DEV Community: Saul Fleischman

Get a ‘Generate First Post’ button on the FoxPlug project page that auto-creates a post from project data and opens the review screen.

Saul Fleischman — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:10:25 +0000

Every time I watch a solo founder set up a new project in FoxPlug, fill in the name and description, and then… nothing. They close the tab. They get distracted. They tell themselves they’ll come back to write the first post later.

That “later” is where 91% of projects die.

Full article: https://medium.com/mentionfox/build-a-one-click-generate-first-post-button-on-the-project-page-that-auto-creates-a-post-from-639c9d308211

How top VCs source and triage deals every day

Saul Fleischman — Fri, 24 Jul 2026 08:18:34 +0000

It starts with a thesis. Before looking at a single company, a good investor defines the sectors and stages they actually back. This sounds obvious, but it is the step almost everyone skips, and skipping it is why so many inboxes and feeds become an undifferentiated firehose. A defined thesis is a filter, and a filter is what turns noise into signal.

See full article: https://medium.com/mentionfox/how-vcs-source-and-triage-deals-4ec698556eb2

The Founder's Field Guide to Vetting an Investor

Saul Fleischman — Thu, 23 Jul 2026 03:57:16 +0000

You are about to let someone into your company for the next decade. You have spent, what, a few hours with them across a handful of meetings and a warm intro. Meanwhile, have already called your former boss, two of your customers, your ex-co-founder, and the angel who passed.

Full article: https://medium.com/mentionfox/the-founders-field-guide-to-vetting-an-investor-b996c248f894

Run Due Diligence on the VC — Before You Take the Check

Saul Fleischman — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 03:27:01 +0000

Founders get reference-checked to death. Before a term sheet ever shows up, a serious investor has already called your old boss, your former co-founder, two of your customers, and the angel who passed on your last round. That is normal, that is due diligence.

Reading a Term Sheet for Intent, Not Price

Saul Fleischman — Tue, 21 Jul 2026 07:57:18 +0000

The number everyone stares at on a term sheet — the valuation — is the least informative thing on the page. Two term sheets at the same valuation can be worth wildly different amounts to you personally, and the difference lives in the clauses most first-time founders skim because they read like boilerplate. They are not boilerplate. Each clause is a small statement about what the investor expects to happen, and who they intend to protect when it does.

How to read the whole thing

https://medium.com/mentionfox/reading-a-term-sheet-for-intent-not-price-1d1ff630c189

FoxPlug — Not Everything Is a Launch: Teaching Software to Know What's Worth Sharing

Saul Fleischman — Mon, 20 Jul 2026 03:34:13 +0000

Build-in-public advice usually comes down to one word: more. Post more. Ship in public. Tweet every commit. Show the work.

I believed it for a while. Then I watched my own feed and everyone else's turn into noise. A founder posts "just fixed a typo" with the same fanfare as "we hit 10,000 users." The reader can't tell which one matters, so they stop reading both. The problem with "share everything" isn't effort. It's that it destroys the signal you were trying to send.

The actual skill in building in public isn't posting. It's judgment — knowing which of the forty things you did this week is the one worth telling the world about. That judgment is hard, it's tiring, and most founders are too close to their own work to have it. Your biggest launch and your smallest bugfix both feel enormous at 1am when you shipped them.

So we built the judgment into the product. It's called FoxSense, and it's the part of FoxPlug I'm proudest of.

FoxSense is a moment classifier. It watches what actually happens in your work — a feature ships, a new person joins the team, someone writes about you, your backer count crosses a round number, you rewrite your landing page — and for each one it answers a single question: is this worth telling the world, and if so, how loud?

The important words there are "how loud." Most tools treat everything as a binary: post it or don't. Real momentum has volume. A genuine milestone deserves a video and a proper post across your channels. A solid feature deserves a short post. A minor internal change deserves a line in your changelog and nothing more. Getting the volume wrong in either direction hurts you — shout about a typo and you look desperate; whisper about your best month and you've wasted it.

