[HN Gopher] Marketing is scary for a solo developer
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Marketing is scary for a solo developer
Author : raunometsa
Score : 424 points
Date : 2021-12-13 10:27 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (raumet.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (raumet.com)
| teewuane wrote:
| I feel motivated to go write up some marketing posts for my apps
| now. Thanks for motivating me :)
|
| I was just thinking about how it needs to be a small simple
| habit. One post a day, and don't look at it and get nervous and
| delete it right after I post it.
|
| Thanks!
| make_it_sure wrote:
| I'm a developer. I haven't done marketing at all, just posted my
| product in a few communities and took off. Why? Because if was a
| big need for what I built and worked really well.
|
| If your product is super needed by the market, you don't have to
| do much marketing, but a great marketing person will get such
| product to the moon
| jimbokun wrote:
| So the key for you was you had already done "market research"
| in the sense you new there was a need for this product and how
| to reach the communities that needed it.
| inDigiNeous wrote:
| Well, that is a clever way to market your product .. by writing a
| blog post about it that is disguised as a blog post about
| marketing, while you are actually marketing your product that
| helps you market your startups.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| "50% of your marketing works, you just don't know which 50%."
| I've heard this cliche from several mentors. You just have to do
| it and hope you do enough of it in the right places.
| ineedasername wrote:
| And it's not unique to developers: any solo business-- and
| probably those with 2-5 people-- will have similar issues. I'm
| assuming any business larger than this can devote ~25% of an FTE
| to the task.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| Yes, it is. Speaking of which, if anyone wants to help me as a
| marketing cofounder, please email me (contact info in profile).
| prionassembly wrote:
| What in the oompa-loompa is a microfounder?
| [deleted]
| jb1991 wrote:
| This is also the first time I've seen these terms,
| microfounder, microstartup. As if everything has to be
| quantified, including a small personal project.
| bootstrapsite wrote:
| So funny I asked the _exact_ same thing on HN a few days ago and
| got some very helpful replies. The top reply which resonated a
| lot with me and also true for Plausible as per this blog post is
| to get a 'marketing' co-founder.
|
| I think it's a pretty combustible combo if one guy loves making
| the software as much as the other guy loves marketing it! Like
| Steve and Steve?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29459901#29462551
| dt3ft wrote:
| I am trying to promote https://pdf2qrcode.com shamelessly. The
| struggle is real :)
|
| Edit: the downvotes confirm the above.
| konschubert wrote:
| I've started to sell a physical product that I make and have had
| my google merchant account suspended twice.
|
| The algorithms claim that my ads are misleading. I don't think
| they are, I hope they aren't.
|
| The first time, I appealed and it got un-suspended. No reason
| given. I thought: Cool, must have been a mistake but it's been
| sorted out.
|
| Then, after a couple days, another suspension.
|
| Now I don't know what to do.
|
| Google ads and google merchant center seems to be a science in
| itself, but I don't have the time to learn it all, nor the budget
| to pay a consultant.
| tymm wrote:
| Were you able to make your Google ads profitable?
| konschubert wrote:
| Yes, but only if I manually counted conversions that google
| didn't see due to ad blockers.
|
| But yes. It was great. I felt like I had a dial that I could
| turn up and down to make my business go.
|
| Then, bam, second suspension.
|
| "Misleading ads".
|
| I have no intention to mislead anyone.
|
| Makes me feel very helpless.
| tymm wrote:
| Sorry to hear that. Did you try other platforms on which
| you didn't get suspended?
|
| Did you have to tune your Google ads campaign before it
| worked or did it work for you from the first try?
| konschubert wrote:
| The thing with google ads is that I can target very high-
| intent queries. if somebody enters "e-paper wall
| calendar", I can show them my ad and have very good
| conversion rates.
|
| This isn't really possible on any other platforms, since
| nobody goes to twitter with the "I want to buy an e-paper
| calendar" intent.
|
| And yes, I tuned my ads heavily to these search queries,
| but in the end the automated google shopping campaign
| worked better.
| enriquto wrote:
| > conversions that google didn't see due to ad blockers.
|
| This is funny. It seems that having an ad blocker is a
| strong indicator for people that are very interested in
| technical stuff (and are at least technically literate
| enough to install it). This sounds like a prime spot for
| placing certain ads. Since ad-blocking is detectable, we
| coders are actually opting-in to this kind of labeling. I
| don't know what to make of that.
| runnerup wrote:
| I wonder if unscrupulous competitors reported you en mass.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| When I made an account to buy Google ads (and almost
| immediately gave up), I was always getting contacted by people
| at Google sales trying to make me actually buy the ads. They
| offered all kinds of help on creating and focusing the content.
|
| Was that experience unusual? And couldn't those people help you
| making your ad adherent to whatever rule Google uses?
| dangrossman wrote:
| I'm in the same situation.
|
| I bought a laser cutter and some other production equipment,
| and started making home decor. I sell pretty simple stuff, like
| door signs and coasters.
|
| Google Merchant Center also suspended my account for being
| "misleading". I have no ads, just a product feed for Google
| Shopping. They won't tell me what's "misleading" about my
| products.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Hmmm....did you mention lasers? That might have triggered
| their "sketchy" Algo. How do they know you are misleading
| anyone? People clicking "misleading" because they saw your ad
| in the wrong context?
| dangrossman wrote:
| There's no ad involved. It's just a product feed for Google
| Shopping that's auto-generated by Shopify, so the product
| details match the website always. Here's the store:
| https://ligninandlight.com/
|
| Google's customer support just provides form responses
| linking to this policy my store violates:
| https://support.google.com/merchants/answer/6150127?hl=en
|
| But they won't provide any concrete information specific to
| my store, and I can't figure out what they're hung up on. I
| talked to a Shopify expert and they told me to make sure I
| have a contact page, refund policy and accept credit cards
| -- all of which I do.
