MantleKit Marketing Efforts - The Truth Nobody Tells You.
14/04/2026
Marketing - This is perhaps the hardest part about launching SaaS, and this is coming from someone who ran a SEO company for 8 years.
I thought building MantleKit was the hard part. Mantlekit SaaS Boilerplate that ships with everything
It wasn’t.
Getting people to actually see it is where things start to feel like you’ve just signed up for a second full-time job you never agreed to. And the worst part is, no one really explains this properly. Everyone talks about “build in public” or “just launch on Product Hunt” like it’s a checkbox you tick and suddenly users appear out of thin air.
That’s not how it works. Not even close.
You don’t launch once, you market forever 🚀
There’s this weird illusion that marketing is a phase. Like you build the app, then you “do marketing” for a bit, and then things just… run.
In reality, marketing is the product. Or at least it becomes one.
You need videos. Not one, but multiple. Different formats, different hooks, different lengths. You need images, landing page visuals, thumbnails that don’t look like they were thrown together in five minutes. Then there’s Reddit posts, which are a whole game on their own. You can’t just drop a link and expect anything other than getting buried or banned. You have to actually understand the culture of each subreddit, write something that doesn’t feel like marketing, and still somehow get attention.
Then there’s X. Which is basically shouting into the void unless you already have an audience or you’re willing to post consistently enough that something eventually sticks. And even then, it’s hit or miss.
And yeah, Product Hunt. Everyone says “launch on Product Hunt” like it’s magic. But if you don’t already have distribution, an audience, or at least a decent network, you’re just another product on the list that day. You might get a small spike, maybe a few users, but it’s not the growth engine people pretend it is.
The real problem isn’t the SaaS, it’s distribution 🤘
MantleKit solves a problem. I’m confident in that. 🍆
But solving a problem doesn’t matter if no one knows the solution exists.
That’s the part that’s starting to click in a slightly uncomfortable way. The product is only half the equation. The other half is distribution, and distribution is messy, manual, time-consuming, and honestly kind of exhausting.
You’re juggling content creation, outreach, positioning, messaging, and timing all at once. You’re testing angles that don’t land, rewriting things that felt good but didn’t convert, and constantly questioning whether the issue is the product, the message, or just bad timing.
It’s not clean. It’s not linear. And it definitely doesn’t feel like something that should still be this manual in 2026.
So naturally… I want to automate it 🖕
This is where my brain goes every single time.
If something feels like a repetitive, painful, multi-step process, my immediate reaction is: why isn’t this a system yet?
Because when you break it down, marketing for a SaaS like MantleKit is basically a pipeline. You need ideas, then content, then distribution, then feedback, then iteration. Over and over again.
So the question becomes:
How much of this can actually be automated without turning it into generic AI slop?
Because that’s the trap. It’s very easy to automate content. It’s very hard to automate good content. Especially content that feels human enough to work on platforms like Reddit or X where people can smell bullshit instantly.
But there’s definitely a middle ground. Something that handles the heavy lifting. Generating variations, structuring posts, suggesting angles, maybe even handling parts of distribution or timing. Not replacing the human input, but amplifying it.
That’s the interesting part.
The annoying truth: this might be the real product ⭐
This is where it gets a bit… ironic.
MantleKit is the product. That’s the thing I set out to build. But this marketing problem, this headache that I’m currently dealing with, might actually be another product hiding in plain sight.
Because I’m not the only one dealing with this. Every solo dev, every indie hacker, every small SaaS founder hits this exact wall. You can build something useful, something technically solid, something that genuinely helps people… and still struggle to get traction because distribution is an entirely different skillset.
And skillsets are just problems waiting to be packaged.
So now I’m sitting here thinking about how to solve this properly. Not just for MantleKit, but as a system. Something repeatable. Something that doesn’t rely on constant manual effort for every single post, every single platform, every single idea.
Because if I can solve this once, properly, it doesn’t just help me. It becomes something other people will pay for.
And that’s where the money is. Not in the SaaS itself necessarily, but in solving the painful, recurring problems around it.
Right now it just feels like a mess… but that’s usually the start 👎
At the moment, it’s chaos.
I'm trying 1000000 different things, like the goViralBro plugin by Charles Dove I'm trying the react/playwright claude video creator I'm trying to post regularly but starting from scratch is a nightmare I'm learning how competitors got famous, and doing affiliate outreach I'm getting torn between looking at shiny new objects like AirLLM and Paperclip
There’s a mental list of things I should be doing. Videos I haven’t made yet. Posts I haven’t written. Platforms I haven’t touched. Outreach I haven’t started (Is 2 emails technically started?). It’s a constant background noise of “you should be doing more” while also trying to actually build and improve the product itself. I need to clone myself 10 times and give each me a different task... but knowing me I get bored easily and want to switch to another focus after 5 minutes.
Even writing these blog posts is hard because halfway through I think... I should check X... What's claude doing, what's codex doing? what's Cursor doing? Wait did I get a reply from X, oh I need to look at my discord... oh shit I still haven't setup discord properly. What the point of Discord bot if I have to do everything? How do I have 38 unread emails? I checked and cleared that an hour ago.
It’s a headache. 😡
But it’s also familiar.
Because this is usually how things start. Messy, slightly overwhelming, unclear how all the pieces fit together. Then slowly, patterns start to emerge. Systems form. Things that felt manual start becoming automated. Things that felt complicated get simplified.
And eventually, if you stick with it long enough, it turns into something usable.
Maybe even something sellable.
So yeah… MantleKit might solve one problem.
But this whole marketing mess?
That might be the next one.
Win / win… I think.❓ 😛