Here's the part that took the longest to get right: FoxSense scores everything relative to you, not to some global idea of "big." Your fortieth shipped feature is not news. Your first paying customer is. A thousand-backer milestone is enormous for a new project and routine for an established one. A generic threshold — "post when you hit 100 of anything" — is worse than useless, because it fires for the wrong people at the wrong time. So FoxSense learns your baseline first. It sits quiet through a calibration period, watches what normal looks like for your project specifically, and only then starts telling you when something breaks out of your normal.

That means the same event produces different verdicts for different founders, which is exactly right. The system isn't asking "is this objectively impressive?" It's asking "is this a big moment for you?" — and that's the only question that matches how your audience actually experiences your story.

It also means the quiet answer is a first-class answer. Most of what FoxSense sees, it tells you to sit on. That sounds like a strange thing for a marketing tool to do. It's the whole point. A tool that only ever says "post this!" is a tool you learn to ignore. A tool that mostly stays quiet and then taps you on the shoulder — this one, this is the week's real story — is a tool you trust. Trust is the entire product.

And when it does tap you, it shows its work. Every moment comes with a plain reason: worth a video and a post because it's your biggest launch in three months. Or: a short post is plenty — good, but you've shipped four of these this month. You can see the reasoning, and you can overrule it. If FoxSense says "small" and you know this one matters because a specific customer has been waiting for it, you promote it in one click and it stays promoted. The machine has judgment; you have the final say. That's the correct division of labor between a founder and a tool, and most tools get it backwards — they either do nothing or they take the wheel.

I built FoxSense because I was the target user. I ship constantly and I'm terrible at knowing what's worth saying out loud, because it all feels urgent from the inside. I wanted something that stood a little further back than I could, saw my work against my own history, and told me the truth: this one's big, that one's noise, save your voice for the moments that earn it.

Build-in-public was never supposed to mean narrate-everything. It was supposed to mean show the real work, told well. Knowing which work, and how well, is the hard part. Now it's the part the software does.

FoxPlug — Share Your Backers, Don't Beg for Them

Saul Fleischman — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 05:02:29 +0000

There are two ways to talk about money when you're building something, and they land in completely opposite places even though the underlying fact is identical.

One is the tin cup. "We're trying to raise support — please consider backing us." It's honest, it's sometimes necessary, and it puts you in the posture of asking. The reader feels a small tug of obligation, maybe a little pity, and mostly scrolls past, because asks are easy to ignore and slightly uncomfortable to read.

The other is social proof. "Two hundred people now back this project." Same money. Completely different signal. Now you're not asking for anything — you're reporting that other people already decided you were worth it. And social proof compounds in a way that asking never does: people back things other people back. The crowd is the pitch.

FoxPlug deliberately only knows how to do the second one.

We connect to where your support actually lives — Patreon, GitHub Sponsors, Open Collective, and more coming — and we watch for the moments that are worth saying out loud. Not every dollar. Not a running ticker. The moments: crossing a round number of backers, hitting a support milestone, a meaningful jump from your own normal. When one of those happens, FoxPlug surfaces it as a moment you can share, framed as proof rather than plea.

The framing rule is strict, and I want to explain it because it's a design decision, not an accident. A milestone we surface says something like "just crossed 200 backers" or "we hit our funding goal." It never says "help us raise." It never adopts the posture of need. If you want to ask for support, that's a real and legitimate thing to do — but it's a different act, with a different tone, and it's yours to write deliberately, not something a momentum tool should slip into your mouth.

There's a second rule that matters more than it looks: the count is the claim, and the dollar figure stays yours.

When we detect a backer milestone, we'll tell the world how many people back you. We will not automatically tell them how much money you've raised — even though we can see it, and even though it's public. That number is available if you want it, sitting in the detail. But a backer-count milestone quietly widening into "and we've raised over a million" is publishing a number you never agreed to publish. Money figures carry weight and consequence — investor perception, competitor attention, team expectations — and the decision to attach a specific amount to your name in public is a decision you should make on purpose, every time, not one a tool should make for you because a field happened to be available.