| dhimes wrote:
| So, I looked at this and the only thing I can see is that
| the price doesn't update as you add options (larger size,
| engraving) etc., until you add to cart and then view the
| cart. So G may think that's misleading: It's not going to
| cost me $23 but $35.
|
| Your shop looks very nice, actually. Cool and thoughtful
| stuff.
| konschubert wrote:
| Man, we should start a support group.
|
| PS: Now I know how I know your name :) Thanks for making that
| great HN responses email tool!
| stavros wrote:
| By the way, I made one for Telegram, if you use that:
|
| https://gitlab.com/stavros/hn-reply-bot
|
| I posted it but not many people seem to use Telegram, or
| find it useful?
| prionassembly wrote:
| Re: traffic from HN. My submissions fall off the new listings in
| minutes, but I still get more visitors than from twitter posts
| with tens of likes. This website is crazy big.
| ayewo wrote:
| I'm guessing that's because HN optimizes for interesting
| headlines that lead to click-throughs to submitted links
| (intellectual curiosity), while Twitter optimizes for on-
| platform consumption (entertainment).
| raunometsa wrote:
| OP here. Having a shower. Brb.
| mukundesh wrote:
| Nice one, would have loved some more tips..
| yboris wrote:
| Marketing is hard. I have a personal charityware project _Video
| Hub App_ that I 've tried to promote. The most sensible place
| seems like Reddit, but even when posting to a fitting subreddit,
| my posts sometimes get taken down because you're not allowed to
| "self promote". Which means there is almost no avenue I can find.
|
| I had success with my first post of the app on HN, but it feels
| rude to re-post it to HN often. It's been 3+ years and I've had
| over 3,600 purchases, but I still don't know how to share my app
| (paying for ads is not an option I want to consider).
|
| https://videohubapp.com/ & MIT open source
| https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
| datavirtue wrote:
| Create sock puppets and promote through them..."organically."
| dahart wrote:
| > But how do I get over the fear of exposure?
|
| For me, it really helped to have A/B testing in place and
| literally watch relatively easy marketing efforts bring many
| times more people than a new feature or a technical or
| educational post. Marketing was (and still is) pretty scary to
| me, but seeing it work does ease the fears. Another motivator in
| my case was spending my own money, which was maybe a mistake, but
| watching my savings drain while I code certainly lit a fire to
| try and make things work.
| wenbin wrote:
| As a sole-founder/developer [1], I resonate a lot with OP's post.
|
| Use google to figure out how much real companies spend on
| marketing vs R&D (e.g., engineers salary). Then you'll know how
| important marketing is. It's not uncommon to see a tech company
| spends way more money on marketing than R&D. There must be a
| reason, right?
|
| Initially, you don't have much money to spend on marketing, but
| you have time. So how do you allocate your time? It's easier than
| ever to build a software product. But getting people's attention
| is getting harder and harder. You have to do work to let people
| know the existence of your product. Great things rarely happen
| automatically without you actively doing work. I know engineers
| like to solve problem in a fully automatic way. But in real
| business, you need to do manual work.
|
| Every email is a marketing opportunity. It's not like you need to
| aggressively sell your product/service when replying other
| people's emails. It's more about providing great customer
| service. Great customer service is an effective marketing
| strategy. Genuinely helping your users solve problem (via email),
| then they'll help you promote your product/service.
|
| It's okay to experiment with paid marketing. When you run a
| business, money is just a number on spreadsheet :) It's more like
| resources that you allocate in a strategy game (e.g., age of
| empires). And paid marketing is not just google/fb ads. There are
| other forms of paid ads. If you can learn java/python, you are
| capable enough to learn how to allocate resources (e.g., time,
| money..) on marketing.
|
| [1] I run listennotes.com
| ushakov wrote:
| my advice: build a great product and offer it to consultancies,
| who can suggest it to their clients
|
| i spent $0 and 0s on marketing/ads/promotions but make a nice
| side-income off consultancies selling my software and services
|
| it's a win-win: you get revenue, they get something they can
| offer their clients
| j4yav wrote:
| Where do you find these consultancies who'd use your software?
| It sounds perfect for my product/situation.
| ushakov wrote:
| usually they find me first!
|
| after we establish a relationship, we just exchange ideas
| what other software/features we could build that they could
| sell
|
| it's a great thing - they get to make money doing sales, i
| get make money building software
|
| if you'd like to, you can e-mail me and i can suggest some
| agencies
| joannabugreplay wrote:
| this sounds amazing!!!
| TekMol wrote:
| Instead of publishing a blog post, I add another feature
| to my product. Instead of sending a tweet, I tweak CSS on
| my site.
|
| Same here. But I _do_ consider that marketing. The product is the
| marketing. The better the free product everyone can use, the more
| the existing users will use it and like it and talk about it.
| "Build it and they will come" works nicely for me.
|
| I do absolutely nothing but coding. Yet a handful of big
| companies approach me every year, asking for B2B deals for my
| software. Even though I do not even mention anywhere that I offer
| anything. And once or twice a year, I say yes. Usually resulting
| in a long term B2B deal which brings in a usage fee in the
| 5-figures-per-year range. Uku worked on the
| code for more than a year, and revenue started coming in
| when a co-founder in marketing joined
|
| Reading this, I wonder how my business would evolve if I did this
| type of active marketing. And I wonder: Is it worth it? Even if
| outbound marketing brings in more customers, it still is time
| spent that I could spend on my software. Which I love see growing
| and getting more and more amazing.
| ushakov wrote:
| Revolut for example does not advertise
|
| They built a great product and offer customers money to refer
| to others (e-mail me if you want a code)
| TekMol wrote:
| If they don't advertise, I would love to know how they got
| over ten million people to watch this video ad:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QabM_PvBtsI
|
| 14 million views and only 776 likes? That sounds very much
| like this video was somehow shoved down peoples throats.
