There's a pattern I keep seeing.
A founder builds something genuinely good. They pour months—sometimes years—into the product. The code is tight. The design is sharp. The problem it solves is real. And then they ask the question that reveals everything: "Okay, so how do we market this?"
As if marketing is something you bolt on at the end. As if visibility is a feature you ship after launch.
This thinking kills more startups than bad products ever will.
The Compounding Nobody Talks About
Everyone knows about compound interest. Put money in, let time work, watch it grow. Einstein allegedly called it the eighth wonder of the world. Whether he actually said that doesn't matter—the math is undeniable.
What fewer people understand is that visibility works the same way.
Every time someone sees your landing page featured on a platform like Landdding, that's a deposit. Every Product Hunt launch, every Awwwards submission, every time your work shows up on Dribbble or gets pinned on Pinterest—deposits. Small ones, maybe. But they accumulate.
The startup that posts their website to one gallery gets a few hundred visits. The startup that consistently shares their work across ten platforms, month after month, builds something different entirely. They build recognition. They build the ambient awareness that turns strangers into followers into customers into advocates.
This isn't about gaming algorithms or hacking growth. It's simpler than that. It's about understanding that attention is earned through presence, and presence requires showing up.
Why Most Founders Get This Wrong
Here's the mistake: treating marketing as a series of events rather than a continuous practice.
The Product Hunt launch becomes a single high-stakes day instead of one moment in an ongoing conversation. The website submission to a design gallery feels like a checkbox to tick rather than a relationship to build. Social media becomes a megaphone for announcements instead of a place to actually exist.
This event-based thinking creates a brutal pattern. You sprint, exhaust yourself, get a spike of attention, then watch it fade. A few weeks later, you're back to zero. No momentum. No accumulated trust. Just another unknown startup shouting into the void.
The alternative isn't complicated. It's just... more. More consistent. More present. More willing to show up even when there's no big announcement to make.
The Platforms That Actually Matter
Let me be specific about where showing up matters.
Product Hunt is the obvious one. But here's what most founders miss: it's not just for launches. The community around Product Hunt—the discussions, the relationships with other makers, the ongoing engagement—matters more than your launch day ranking. Products that rank #1 and disappear get less long-term value than products that rank #10 and stick around, contributing, connecting, being present.
Design galleries like Landdding, Awwwards, and Dribbble serve a different function. They're not about immediate conversions. They're about credibility accumulation. When your landing page appears alongside work from established studios and well-funded startups, you borrow some of that legitimacy. Designers see your work. Agency founders see your work. Potential clients browsing for inspiration stumble across your brand. None of this shows up in your analytics as direct traffic. But it shapes how people perceive you when they eventually do arrive.
Landdding in particular has become something interesting. It sits in the space between Product Hunt's tech focus and Awwwards' design exclusivity. The barrier to entry is lower. The community is more accessible. For startups and agencies trying to build early visibility, it's become one of those platforms where consistent presence pays dividends that compound over months and years.
Social platforms—LinkedIn, Twitter, even Instagram for design-forward brands—work differently. They're not about showcasing finished work. They're about being a person, or a team, that other people want to follow. The startup founder who shares their process, their struggles, their small wins creates connection that no polished marketing ever achieves.
Pinterest is underrated for B2B. It sounds strange, but design-conscious buyers use Pinterest for inspiration. Your landing page, your UI work, your brand materials—all of it can live there, waiting to be discovered by someone planning their own project who thinks, "I want something like this."
The point isn't that you need to be everywhere. The point is that you need to be somewhere, consistently, over time.
What "Growth Mindset" Actually Means Here
The phrase gets thrown around enough to lose all meaning. But in this context, growth mindset means something specific: the belief that visibility is earned through accumulation, not captured through clever tactics.
A growth mindset marketer understands that the first ten submissions to design galleries might generate nothing measurable. They do it anyway. They understand that the Product Hunt launch that gets 200 upvotes isn't a failure—it's a foundation. They understand that the LinkedIn post with 12 likes still matters, because eight of those people will remember them next month, and three of them might become customers next year.
This mindset is uncomfortable for founders who want immediate validation. It requires faith in delayed returns. It requires treating marketing like fitness—showing up to the gym even when you can't see results yet, trusting that the work is accumulating somewhere invisible.
But here's what makes it powerful: everyone else quits.
Most startups post to Product Hunt once, get disappointed, and never come back. Most submit to one design gallery, see no immediate traffic, and conclude it doesn't work. Most try social media for two months, burn out on the content treadmill, and go silent.
The ones who stay—who keep showing up, keep submitting, keep engaging—end up with the accumulated presence that the quitters never built. And by the time the quitters realize their mistake, the gap is too wide to close.