So we default to the safer, and frankly stronger, claim: people. "Two hundred people back this" is more persuasive than a dollar figure to most audiences anyway, because it's about humans choosing you, not an abstraction. If you want to lead with the money, you can. But you have to reach for it. It's never the default, and it's never automatic.

This is a small feature that encodes a belief I hold pretty firmly: the way you talk about your traction should make you look like something people are already backing, not something that needs rescuing. Those are two different products even when the numbers behind them are the same. Founders who master the first one build momentum. Founders stuck in the second one wear their audience down.

And the reason to automate the noticing — rather than just remembering to post when you hit a milestone — is that you won't remember. You'll be heads-down building when your backer count ticks past the round number that would've made a great post, and by the time you surface for air three weeks later, the moment reads as old news. Milestones are perishable. The value of "we just crossed 200" collapses to nothing if you say it a month after the fact. Catching it the day it happens, and handing you a ready-to-share moment framed as proof, is the whole point.

Build in public long enough and you learn that the numbers matter less than the posture. The same funding milestone can read as "this is working, come be part of it" or as "please, we need help." One pulls people toward you. The other pushes them away. FoxPlug is built to only ever help you do the first — and to keep the most consequential number, the actual dollars, firmly in your hands where it belongs.

The Foxy Walkthrough: Why I Built an AI That Shows Users Where to Click

Saul Fleischman — Sat, 18 Jul 2026 04:28:54 +0000

Most onboarding flows are really just apology letters dressed up as tutorials.

The Problem I Kept Ignoring

I watched seventeen user sessions in a row one Tuesday morning. Not skim-watching. Actually watching, with a coffee going cold next to me, as real people clicked into MentionFox, poked around for thirty seconds, and then either bounced or started doing something I had never intended. Seventeen sessions. Maybe four of those users found the feature they came for. The others just... drifted. They were not confused in an obvious way. No error messages, no broken flows. They were confused in the quiet way, the way you are when you walk into a room and forget why you came. The product was technically working. The product was also failing.

The Thesis That Changed How I Built

I had convinced myself for a long time that good UI was sufficient. If the interface was clean and the copy was clear, users would figure it out. That belief is expensive. It costs you churn you never get to diagnose, because the user who drifts away at minute two does not file a support ticket. They just disappear. What I started to understand from those seventeen sessions is that there is a gap between "knowing what a feature does" and "knowing where to reach for it right now, in this moment, given what I am trying to accomplish." Documentation closes the first gap. It does almost nothing for the second.

The thesis I landed on was this: users do not need more information about the product. They need a guide who watches what they are doing and says "try this, here, now." That is a fundamentally different thing to build. And once I believed it, I could not un-believe it.

What I Actually Built and Why It Went Wrong First

The first version of what became FoxChat was embarrassing. I shipped a chatbot that sat in the bottom corner and answered questions about features. Classic FAQ wrapper with an LLM underneath. Users ignored it at roughly the rate they ignore cookie banners. I checked the interaction logs after three weeks. Almost no one opened it voluntarily. The people who did were already power users looking for keyboard shortcuts. The people who needed it most, the drifters from my session recordings, never touched it.

The failure taught me something specific. A reactive chat widget puts the burden on the user to know they are lost. But the whole problem is that lost users do not feel lost in a way they can articulate. They feel vaguely unsatisfied, like the product is not quite doing what they hoped. They do not think "I should ask the chatbot." They think "maybe this tool is not for me."

So I rebuilt it around a different premise. Instead of waiting for the user to ask, the AI needed to observe context and offer navigation. Not pop-up notifications. Not tooltips that appear on a timer. Actual context-aware suggestions tied to what the user was doing in that moment. If someone had just connected a monitoring topic and was sitting on the results page without taking any next action, the AI should notice that and offer a specific path forward. Not "here are our features." More like "you have fifteen new mentions from the last 24 hours, here is how to filter for the ones most likely to be buyer intent signals."

Measuring Whether It Actually Worked

I am allergic to vanity metrics at this point, so I set two specific numbers to watch. First: did time-to-first-meaningful-action drop? By meaningful action I mean something that would realistically lead to a use case completion - not clicking a menu, but actually running a search, saving a lead, or exporting something. Second: did the percentage of users reaching what I internally call "the aha moment" increase within the first session?