| ushakov wrote:
| maybe it was embedded in some marketing materials
| TekMol wrote:
| Could be.
|
| I often wonder if views of an embedded YouToube video
| increase the view count.
| ushakov wrote:
| if it had auto-play enabled, yes
| monkey_monkey wrote:
| No, if autoplay is enabled, youtube embedded views don't
| count.
|
| https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/171780?hl=en-
| GB#zi...
|
| "Embedded videos that are auto-played don't increment
| video views."
| cblconfederate wrote:
| they dont advertise _now_ , but how to get initial traction
| is the chicken-and-egg problem
| nprateem wrote:
| > The product is the marketing
|
| Then you don't understand what marketing is.
| [deleted]
| sergiomattei wrote:
| > But Raz's Chartbrew is making only $137 MRR after working on it
| for more than 3 years.
|
| Great post, but I don't understand what naming and shaming
| specific low-MRR founders contributes to your core message.
| raunometsa wrote:
| Of course my intent was not to name and shame. I didn't realize
| that it can feel like that.
|
| But what does it contribute to the story? I wanted to show a
| real life example of what a lot of solo dev founders (including
| myself) are doing - focusing mostly on coding. Why? Because
| this is what they like to do the most (I think).
| nathanfig wrote:
| FWIW I did not think you were shaming anyone; you recognized
| that he worked hard and did great work but has not been
| justly rewarded. I appreciated those examples.
| joannabugreplay wrote:
| I think a lot of readers can see themselves in that person.
| It's a hard truth to face and it's a lot easier to put off
| that realization than to take action in the present moment.
| semireg wrote:
| As a solo/bootstrapped dev with a fairly successful Electron app
| in the business space, it has taken me YEARS to embrace marketing
| and I still fall flat.
|
| I've hired mentors to listen to me rant for a few hours. They ask
| questions, and they are surprised by my sales figures. Their
| advice is always the same: stop writing features _NOW_ , and
| start learning who/why your customers are buying from you, and
| use that data to find more of them.
|
| My absolute instincts are to show off the product/features and
| let the customer make a decision if it's a fit. But every
| marketer says, "no, don't describe the feature, tell the user why
| it'll help and save them time."
|
| And my response is, "if I have to tell them that, and they
| believe me, then I'm not sure I want them as a customer..."
| Everything is subtle on a good day, but feels weirdly deceiving
| on a bad day. I feel like I don't trust marketing - so I don't
| want to write marketing that I think doesn't work on me. It's
| like tickling yourself.
|
| I've been trying to rectify this by building out a new "Feature
| Tour" part of my app's website. This will give me space for some
| light documentation, links to Guides/FAQs, but also be composable
| into landing pages for specific niches and calls to action. We'll
| see if it works, but still a few weeks from launch.
| metadata wrote:
| Jon Yongfook has a brilliant approach - he writes code one week,
| then does only marketing another week.
| https://twitter.com/yongfook
|
| I plan to follow that as it completely eliminates the habit of
| "just have to fix a few things on the software side and then I'll
| get on with blogging/tweeting/...".
| mritchie712 wrote:
| This is one of those bits of advice that you hear and say,
| "This is smart, I'm doing it... next week"
| pawelwentpawel wrote:
| I'd vote for Jon's method of one week code, one week marketing:
|
| - Limiting distractions. I won't get any work done if every
| five minutes I'm checking notifications that come in as a
| result of my marketing efforts. It gets me out of the zone
| immediately.
|
| - It forces a 50/50 split. It's too easy to stick to what
| you're good at. In my case it's coding and building the product
| - it's my comfort zone. It gives me a feeling for
| accomplishment and productivity. Feeling productive while
| neglecting the other side of the process is dangerous.
|
| - It's enough time to incorporate feedback from users quickly
| while staying sane without sacrificing the process itself.
|
| As per the release anxiety mentioned by the OP - that's a very
| common one, especially if you're the one that actually made the
| product. One way to tackle this is to view it as a continuous
| process of release, not a single event in the calendar. For me
| this means building confidence in increasing steps and doing a
| release often with a smaller audience first (maybe some small
| subreddit or a submission website?) and gradually increasing it
| as time goes on. This also allows you to spot any bugs or
| problems quicker.
| datavirtue wrote:
| You have to be able to get into a marketing groove, though. It
| takes a lot of cajoling to get my brain to switch gears.
|
| I need someone who can live and breath marketing the way I live
| and breath software. I can get into a marketing groove but it
| going to detract from building. No way around that. Switching
| back and forth is going to burn me out.
| unbanned wrote:
| I am not clicking that link.
| mritchie712 wrote:
| To Twitter?
| ChefboyOG wrote:
| One of the other benefits of this kind of approach is that it
| allows the two sides to inform each other without hindering
| each other. Each function gets the proper space to "breathe" in
| a sense.
|
| For example (and this draws entirely from my own anecdotal
| experience), I find that in the course of marketing, I often
| get the best feedback/inspiration from users/community members,
| and this is very helpful in deciding what to implement next.
| However, I find that this pseudo-research process is only
| effective if I take enough time to process the information in
| whole. In other words, if a user has an extremely compelling
| idea, it can be tempting to implement it right away. If I
| resist and take my time, considering the idea in the context of
| the dozen other points of feedback I've collected, I can often
| distill the jumble of ideas into a stronger, singular feature.
| If I jump in right away, I'll inevitably end up in a state of
| feature creep.
| giantg2 wrote:
| The examples given are already more profitable than any solo
| software I've done.
|
| For me, the problem is that I only do niche problems that don't
| have a software solution yet. That means my audience is very very
| small. Basically I just end up making stuff FOSS.
| sebastianconcpt wrote:
| This is the kind of problem that ended up making me shutdown my
| SaaS in 2015. But more than marketing the problem was sales.
| meatsauce wrote:
| I've been writing sales copy and teaching sales for 15 years and
| I've seen both developers and laymen spend 1000s of hours and
| 1000s of dollars on startups without knowing who they are selling
| their product to. They build something, spending years in
| development, only to ask "how can we sell this?" after everything
| is built.
|
| This is a huge mistake.
|
| My advise is to study sales and marketing prior to building out a
| project you intend to monetize. Alternatively, find a partner who
| can sell or hire a consultant before writing a single line of
| production code.
| tymm wrote:
| As a solo developer (https://simplepush.io) that hates marketing
| as well, I often find myself trying to make use of paid ads.
| Probably because it is easier to spend some money than writing a
| good article. However it hasn't really worked for me so far.
| Wondering if other solo developers had some success with paid
| ads?
