to do something, one or two of these approaches might be highly appropriate and useful for you to implement today. You don't need to love marketing as a technical founder or as any founder really.

Arvid: 17:01

You don't even need to like it. You just need to build systems that do it for you. And that's what technical founders are good at anyway. And that's it for today. Thank you so much for listening to The Bootstrap Founder.

Arvid: 17:11

Speaking of letting machines help you find what matters, if you're a founder, PR expert, marketing team, you might be missing critical conversations about your brand that are happening on podcasts right now. PodScan monitors over 4,000,000 podcasts in real time and will alert you when people talk about anything related to you. It's about turning that unstructured podcast chatter into competitive intelligence. And if you're a founder searching for your next venture, please go and check out ideas.podscan.fm, where an AI system goes through all of these conversations, hundreds of hours of expert discussions every day so you can build what people are already asking for. Please share this with anyone who needs to turn conversations into competitive advantages.

Arvid: 17:51

Find me on Twitter at obid kahl, a r b I d k a h l. Thanks so much for listening. Have a wonderful day, and bye bye.