Before the new version of FoxChat was in place, median time to first meaningful action was around nine minutes for new users. That sounds fine until you remember that most people give a new B2B tool about three minutes of genuine patience before they start mentally composing their cancellation email. After we rolled out the context-aware guidance, that number came down to under four minutes. The aha moment rate in session one went from something I was embarrassed to say out loud to a number I am now willing to reference in a pitch deck. Not because the product changed. The product was identical. The guide changed.

There was also a failure mode I had not anticipated. Some users found the AI suggestions intrusive. I got feedback, direct feedback from a customer I respect, that it felt like the product was "hovering." I toned down the frequency and added a simple way to suppress suggestions for a session. Retention among the users who had complained actually improved after that adjustment. The lesson there is that guidance should feel like a knowledgeable colleague, not a surveillance system.

The Investor Research Angle I Did Not Expect

One place where this mattered in a way I had not planned for was the investor research use case. Some of our users come to MentionFox not to generate leads but to track signal about markets, competitors, or funding activity. That workflow is genuinely non-obvious on first contact. The steps are different, the filters are different, the outputs they care about are different from a sales-led user. Without guidance, those users consistently got stuck trying to use the lead-generation flow for something it was not designed for.

When the AI started recognizing the signals of an investor research session - the types of keywords being tracked, the sources being prioritized - it could route them toward the right configuration. That improved completion rates for that specific use case by a margin that would have taken me months to achieve through UI redesign alone.

What This Means If You Are Building Something

The practical version of everything I just said is this. If you are watching session recordings and seeing people fail quietly, your instinct is probably going to be "I need better onboarding docs" or "I need a product tour." Resist that. Docs and tours are static. Your users are not static. They come in with different intent, different context, different levels of patience. The guide has to be dynamic or it is just more noise they will learn to ignore.

Build something that watches and responds, not something that broadcasts. The bar is not "did the user receive information." The bar is "did the user take the action that was right for them, at the moment they were ready to take it." That is a harder bar. It is also the only one that shows up in your retention numbers.

If you want to see how FoxChat handles contextual guidance inside MentionFox - specifically how it surfaces next-step suggestions based on what a user is actively doing - the best way is to poke around the product directly. And if you are evaluating whether the platform fits your team, the MentionFox pricing page has the current plan breakdown without any contact-us-for-a-quote friction, because I find that friction annoying as a buyer and I refuse to do it to you.

If you found this useful, I write about solo-founder distribution, B2B SaaS, and what's actually working in the AI-search era over on my Substack (one post per week, no spam).

I'm building MentionFox - a B2B intelligence suite that combines brand mention tracking with AI-visibility (GEO) measurement, investor research, and outreach automation. There's a free tier and a 5-day trial of Pro at mentionfox.com/pricing.

FoxPlug — Your Changelog Is Your Most Honest Marketing

Saul Fleischman — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 07:19:39 +0000

Most founders treat the changelog as a chore. A dry list of "what's new," written in a hurry, buried on a page nobody visits, formatted like release notes because that's what release notes look like. It's the part of the product you write last and care about least.

I think that's backwards. Your changelog is the most honest marketing asset you have, and for a founder building in public, it might be the most valuable.

Here's why. Every other piece of marketing you produce is a claim about the future — what the product will do, who it's for, why it matters. Your changelog is the only one that's pure evidence about the past. It says, plainly and without spin: here is what we actually shipped, and here is when. Nobody pads a changelog. It moves when the product moves and it's silent when it doesn't. That makes it the one thing on your site a skeptical visitor can trust, because it's the one thing you can't really fake.

And a steady changelog tells a story that no single post can: that you ship, consistently, and you're not slowing down. One feature is an event. Forty features over six months, dated, in a row, is proof of momentum — and momentum is what people are actually buying when they bet on an early product. They're not buying what it does today. They're buying their confidence that it'll be twice as good in six months. Your changelog is the evidence for that bet.

So in FoxPlug we rebuilt the changelog from a chore into a channel.