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Some suggestions for your site. Explain what a push
| notification is. I'm a developer and I only have a vague idea
| of what you're talking about. Why would I want to do a push?
| What benefit does it have? Am I possibly already doing
| notifications a different way that's less efficient/less
| effective/slower than your method?
|
| Right there are a bunch of blog articles you could write and
| share that provide free marketing for your product.
|
| Also _nothing_ should be priced at $4.99 /year, I don't care
| what it is, if it's worth $4.99 a year then it's probably worth
| at least 20x that.
| tymm wrote:
| Really appreciate your suggestions! Some things are just hard
| to see from the inside.
|
| > Also nothing should be priced at $4.99/year, I don't care
| what it is, if it's worth $4.99 a year then it's probably
| worth at least 20x that.
|
| Would you still increase the price if the main competitor
| with the biggest market share is already cheaper (one-time
| payment of $5)?
| inpharmer wrote:
| I'm not knowledgeable about your market or how your product
| works, just interested in technology and discussions here,
| so take this at face value. To me your product looks like a
| service. I'm skeptical of any service that is a one-time
| payment versus some type of subscription. With a
| subscription I'm inclined to believe there's maintenance.
| With a one-time payment, I'm inclined to believe that
| either the product isn't sustainable without growth, will
| become ad-supported, or will fold.
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| Yes, I refuse to compete on price. One of my favorite
| phrases (just read it in a email an hour ago, in fact) is
| "your price is right on the edge of my budget."
|
| How do I know that the main competitor isn't slowly going
| out of business at that price? Maybe their product is total
| crap, maybe I can offer stellar support that's worth a
| higher price, maybe I can guarantee GDPR compliance, maybe
| I can offer uptime guarantees, maybe my product is designed
| to a small niche that will pay a much higher price for a
| product targeted exactly at them, maybe I can focus on
| large customers who would be suspicious that a $4.99 price
| is way too low, maybe, maybe, maybe. In the end, ask
| yourself if you really think that $4.99/year * n_Customers
| computes to a number that makes it worthwhile for you.
| conductr wrote:
| I'm going to pile onto this parent because I too am trying to
| figure out what this does. I originally think of this as
| allowing me to push notifications to my app's users devices
| (eg One Signal, Airship, etc.). As I scroll and read I find
| that it's likely for uniquely sending notifications to MY
| device.
|
| Perhaps a vertical, but I'd go after the DIY/hobbyist/maker
| developer market. Arduino and such. You can write tutorials
| about how to get X to notify you when Y and they have very
| active forums. I dove deep into this during COVID lockdown
| and it actually felt like 90s/early-00s web as the community
| is great and they still mostly use wikis/forum software to
| help each other. There's a lot of folks hosting their own
| tutorial websites. Just make content teaching people of
| different ways to use your product and I feel like it would
| be discovered.
| ushakov wrote:
| ads don't work unless you have Coca Cola budgets
|
| why not share your project here more often and other sites like
| ProductHunt, IndieHackers?
| tymm wrote:
| Because I just want to finish that one feature before sharing
| it ;) Jokes aside, I just don't like the idea of spamming
| communities. I probably should do it more often though.
| dt3ft wrote:
| Because it gets downvoted to hell :)
| pul wrote:
| I've done some search ads for https://www.nslookup.io in the
| early days, but I don't think it has done much. I don't track
| users, so I don't know if it got me any returning users. In any
| case, facebook's recent downtime [1] and a well-received blog
| post [2] brought in much more traffic.
|
| [1]
| https://plausible.io/nslookup.io?period=custom&from=2020-12-...
|
| [2]
| https://plausible.io/nslookup.io?period=custom&from=2020-12-...
| XCSme wrote:
| I struggle with marketing so much. I built an amazing product,
| existing customers love it, but spending any time on doing
| marketing feels like either wasting development time or spending
| time to try to force people into buying something they might not
| want.
|
| Most ads are trying to trick you into buying stuff you don't
| really need. I know there are cases in which you actually see a
| relevant ad for something you really want to buy and that will
| bring value to your life, but that's usually an edge case.
|
| What I am working on doing now is to combine development +
| marketing. Instead of creating marketing material to sell, I am
| creating marketing material to educate: create how-to
| instructional videos, technical blog posts, improve the
| documentation, etc. If you sell a tool I think this is the best
| way to go, instead of advertising how cool your tool is, teach
| people how to use your tool and what they can do with it (eg. if
| you sell a hammer don't show people how to drive nails and give a
| 50% limited time discount code; teach them how to build a chair
| and let them decide themselves if they need a hammer or not).