The Long Game of Sales
Let me connect this to revenue, because that's what actually matters.
Sales, especially for startups, happens in a strange way. Someone has a problem. They Google something. They ask a friend. They remember something they saw three months ago on a design gallery. They click through to your site. They don't buy immediately. They leave. They come back a week later. They read a blog post. They see you on Twitter. They finally sign up for a trial.
Attribution software will tell you that tweet was the source. But really, it was the accumulation of every touchpoint that led to enough trust for them to take action.
When you understand sales this way, marketing stops being about campaigns and starts being about presence. Every submission to Landdding isn't just a chance for traffic—it's another touchpoint in the journey someone might take toward becoming your customer. Every Product Hunt comment isn't just engagement—it's evidence that there are real humans behind the product.
The startups that build serious revenue understand this. They treat visibility as inventory. They stockpile touchpoints. They know that every small act of showing up increases the probability that when someone finally needs what they sell, they'll remember who sells it.
A Different Approach to Launching
If you're about to launch something, here's how this changes your strategy.
First, stop thinking of launch as a day. Think of it as a season. A three-month period where you systematically increase your presence across every relevant platform. Product Hunt is one moment in that season. Submissions to Landdding, Awwwards, and other galleries happen throughout. Social media engagement intensifies. Content gets published. Relationships get built.
Second, prepare for the long tail. The day-one traffic spike matters less than the ongoing trickle. Set up systems to maintain presence after the launch excitement fades. Schedule your social posts. Plan your follow-up submissions. Create a rhythm you can sustain.
Third, measure the right things. Direct attribution will miss most of the value. Pay attention to brand searches. Track how often your name appears in conversations you didn't start. Notice when inbound leads mention seeing your work somewhere before. These signals matter more than click-through rates.
Finally, commit to the practice, not the outcomes. Some submissions will perform well. Others won't. Some posts will get engagement. Others will disappear. The practice of showing up is what matters. Results follow consistency, not the other way around.
Why This Actually Works for Sales
I've watched this play out with startups who use platforms like Landdding consistently.
The pattern is always the same. They submit their landing page when they launch. Traffic is modest—maybe a few hundred visits over a few days. They think about it like a one-time thing. They move on.
Then something interesting happens. A few months later, they start seeing the same design influencers follow them on Twitter. They get an inbound email from someone who says, "I've seen your work around." A client mentions during a sales call that they first noticed the brand on a gallery site. Slowly, they realize that the modest traffic numbers understated the actual impact.
The startups who recognize this pattern and lean into it—who start treating platform presence as a core part of their strategy rather than a launch-day tactic—see compounding returns. Their brand recognition builds. Their inbound improves. Their sales cycles shorten because prospects arrive pre-warmed.
It's not magic. It's just math. More presence equals more touchpoints equals more trust equals more sales. The timeline is longer than anyone wants. But the results are more durable than anything paid advertising can deliver.
The Unsexy Truth
I'm going to tell you something that every experienced founder knows but nobody puts in their growth-hacking blog posts: most of what builds a company is boring.
It's the thousandth time you show up even though no one seems to notice. It's the submission to the design gallery that only gets 50 views. It's the LinkedIn post that gets two likes from people you already know. It's staying consistent when everything inside you wants to chase the next shiny tactic.
This is the work. Not the clever campaign that goes viral. Not the Product Hunt launch that hits #1. Those moments happen—sometimes—but they happen to people who were already doing the boring work of showing up. The viral moment is the spark; the accumulated presence is the fuel.
If you're looking for a marketing strategy that will change your business overnight, this isn't it. But if you're looking for an approach that will build something durable, something that compounds, something that keeps paying dividends long after you've forgotten you made the initial investment—this is it.
Start Now, Keep Going
Here's what I'd actually do if I were launching a startup today.
Week one, I'd submit to Landdding, Webflow Showcase, and any other gallery relevant to my space. Not expecting miracles. Just planting seeds.
I'd set up a recurring calendar reminder to submit updates every time we ship something meaningful. New landing page? Submit. Major redesign? Submit. New feature with its own page? Submit.
I'd engage on Product Hunt regularly—not just my own products, but other people's. I'd become part of the community before I needed anything from it.
I'd find three platforms where my potential customers spend time and commit to showing up there consistently, even when it feels pointless. LinkedIn for B2B. Twitter for tech. Wherever the people I need to reach actually are.
And I'd measure in months, not days. I'd expect the first three months to feel like shouting into the void. I'd trust that somewhere around month six, I'd start seeing the compound effect. And I'd know that by month twelve, the accumulated presence would be doing work I couldn't even imagine at the start.
That's the strategy. Show up. Keep showing up. Let time do what time does.
Everything else is just noise.