It's white-label, so it wears your brand, not ours. It's per-project, so each thing you're building gets its own clean feed rather than everything smashed together — a founder with three products shouldn't have to explain why updates to one are mixed in with another. And it's built to be shared, not just archived: the changelog is a public, branded page that does double duty as proof-of-momentum, something you can point people to and something that quietly markets you between launches.

That "between launches" part is where it earns its keep. Launches are spikes — a burst of attention, then quiet. The changelog is the baseline underneath the spikes, the thing that's working on the days you're not launching anything. A visitor who lands on your site on an ordinary Tuesday, sees a launch from three months ago and nothing since, quietly concludes you've stalled. The same visitor who sees a changelog with entries from this week, last week, the week before, concludes the opposite without you having to say a word. You didn't write a marketing pitch. The dates did it for you.

Tying it into the rest of FoxPlug is where it gets genuinely useful rather than just tidy. Because the product is already watching what you ship, a changelog entry isn't a separate thing you have to remember to write — it's a natural byproduct of the moments the system already detected. The same ship that FoxSense weighed to decide whether it deserved a video can also drop, quietly, into your changelog as part of the steady drumbeat. Big moments get the full treatment; small ones still count, as a line in the record that proves you never stopped moving. Nothing worth logging gets lost just because it wasn't worth a whole post.

There's a discipline I want to name here, because it's easy to get wrong. A changelog only works as trust if it stays honest. The moment it becomes marketing copy — every bugfix dressed up as a revolution, every entry breathless — it stops being evidence and becomes just more noise, and readers can smell it instantly. So the right voice for a changelog is flat, specific, and a little understated. Added this. Fixed that. Shipped the other. The persuasion isn't in the adjectives. It's in the length of the list and the freshness of the dates. Let the record speak; don't oversell it.

For a solo founder especially, this matters, because you don't have a marketing team producing a steady stream of content. What you have is the work itself. The changelog is the lowest-effort, highest-trust way to turn the work you're already doing into a continuous, credible signal that you're alive and moving — without writing a single additional word of marketing.

Stop treating it as the thing you update grudgingly at the end. It's the most believable page on your site. Give it your brand, keep it honest, put it where people can see it, and let it do what no launch post can: prove, quietly and continuously, that you ship.

Why I Don't Trust My Own Founder Hunches Anymore

Saul Fleischman — Thu, 16 Jul 2026 07:32:18 +0000

The hunch that cost me four months

I was absolutely certain that mid-market HR tech companies were drowning in competitor noise and desperately needed a better way to track what was being said about them. I had talked to three founders at a conference, all of them nodded vigorously, and I walked away feeling like I had cracked the code. Four months later, after building a feature set aimed squarely at that segment, I had five free trials and zero conversions. The nodding, it turned out, meant "interesting idea" not "I will pay for this."

Why founder intuition is both your best asset and your worst one

Every founder I respect runs on pattern recognition. You spot something broken before the market names it. You connect dots that analysts miss because they are looking at reports, not at the actual friction in people's days. That intuition is real and it is worth protecting.

But the same cognitive machinery that lets you see around corners also lets you build elaborate castles on a foundation of three data points and a good conference conversation. I have done this more than once. The HR tech detour was not even the most expensive version. I spent two months convinced that VC associates were the right entry point for selling investor research tools, because a partner at a fund told me his associates were overwhelmed. He was describing his problem. His associates were not the ones with budget or urgency to solve it.

What changed things for me was not becoming less intuitive. It was building a system that could argue back.

What I actually started doing differently

The first shift was separating signal-gathering from interpretation. When I was doing both in the same conversation, the interpretation always won. I would hear something ambiguous and immediately file it under the hypothesis I was already running. So I started recording discovery calls and reviewing them two days later, cold, without the emotional residue of the conversation. Things I had mentally labeled as strong confirmation looked very different on a reread. People were being polite. They were describing a past pain, not a current one. They were talking about what their company needed in theory, not what they personally had budget authority to buy.