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| I tried to do dev and marketing at the same time, it was
| impossible for me. I searched my network and had a friend of a
| friend who is a marketer actually sit down and help me over
| beers one night. It really opened my eyes into how much I don't
| know. They later on continued to help me for a bit but I would
| recommend reaching out to someone who actually does it for a
| living and pick their brain.
| demadog wrote:
| Took a quick look at your product and I'd be a good fit.
|
| Here's the thing, for non-technical marketers, they've become
| so used to SaaS/cloud because it's easy.
|
| The moment I see "self-hosted" and "own server" my brain
| freezes up and I think about how much work that might be to set
| up.
|
| You can keep it self hosted but maybe say "3 steps and set up
| in an hour"
|
| Or just submit to the cloud because most marketers and business
| owners don't value self-hosted as a net positive!
| Nemi wrote:
| I think you are confusing marketing with advertising. What you
| are doing IS marketing. Marketing is about understanding the
| market's problem you are solving and figuring out ways to
| connect those people with your product.
|
| A great way to market your product is to use "content
| marketing" where you create truly useful information on how
| people can solve their problems that may or may not even need
| your product to work. This combines being altruistic (they may
| read your content and figure out how to solve their problem
| without your product, and that is ok) with being business savvy
| (they may be so impressed with your knowledge and articulation
| that they want YOU to solve their problem, so they hire you/buy
| your product).
|
| Advertising is just one very small aspect of marketing. A
| really good marketer understands this and finds the best way to
| expose their product and reach customers that really need your
| help.
|
| Probably one of the best examples of altruistic content
| marketing was Joel Spolsky. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/
|
| He never even tried to sell his company's software FogBugz, but
| the exposure FogBugz got through his blog was so much greater
| than he ever could have gotten through advertising. He created
| a reputation that eclipsed his product several times over. You
| don't have to go to the length he did, but hopefully you get
| the point.
| kordlessagain wrote:
| If you are solo, any time you spend doing anything else than
| coding and improving product is a complete waste of time. A well
| done product will raise interest in a given market or segment.
| There's a joke in there somewhere about a well done AI based
| product will literally market itself. Marketing is raising
| interest. Nothing more.
| datavirtue wrote:
| Marketing is the identification of customers with a need (a
| market), and all of the associated activities involved with
| making the solution (product) and getting it to those people in
| need for a price they can justify. It encompasses the entire
| company, which is a bit more than "raising interest."
| canadianwriter wrote:
| I am actually working on a book for exactly this - I consult with
| start up founders all the time on their marketing and there is a
| TON of misinformation for them to deal with on top of the fear
| talked about here and a host of other issues.
|
| There are plenty of generic marketing books, but mine is focused
| specifically on startup founders. For example: almost every
| digital marketing book out there will say you need a blog for SEO
| reasons, the reality is you shouldn't bother with that until you
| are further along with your business most of the time (and I'll
| go into detail on the why in the book).
|
| A startup founder has super limited time and money, so talking
| about the optimal set up (tweet X number of times, Post X number
| of blog posts) may not be helpful when there are things that take
| up way less time that may be far more valuable. Eg. knowing
| exactly where your perfect customer hangs out can be more
| valuable, especially so your tweets or blog posts don't just
| disappear into the nether.
| erulabs wrote:
| Hey this article inspired me to tweet about my product. Maybe
| I'll even get a like this time :P
| MrDresden wrote:
| From this standpoint (solo dev & marketing) I have a question;
|
| Would it make sense to make a twitter channel around a product
| for marketing purposes and direct traffic to it or rather to my
| personal one?
|
| I have almost no following at the moment, so they would both
| effectively be equivalent (be starting from scratch).
|
| In one way I can see the benefit in building an audience for
| other products in the future, but it still feels a bit odd to me.
| j4yav wrote:
| I feel like I've been in quicksand for the last year. I've built
| something that my cofounder and I are using internally for remote
| collaboration, along with a couple support people, and it's
| great. But none of us have been able to figure out how to talk
| about it in a way that generates interest. This is really hard if
| you're more of a natural builder than a seller.
| Flankk wrote:
| You should have a deep understanding of why your product
| exists. Other people don't, they only see what is on the
| surface. I recommend _Start With Why_ for more on this idea.
| Sales is a bunch of smoke and mirrors. It 's the difference
| between remote collaboration software and sipping a pina colada
| in the shade while enjoying the ocean breeze.
| hluska wrote:
| Hey friend, I understand exactly where you're coming from. When
| I started high school in the 90s, my stutter was such that you
| would have had a lot of trouble understanding me. When I
| started building stuff, marketing seemed like voodoo.
|
| I learned. And frankly, I was so inept that if I can learn,
| you're going to be an expert.
|
| You've got this. Seriously, you've got this. I'd put my last
| dollar on you because you've got this.
|
| If you'd like some advice, think back to when you were learning
| how to write code. You wrote some monstrosities that you likely
| wouldn't write today. But that was okay because you were
| learning. Think about marketing the same way. You don't have to
| be perfect because you're learning so just chill and have some
| fun.
|
| Tactically, approach marketing like you're learning a totally
| new programming paradigm. Try something, test it and measure.
|
| For example, you're in a thread right now with a lot of
| hackers. One of whom is writing a message to try to encourage
| you. Now might be a really good time to put a link to your
| product. You might not get any traffic. In that case, this was
| a really bad marketing tactic. You may get traffic and zero
| sales. In that case, this was a really good exposure campaign
| but remember that people die of exposure. You may get traffic
| and some sales. If that happens, you can deduce that something
| about the link or where you have placed it (on HN in general or
| on this thread in particular) is powerful.
|
| There's a piece of data for you. Try it out and see what
| happens. Worst case scenario, blame me and the shitty fucking
| school that gave me a marketing degree. Best case scenario,
| we're going to have a party when you go over a million in
| revenue.
|
| You've got this. I believe in you. If you're here, you're more
| than intelligent enough. You've got this. It's not even a
| matter of belief in you, it's fact. You've got this.
|
| Share that beautiful, perfect product.
|
| (Note - the second you start to share it, the market may tell
| you it's neither perfect nor beautiful. That's a very good
| sign. Anyone can build something fit to be ignored. It takes
| one hell of a good team to build something that people will
| shit all over.) :)
|
| (Note 2 - Chill and have fun.)
| j4yav wrote:
| I love this reply, thank you!
