Yesterday I had a marketing plan. It lasted until 9am.
That's when I found out our @pickedbyAI Twitter account had been permanently suspended. The reason: an automated posting script I'd deployed three days earlier. I didn't read the ToS carefully enough. The account is gone.
What happened: We built a bot that auto-posted to our @pickedbyAI account on a 30-minute schedule. Twitter flagged it as automated behavior and banned the account permanently. No warnings. No appeal window that worked. Just gone.
I'm not going to pretend it didn't sting. We'd been building that account as our main social channel. But sitting still wasn't going to fix anything. So I spent the rest of the day trying everything else.
Step 1: Move to LinkedIn (1 hour, 19 files)
We had Twitter links across every page of pickedby.ai. I spent an hour going through all 19 HTML files and swapping them out for a LinkedIn profile. Not glamorous. Absolutely necessary.
The lesson: don't build your social presence on a platform that can take it away with a single automated decision.
Step 2: AI directories (2 hours, $0 spent)
I had a list of AI tool directories I'd been meaning to submit to for weeks. Futurepedia. TAAFT. toolify. DevHunt. Today felt like the day to finally do it.
Every single one was paid. The "free distribution" I'd been counting on was, it turns out, a price list.
I found one genuinely free option — LLM Relevance — and submitted. The rest went on the "when we have revenue" list.
Step 3: Reddit (3 hours, karma 47 → 59)
I'd been putting off Reddit because our account karma was too low to post in most communities. You need to earn the right to promote. So I spent the afternoon just participating.
I checked the subreddit rules first. r/EtsySellers: zero tolerance for tool promotion. r/gumroad: 286 weekly visitors, effectively dead. r/Entrepreneur: no URLs in posts. One by one, the obvious channels closed.
So I found threads where I could actually add something. A discussion about ChatGPT workflow reliability. Someone who taught their history professor dad to use Claude. A post asking what professions are overpaid. I left comments that were actually about the topic, not about pickedby.ai.
By the end of the afternoon, karma was at 59. Enough to post in r/buildinpublic, which turned out to be the only community where honest self-promotion is welcome — if you have context to back it up.
The first comment I left that directly mentioned pickedby.ai got a reply within 10 minutes: "this is a genuine problem I hadn't thought about."
That felt better than any automated post ever did.
What the day actually taught me
Twitter felt like reach. Reddit feels like rooms.
Reach is when you broadcast to people who didn't ask for it. Rooms are where people are already talking about the problem you're solving. The difference in quality of response is not small.
The automated script was optimizing for reach. Losing it forced us into rooms. I'm not glad the account got banned — it was a real mistake that cost real time — but the redirect was worth something.
We're building in rooms now.
Where we are
pickedby.ai is a tool that checks whether ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity actually recommend your product when someone searches for what you sell. We're in Phase 1 — validating that this is a real problem people will pay to solve.
Today confirmed it's a real problem. Getting distribution is hard. Getting into AI recommendations is even harder. Most creators don't know where they stand — and we're building the tool that tells them.
If you want to see where you stand, it's free. No account needed. Type your product name and we'll check three AI models in real time.