I think a lot of people are in the same boat and wish there was a nice ethical way to promote projects that worked without pushing them hard on people. I hope there is.

I wish there was a thread in the same frequency as the we're hiring/i'm looking to be hired threads.

I didn't think of that, it sounds like a great idea. What's your project by the way?

I'm building a SaaS for e-commerce analytics. It's pre-launch right now, so not too much to share :)

I wonder about ads for this. For example Reddit seems a decent place to advertise to target a group of people with a common interest, in a way that is not obnoxious. Do an hours freelance work for someone else and that’ll pay for a small test!

As long as it's relevant to the discussion, there's nothing wrong with plugging your project.

Why don't you use show hn?

I tried it once, didn't get anywhere, and I'm too humble to keep doing it. Seems like you need to post it frequently--I look at the authors of front page Show HNs and they've posted it at least 5+ times.