| DarylZero wrote:
| Big difference is, you can try inputting code into a compiler
| all day. But opportunities to sell are few and far between.
| nicoburns wrote:
| What makes it better than what's out there? There are a lot of
| tools in this space!
| j4yav wrote:
| It's designed from the ground up for async collaboration and
| focus (you collaborate on decisions like you might an issue,
| rather than interruptive chat discussions or worse,
| meetings.) It's based on how I saw collab work at a unicorn I
| worked at that was doing remote work well pre-pandemic, and
| that I've seen replicated elsewhere.
|
| However, it feels very foreign to people who haven't
| experienced that. What I've seen is you don't really "get" it
| until you try it, and getting people to try it is really
| hard.
|
| I suspect there's some correct way I can talk about it that
| helps people see the value more quickly, but I haven't
| figured it out yet.
| andruby wrote:
| Have you considered recording a video of you using it?
|
| Have a rough landing page. Add the video. Post a Show HN.
| How I would consider marketing it after that is through
| "content marketing". Ie: start a blog/insta/twitter/youtube
| channel where you post relevant stuff for people trying to
| solve or improve remote collaboration. You can show your
| solution, or talk about common problems you've seen, etc.
|
| Good luck!
|
| (I'm curious to see your solution!)
| j4yav wrote:
| We have a video and landing page at https://AsyncGo.com,
| but the messaging isn't super locked in yet. Curious for
| your feedback.
| andruby wrote:
| I would probably focus on "Remote decision making" as
| that seems to be the key thing setting you apart from
| other solutions (imo). At least, it is the key element
| that attracts my attention :)
| mdorazio wrote:
| > It's designed from the ground up for async collaboration
| and focus (you collaborate on decisions like you might an
| issue, rather than interruptive chat discussions or worse,
| meetings.)
|
| This doesn't really tell me anything. Can you provide a
| real-world example of how it would work on a project? Is
| there a ~10 second video or gif of it in action? Or even
| more basic, what specifically made you angry enough with
| existing tools that you felt the need to create this? What
| did you want to do that you couldn't? (And please avoid the
| term async in your explanation - it will help you be
| clearer).
| j4yav wrote:
| The app has a list of topics that anyone can add to. Each
| topic has a due date so you know when it is wrapping up,
| and they also have an explicit context and outcome; the
| topic creator sets the context, and the outcome is the
| bit that everyone collaborates on by editing
| together/using the discussion thread. Once the topic is
| done and a decision made, you lock the topic, saving the
| context, decision, and the discussion thread for later
| reference.
|
| It's better than Slack because it lets you engage with
| discussions more mindfully and across time zones, rather
| than as they come up in easy to miss and fragmented
| threads, and ensures that the decision is self-
| documenting when it's done. It's also better than
| something like Notion, an Issue, or Google Doc because it
| has better embedded conversation threads, and comes with
| the structure for separating context and decision.
|
| Everything else we tried was too free form, this brought
| just enough structure to get everyone on the same page
| and make decisions/discuss topics without getting in the
| way, while having some consistency to finding them and
| how the conversations were structured.
|
| Does this help? There is a video up at
| https://asyncgo.com, but it suffers from how hard it has
| been to figure out how to talk about the app clearly.
| zffr wrote:
| Some feedback:
|
| - From the website it is not clear how users use your
| product. The only screenshot is on an iPad. Does that
| mean your product is a mobile app? The video shows a
| website. Does that mean your product can be used as both
| a website and an app, or just a website? Your website
| should make it clear how your users can access your
| product.
|
| - You mention in the video that there's a chrome
| extension, but this is not mentioned on the website. Most
| users will not even watch your video unless they are
| sufficiently interested from what they read on your
| website. If there are other integrations your support you
| should mention them as well.
|
| - In your video you claim that using AsyncGo has allowed
| you to avoid having _any_ work meetings, but I'm not
| convinced from the video that I could replicate this on
| my team. It would be interesting to hear details about
| the kind of work meetings you used to have, and how
| AsyncGo has replaced them. It would also be interesting
| to hear details about how other collaboration platforms
| fall short. Ex: why not use slack?
|
| - IMO the example in your video is too abstract and not
| relatable (at least for me). At work I don't think i have
| ever scheduled a meeting to discuss some internet
| article. Usually people just post a link in slack and
| start a discussion there. If there is some outcome, maybe
| we create a ticket in our bug tracker. I feel like it
| would be better if you used a more realistic example from
| your experience using AsyncGo. I would be interested to
| see the kind of comments people leave and how people tend
| to use features like search, up/down votes, labels, etc.
| mdorazio wrote:
| Ok cool. So if I had to sum it up elevator pitch style
| based on what you've provided so far, I would call it a
| collaborative project management tool that uses threaded
| discussions for deliverables and decision making.
|
| Is your target and experience to replace existing PM
| tools like kanban boards or work alongside them?
| j4yav wrote:
| To work along side them, we are really just thinking
| about the collaborative decision making bit. We do have
| document editing built-in (WYSIWYG markdown editing), but
| issue trackers for example, backlogs, kanbans would still
| be in place for _doing_ work.
|
| I can imagine replacing Slack, for the right team. We are
| a small team, but internally we use our own app (all the
| time) plus Google Chat (rarely, for quick pings).
| pigcat wrote:
| Sounds cool. Where can I find it?
|
| Edit: I see you added a link! It _is_ cool. Great idea, I
| like the name too. I can see this being very useful and
| will give it a try the next time I need an outcome.
| j4yav wrote:
| Added a link above to the current site/video that I have.
| If you have any feedback (even if you don't use it) I'd
| love to hear from you, my email is in my bio here.
|
| Edit: Much appreciated!
| davedx wrote:
| I take it one step further.
|
| Having worked with large marketing departments, I have decided I
| don't like marketing at all. It tends to follow psychological
| tactics to gain attention, often in deceptive or underhanded
| ways. You van see this by looking at the kind of features
| products like Hubspot offer: lots of creepy "tracking" of leads.