The second shift was using social listening data as a check on my own assumptions before I built anything. This sounds obvious but I was not doing it systematically. I would run searches on competitor mentions, industry pain points, and the specific language people used when complaining publicly in forums, LinkedIn comments, and community threads. That language gap alone was instructive. I kept using the phrase "brand share of voice" in my positioning. Almost nobody in my actual target segment used that phrase. They were saying things like "I have no idea if our content is actually landing with the right people" and "our SDRs are going dark because they don't have good context before outreach." Different words, different frame, different product emphasis.

The third thing I did was build a small internal rubric before starting any new feature or segment push. Five questions. How many distinct people, unprompted, described this exact pain in the last 60 days. What is the current workaround they are using and are they paying for it already. Who specifically owns this problem inside the company and do they have discretionary budget. What would success look like to them in 90 days. And what is the second-order reason they might not buy even if they agree the problem is real. Running that rubric killed two features before I wasted engineering time on them. It felt wasteful to do that analysis. It was not.

The fourth shift was getting more honest about what the data from our own platform was telling me versus what I wanted it to say. We built an investor research component inside MentionFox, the investor suite, partly because I personally wanted that tool and assumed other operators and founders would too. Usage data told a more specific story. The people who actually leaned into it were not founders doing general market research. They were founders in active fundraising processes who needed fast competitive context before partner meetings. Totally different use case, totally different messaging, totally different urgency trigger. I had the right product and the wrong story about who needed it and when.

The fifth thing, and this is the uncomfortable one, is that I started writing down my hunches with a confidence score and a timestamp, then checking back on them quarterly. Most founders, including me, have selective memory about our predictions. We remember the ones that landed. The ones that did not tend to get quietly reclassified as "pivots" or "learnings." Keeping a literal log of what I predicted, how confident I was, and what actually happened has made me significantly more calibrated. My hit rate on strong-confidence hunches about enterprise segments is around 40 percent. That is not bad, but it means I should not be betting four months of engineering on any single one of them without external data as a check.

The practical version of this

If you are a founder and you are about to build something because you have a strong feeling, that feeling is data but it is not evidence. Before you scope the feature, run the rubric. Go find 20 to 30 public conversations - Reddit threads, LinkedIn posts, community Slack archives, whatever you can get - where people are describing the problem you think you are solving. If you cannot find those conversations, that is itself important information. Either the pain is real but private, which happens in some enterprise contexts, or the pain is not as acute as you believe.

Use whatever tools you have to do that listening systematically rather than sampling the conversations that already confirm what you think. The whole point is to find the evidence that argues against you. Your own brain will not surface that evidence voluntarily. It needs a process that forces the question.

Where MentionFox fits into this for me

I am not going to pretend objectivity here. I built parts of MentionFox specifically because I needed this discipline for myself and my team. The social listening layer is what I use to pressure-test positioning before we ship anything. The investor research tools inside the investor suite came directly from a real use case I kept running manually before we built it out. But the broader point holds regardless of what tools you use. The discipline matters more than the tool.

If you want to see how MentionFox handles the signal-gathering side of this - tracking mentions, surface-level sentiment, lead signals, and the AI visibility data that tells you how your brand is appearing in LLM-generated answers - the pricing page has the breakdown by use case and team size. No aggressive sales sequence, just the information.

My hunches are still useful. I just do not let them run unsupervised anymore.

If you found this useful, I write about solo-founder distribution, B2B SaaS, and what's actually working in the AI-search era over on my Substack (one post per week, no spam).

The warm intro is everything: why cold outreach fails in venture

Saul Fleischman — Wed, 15 Jul 2026 01:26:54 +0000

In most of business, a good cold email can open a door. In venture, it mostly cannot. Investors and founders both operate on a currency that cold outreach cannot buy: trust transferred through a mutual connection. Understanding why changes how you approach everyone you want to reach.

The reason is volume and risk. A notable investor receives more inbound than they can read, so they triage ruthlessly, and the cheapest triage signal is provenance. A message that arrives through someone they already trust clears the filter before a word is read. A cold message, however well written, starts at the bottom. It is not personal; it is arithmetic.

