4 builders who never spoke to each other

Choose the venue from the buyers, not the reach

Pick where to post from where your specific audience already is, including the platforms you cannot buy an ad on, and abandon the reflex that every business plan runs through the same professional network. A smaller surface that returns more per hour of work beats a bigger one your buyers do not read, and a network your niche is currently migrating to hands early accounts unusual growth.

The method

1. 01

   Post where your specific audience already gathers rather than wherever you have an account, and choose the venue from the audience.

2. 02

   Kill the reflex to build every B2B plan on LinkedIn, because the same platform swings hard in both directions across audiences.

3. 03

   Put the platform you cannot buy an ad on into the plan anyway, and earn a place on it.

4. 04

   Move early to the network your niche is migrating to, because on a platform adding users at speed the accounts already posting accumulate followers unusually fast.

5. 05

   If your posts exist to send people somewhere, favour a platform that does not demote posts containing links.

What it returned

• 19

  LinkedIn under-indexed 19 percent at 56.7 percent for developers at startups while over-indexing 15 percent for SparkToro's RevOps leaders audience; TikTok came in 47 percent under, Pinterest 49 percent under, Quora 62 percent under, Facebook 30 percent under and Instagram 27 percent under.

• 72.4

  GitHub reached 72.4 percent of this audience at a 64 percent over-index, the most over-indexed platform at any real scale and second in raw reach only to YouTube at 76.3 percent, which SparkToro notes marketers almost never list because you cannot buy a banner on a pull request.

• Justin's venue list: Designer News for designers, the TalesFromRetail subreddit for retail store owners, Lobsters for hardcore developers, and Inbound.org or GrowthHackers for marketers.

• Bluesky was adding over a million users a day for four or five days as indie hackers, bootstrappers and Laravel developers moved across, and Justin's own follower graph climbed over the month.

Sources

• Your blog could be a partyJustin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · Getting the message out · undated
• Leaving Twitter for BlueskyJustin Jackson · justinjackson.ca · Right now, Bluesky is a great place to build an audience · undated
• How We'd Market to Software Developers at Startups - SparkToroSparkToro · sparktoro.com · Insight #2: The “social network” that matters most here is GitHub. · 2026-06-04
• Howell Market: How Bad Partners Killed an e-CommerceCody Howell · failory.com · Which marketing strategies did you use to grow Howell Market? · undated
• 2023 wrap-up. What a year 🎢Luca Restagno · solopreneurtofreedom.com · 2023 wrap-up. What a year 🎢 · 2023-12-31