|
| Contrast with sales: sales is about directly showing people your
| product and getting them to buy it because it helps them solve
| problems in their business. It's much more honest, both the
| offering and the end goal.
|
| On my current project I will be starting and finishing with sales
| (direct) and any content that supports that goal. Tweets, blogs,
| SEO and spammy landing pages? Nope.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Can't tweets and blogs also help people solve problems in their
| business?
| smugglerFlynn wrote:
| There are all sorts of deceptive tactics used in Sales as well.
|
| I think it all boils down to your personal professionalism and
| culture in the end: some people choose to go the easy route,
| some people don't. Unfortunately, mass culture of both Sales
| and Marketing industries seems to heavily rely on deception
| today.
|
| Could it be that the reason you contrast Marketing with Sales
| is because you've seen how marketing industry (and mass culture
| in modern marketing) works, but your sales experience was of a
| different kind?
| davedx wrote:
| I don't know. The sales dept I worked most closely with was
| for a utility company, which is extremely price competitive,
| so the hustlers who go out there to sell to people can be
| pretty aggressive tactically, but I still find that if you
| ignore the pushiness, it's mostly honest and above board.
| (Used cars salespeople have a bit of a different reputation
| on honesty I hear but I don't have direct experience there).
|
| Whereas marketing, it's in the DNA of the whole industry to
| be sneaky, even creepy. The constant tracking, the bending
| and distortion of truths, the dark patterns and deceptive
| practices, it's pretty rotten. Count up all the trackers and
| spyware installed on the average website. Guess who pushed to
| get them all installed? Almost certainly the marketing
| department.
|
| There are honest folk who work in marketing and genuinely
| care about the product, the customer, and approach their job
| ethically, but from what I've seen they're in the minority.
| evancoop wrote:
| How does one distinguish between "marketing," a process that can
| be analytical with respect to consumer behavior, survey data,
| market testing, etc. and "hustling," which is less rigorous, and
| more ado about effort in generating exposure? It seems as though
| devs can get behind the former, once there's a product to sell,
| but the latter is somewhat antithetical to the general
| disposition (at least for me personally).
|
| Is this really a plea to recognize that some of this isn't about
| a skillset as much as a temperament?
| clairity wrote:
| any developer who wants to build a business is _becoming a
| marketer_ , full-stop, otherwise you're just a hobbyist.
| marketing encompasses all of the functions of bringing a product
| to market and repeatedly exchanging it for money, including
| figuring out and developing the products/features people want and
| finding all the people who might want it.
|
| marketing, not development, _is_ business. if that's scary, it's
| worth reconsidering your appetite for starting a business.
| luckily, the mechanics of marketing are straightforward to learn,
| though developing good intuition is harder since the problem
| space is more ambiguous than programming.
| SleekEagle wrote:
| Really great article. Something that's so unique about tech-
| related industries is that you can ALWAYS be improving your
| product and releasing new features, the only barrier being time
| and effort, so it can be hard to pull yourself to focus on all of
| the other things that let a company grow.
| dialcortez wrote:
| I'm in the same boat. Tho I feel the route for solofounders to
| market themselves is twitter and that is one of the biggest
| obstacles for me to actually do it.
|
| Don't really know if SEO is really that important for solodevs or
| small products anymore.
|
| When you sell a product, you try to present it as something real,
| with support, hoping customers don't realize this is just a 1
| person operation. The expectations are different. SEO is
| different.
|
| But when your clients are not on the twitterverse, things get
| complicated.
|
| I resonate with the article, and I'm stuck on this most of the
| time. Saved for a personal constant reminder. Thanks!
| intrasight wrote:
| I've come to believe that as a solo developer, you are the
| product.
|
| So my "marketing" strategy this year is to put my developer notes
| on Github. Basically let people into my head and see my
| development process unfold.
| davnicwil wrote:
| I you like this post, I wrote a blog post 'Negative Feedback is
| Positive' [0] a while ago that you might also enjoy, to further
| drive home a related message.
|
| You're never one more CSS tweak away from not embarrassing, and
| you're never one more feature away from useful. Things aren't
| binary like that.
|
| Just ship / promote it now, in its current state, and see what
| useful feedback you can get. Hint: likely none, as nobody cares.
|
| [0] https://davnicwil.com/negative-feedback-is-positive/
| bastardoperator wrote:
| A marketing director forced me into spamming our customers. I
| objected, said it's going to be a bad idea, copied everyone. He
| was furious I challenged his authority, told me I don't know a
| thing about marketing which is true. I do however know
| unsolicited email is not appreciated.
|
| I eventually get overruled and flip on the spam machine. This is
| a Monday evening. By Tuesday noon our support lines are flooded,
| twitter is going wild, and people are actually leaving the
| service.
|
| By Tuesday evening I'm asked to turn off the spam machine. So
| yes, it is scary especially when the people doing the marketing
| don't even understand basic internet etiquette.
| WORMS_EAT_WORMS wrote:
| Honestly, this just depends - depends on who your audience is
| and what your service is. No one likes spammy and cheesy emails
| but can be super effective and a company's biggest conversion
| medium.
| codpiece wrote:
| I'm a marketing technology consultant. I've built or optimized
| systems for many tech companies you know and love.
|
| I've always wanted to share my knowledge; write a book, do a
| training series, etc, but I simply can't market myself. The
| hustle needed to be seen feels too...gross.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Why does it feel gross? You would be helping a lot of people.
|
| Do you think how for example Andrew Chen markets himself and
| his book is gross?
| codpiece wrote:
| I think it's the hustle of social media to be heard that
| turns me off. The 'thought leader hustle' feels artificial,
| manipulative and needy.
|
| I think it comes down to what you hear in this very thread,
| and often expressed by engineers; marketing and advertising
| to consumers can feel deceitful.