So the work is not writing a better cold email. It is finding the warm path. For any person you want to reach, there is almost always a chain of one or two connections, a shared investment, a former colleague, a portfolio overlap, that turns a cold ask into a warm one. The skill is mapping those paths and choosing the one where your connection is genuinely strong, not nominal.

This is also why a warm path has to be real. A weak intro, someone who barely knows the target vouching for someone they barely know, can be worse than no intro, because it spends credibility without transferring any. The best paths are backed by something concrete: people who have actually co-invested, worked together, or built something in common. If you cannot point to the tie, neither can your introducer.

When there is truly no warm path, cold outreach still has a place, but it has to do the work a warm intro would have done. That means leading with a specific, relevant reason you are reaching this exact person, not a template. The bar is higher precisely because you have lost the trust shortcut.

The lesson holds for founders raising and investors sourcing alike: before you draft a message, map the path. The quality of your intro almost always matters more than the quality of your pitch.

I Give Free Launch Videos to Strangers. It's My Only Growth Channel — and That Should Scare You.

Saul Fleischman — Tue, 14 Jul 2026 06:42:28 +0000

Every growth playbook says the same things: build an audience, run ads, ship content, optimize the funnel. I did most of those badly. And here is the only thing that has actually moved the needle for my startup: I make free launch videos for total strangers and hand them over with no strings attached.

That's the channel. That's the whole thing. And the fact that it's the only thing that's worked should make every founder reading this slightly uncomfortable — because of what it implies about all the "marketing" the rest of us do.

The one channel that converted anyone

I scan Product Hunt for makers who launched without a demo video — there are a lot of them — and I make one for them, from their own site, fully white-label, and drop it in their comments. No pitch. No "book a call." Just: here, this is yours, use it anywhere.

Some of them come look at what made it. A few sign up. Every single one of my first users arrived through that door and no other. Not ads. Not my Twitter. Not the blog. A free thing, given first.

Why that should bother you

Here's the uncomfortable part. If the only marketing that works is literally doing unpaid work for a stranger before asking for anything, then most of what we call marketing isn't marketing. It's noise. It's asking, dressed up.

We've all automated the asking. Cold email sequences. "Quick question" DMs. Retargeting pixels that follow people around the internet whispering buy, buy, buy. We industrialized the ask and wondered why nobody answered. Nobody industrialized the give. Generosity doesn't have a growth-hacking conference track.

But attention, it turns out, is still earned the old way: you do something useful for someone, and a fraction of them turn around and pay attention back. In a feed full of automated outreach and AI slop, a genuinely useful free thing is a pattern interrupt so rare it feels almost suspicious.

"But it doesn't scale"

Correct. Making a bespoke video for a stranger, by hand, does not scale, and every investor instinct in your body is screaming that right now. Here's my honest answer: scale is the wrong first question when your number is zero.

The first question isn't "how do I do this a million times." It's "have I done one genuinely useful thing for one real person yet." And most founders, if they're honest, haven't. They've done a thousand asks and zero gifts. They have a distribution problem, they think — but really they have a generosity problem.

So I built the tool that lets me give at scale

The only reason I can do this more than once a week is that I built the machine to produce the gift: one recording of a real product becomes a whole white-label launch kit — video, GIFs, stickers, stills, a blog post, posts for every channel. Not because generosity scales, but because the asset does, and generosity is just the delivery mechanism.

That's the actual business, if it becomes one: giving founders something worth giving away, so they can not-be-a-ghost on their launch day. I'm the first user, and I'm using it to give things away, because that's the only marketing I've found that a stranger doesn't immediately smell as a trick.

The honest number

Three signups. I know. I'm not writing this from the mountaintop; I'm writing it from the bottom of the hill with the receipts in my hand. But every one of those three came from giving first, and none of the fancy stuff produced a single one. That's not a growth hack. It's just the part nobody wants to say out loud:

You probably don't have a distribution problem. You have a generosity problem. Go do one genuinely useful thing for one real stranger this week, with nothing attached, and watch what happens. It's slower than an ad and it works better, and that should tell you everything.

— Saul, building FoxPlug in public, giving it away first