u/shefinshefz

I’ve been thinking about this from the perspective of someone starting with zero audience, zero traffic, and no marketing budget.

Let’s say you have a genuinely useful digital product, your sales page is ready, and the product is actually good.

But… nobody knows it exists. 😅

What would you do next?

Would you:

🔹️Build an audience on social media?

🔹️Post in communities like Reddit or Facebook?

🔹️Try Pinterest or SEO?

🔹️Make YouTube/short-form content?

🔹️Build an email list?

🔹️Use marketplaces?

🔹️Try paid ads later?

🔹️Take a completely different route?

And here’s the part I’m most curious about:

What would you avoid?

There are so many “proven” strategies online that it’s hard to tell what actually works when you're starting from nothing.

If you’ve personally sold digital products, what was the first thing that genuinely brought you traffic, customers, or sales?

Even if something failed badly, I’d love to hear about it.

If you had to start again from zero today, what would your first 30 days look like?

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately.

Getting people to see your content is one problem.

Getting the right people to actually click, trust you, and eventually buy feels like a completely different game.

So I’d love to hear from people who have actually

experimented with social media marketing:

What has genuinely worked for you?

Which platform has brought you the best results?

What type of post gets the most meaningful engagement?

What actually turns engagement into clicks or sales?

Have you found a strategy that consistently works instead of just getting one viral post?

What marketing tactic looked promising but ended up wasting your time?

If you had to build an audience from zero again, what would you do differently?

I’m much more interested in real experiments and lessons learned than generic marketing advice.

What’s one social media marketing lesson you wish you knew when you started?

I’m curious about what’s actually working for people selling digital products right now.

There’s so much advice online — post consistently, build an audience, use Pinterest, run ads, do SEO— but I want to hear from people who have actually tested these things.

If you sell digital products through Gumroad, Payhip, Etsy, your own website, or another platform:

What is currently bringing you the most traffic and sales?

I’d especially love to know:

Which platform has brought you your best customers?

What type of content gets people to click?

Have you had better results from social media, communities, SEO, email, or paid ads?

What marketing experiment worked surprisingly well?

What did you try that turned out to be a complete waste of time?

If you had to start again from zero audience today, what would you focus on first?

I'm not looking for “just post every day” advice 😅

Real experiences, experiments, numbers, wins, failures all welcome.

I’m trying to figure out what actually deserves time and effort instead of chasing every marketing tactic on the internet.

I've started thinking about prompt quality a little differently.

If I run a prompt once and get an excellent answer, that's a good result but it doesn't necessarily mean I built a good prompt.

The more useful test is:

Can the prompt produce a useful result across different inputs?

For example, if a prompt is designed to analyze customer feedback, I wouldn't test it with one perfect example.

I'd give it:

- a normal example

- a very short example

- a messy example

- an ambiguous example

- an example that doesn't fit the expected pattern

Then I'd look at how it fails, not just whether it fails.

A prompt that gives one impressive output might just be lucky.

A prompt that stays useful when the input changes is much more interesting.

How do you personally decide that a prompt is actually good?

I used to save the responses that worked really well and treat them as examples of a "good prompt".

Lately I've found the failed outputs more useful.

When a prompt produces a bad result, I started noting what kind of failure happened:

🔹️misunderstood the goal

🔹️ignored an important constraint

🔹️made an assumption

🔹️produced the wrong format

🔹️gave a technically correct but practically useless answer

After a while, I noticed that the same failure patterns kept appearing.

That changed how I improve prompts. Instead of asking How can I make this prompt better?, I ask:

What failure am I trying to prevent?

That feels like a much more useful starting point than endlessly adding instructions.

I'm curious whether other people keep track of failed outputs or mostly save the successful ones.

I've been experimenting with prompts that don't immediately try to produce an answer.

Instead, they first tell the AI to identify missing information, unclear requirements, or assumptions that could lead to a bad result.

Only after those gaps are resolved does it generate the final output.

It made me realize that sometimes the biggest improvement to a prompt isn't adding more instructions , it's giving the model permission to stop and ask for what it actually needs.

Curious how others here handle this

Do you prefer prompts that make the model ask clarifying questions first, or prompts that give it enough context to produce an answer immediately?

Genuine question for people who use prompts regularly.

If you change a prompt and the next response looks better, how do you know the prompt actually improved?

Do you:

A) Compare the outputs manually

B) Test the prompt multiple times

C) Use an evaluation

D) Just go with whichever response looks better

E) Something else

I’m curious because AI outputs can vary even when the prompt stays exactly the same.

How do you personally evaluate whether a prompt is actually improving?

Yesterday I asked how people actually manage their AI prompts, and the discussion got more interesting than I expected.

A few problems kept coming up:

• Finding a prompt you created months ago

• Keeping track of different versions

• Knowing what changed when a prompt stops working

• Keeping a large prompt collection organized

So I'm curious:

If you had to design the ideal solution for these problems, what would it look like?

Would you prefer:

A) Folders + tags + search

B) Automatic version history

C) AI that helps find/update prompts

D) Something completely different?

I am particularly interested in learning about what has been effective for you, rather than what simply appears promising in theory.

I've been experimenting with simple AI workflows for repetitive tasks, and I've found that the biggest improvement often comes from giving the AI a clear process rather than just asking a single question.

Here are 3 workflows worth trying:

1. Turn messy notes into organized action items

Instead of:

"Summarize these notes."

Try:

Organize these notes into:

- Key decisions

- Action items

- Person responsible

- Deadlines mentioned

- Questions that still need answers

Don't invent information that isn't present in the notes.

2. Turn one idea into multiple content formats

Give the AI one core idea and ask it to adapt it into:

- A short social media post

- A 30-second video script

- A longer educational post

- 3 possible hooks

Keep the underlying message consistent while adapting the format and tone for each platform.

3. Improve a prompt instead of repeatedly rewriting it

When a prompt gives inconsistent results, ask the AI to analyze the prompt first.

For example:

Analyze this prompt and identify:

1. What is unclear?

2. What information is missing?

3. Which instructions could conflict?

4. How could the output format be made more consistent?

Then rewrite the prompt while keeping my original goal unchanged.

The main thing I've noticed is that specifying the goal, audience, constraints, and desired output can make AI workflows much more repeatable.

What AI workflow has saved you the most time?

I've been experimenting with a simple structure for content prompts:

Context → Goal → Audience → Constraints → Output format

For example:

Context: I'm creating short-form content about AI tools.

Goal: Generate 5 video ideas.

Audience: Beginners who want to learn practical AI.

Constraints: Each idea should be useful within 30 seconds.

Output: Give me a hook, 3 key points, and a CTA for each idea.

I've found that adding the audience and output format makes the results much more consistent.

What prompt structure do you use when you want repeatable results?

Disclosure: I'm also working on a collection of prompts for content creators, so I'm interested in how other people structure and reuse their prompts.

I've been experimenting with different prompts for content creation, and one problem I keep running into is organization.

I end up with prompts scattered across chats, notes, documents, and different AI tools.

For people who use prompts regularly:

1.How do you save your best prompts?

2.Do you organize them by use case?

3.Do you keep separate prompts for ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.?

4.What's the biggest problem you've had with reusing an old prompt?

I'm curious what everyone's workflow looks like.