|
| Business to business marketing is very different. You present
| your value to customers, they explore, and reach out when
| ready for more information.
|
| If I could mentally associate myself with someone like Chen
| vs Gary Veynerchuck, Ryan Holliday, or Seth Godin, I would
| feel less 'gross'. I suffer the same problems as the OP and
| others here.
| hwers wrote:
| I don't mean this in a mean way at all but when I read this my
| mind mostly goes to wondering if the energy spent on marketing
| and building yet another product we've seen thousands of
| iterations of would be better spent on trying to think of things
| that produce genuine value. (Another chart app? Again I don't
| mean to be insulting at all but it doesn't seem to solve much
| that hasn't been solved already.) Maybe engineers should be
| learning how to sit in an empty quiet room for hours and just
| brainstorm ideas until they hit on something that would really be
| useful since once you come up with it implementing it can usually
| be done in a week.
| winrid wrote:
| What I do is have a whiteboard and I can't move the post-it notes
| to the "done" section until there are some kind of tests, docs,
| and a blog post.
|
| This works because there's limited space on the board and I'm
| OCD. :P
| sergioisidoro wrote:
| I'm going through the same thing right now. I have an MVP ready
| for use, sitting in the drawer because I'm too afraid to take the
| next step. It's encouraging to see stories of others going
| through the same.
| holler wrote:
| Right there with you! Spent two years building a project, got
| some initial users, but need to shift to marketing and I feel
| an immense mental block... I actually took time off because I
| became so stressed thinking about the next step of shifting to
| marketing.
| sergioisidoro wrote:
| Hey, if you're interested in connecting, so we can help each-
| other let me know. Peer support could be a way out of this
| mental block?
| Invictus0 wrote:
| The comments here are proof enough that marketing is completely
| foreign and misunderstood by a lot of developers.
| lbriner wrote:
| Here's the thing. Developers are generally perfectionists and
| marketers are realists. As a Developer, I am naturally
| uncomfortable with marketing because my default view is that I
| don't want to lie or over-promise and I don't like fluffy claims.
|
| Marketers and sales people _can_ be less bothered about facts but
| I think much of the time, we just think that, the truth is that
| there can be a lot of fact-based marketing but also you just have
| to remember that your product will never be a perfect fit and
| neither are any of your competitors but you can sell anyway
| because you are making your customer 's life better, not perfect!
|
| Imagine you are selling something like a Toyota SUV. Is it
| perfect? No. Is it the best price-point? Possibly not; the best
| MPG? Probably not but I am selling a package, a vehicle that
| ticks a lot of boxes for someone and ultimately something that is
| better than the competitors in some ways and worse in others.
|
| If I am uncomfortable selling the Toyota because the MPG isn't
| the best it could be, I am not saving the customer from
| disappointing MPG, I am pushing them to a competitor and taking
| away the benefits that they would get from a Toyota.
|
| If your product solves a problem, assuming it isn't garbage, then
| it will be better than competitors in some ways and worse in
| others. You can market it accordingly!
|
| Good luck.
| AuryGlenz wrote:
| That's good advice. I'm a developer and a photographer and a
| couple of months ago I had a wedding consult (sales meeting)
| where the fact that I'm not good at that portion came up for
| the reasons you mentioned. The potential client somewhat
| jokingly then asked "are you a good wedding photographer?"
|
| I've never had a question at a consult seize up my brain like
| that before. A good salesperson would have said "of course, and
| here's why...". I am not a good salesperson and floundered.
|
| Reflecting afterwards I realized the truthful answer isn't that
| I'm a good wedding photographer, but that I'm a good wedding
| photographer for a particular subset of people.
| granshaw wrote:
| It's likely your product serves a certain segment better than
| others. By targeting just that segment (assuming it's big and
| profitable enough) the "lies" factor is greatly reduced cause
| it is indeed a great fit for them
|
| Then it becomes purely a marketing problem... how can I make
| everyone in the world in this segment aware of my product? :)
| libertine wrote:
| > my default view is that I don't want to lie or over-promise
|
| This is the greatest prejudice around marketing in the tech
| community. A simple exercise you can do that debunks that frame
| of thought: lies are unsustainable.
|
| Unless you're a government or a monopoly that has their
| predictable flow of revenue, lies aren't affordable.
|
| You can lie and scam people, but that's not a long term
| strategy, because you'll burn off customers, and complains,
| reports, refunds will start to creep in and - unless you're in
| China or some country that turns their sight away from these
| practices - you'll be burned.
|
| What you might think of lies is the way one can phrase a, for
| example, value proposition of a product: just because a big
| slice of applications are CRUD apps, that doesn't define them.
| It doesn't help anyone when it comes to perception, because
| that's what you have to work with - and perception is as good
| as reality.
|
| You can't work without the facts, because that's what people
| will have at the end.
|
| Picking on your example, there's more to a car than MPG - and
| even those variables sometimes are compromises. Imagine the
| Toyota SUV has an higher MPG because the car weights more due
| to some security features, and they place the SUV in the market
| as a SAFE SUV FOR FAMILIES.
|
| That's a fact (in our exercise). It's also a fact that it has
| high MPG, but you're not hiding it either, you have to display
| that information and you can even justify it, but you're not
| spending money to tell that.
|
| Why? Because you can only say much to grab people's attention
| and to deliver the right message to them. Attention is
| precious, you have micro seconds to snatch it and seconds to
| sustain it and deliver a message.
|
| Plus you can only factor in so many variables into a decision
| making process, you'll always make compromises as a customer.
| For a lot of people MPG isn't a problem. For some, it is.
| That's why there's so much variety in the market.
| opportune wrote:
| A lot of tech marketing boils down to dishonest comparisons-
| for example perhaps Product X is really inferior to Product Y
| except on some contrived workload or an unfair comparison (eg
| Product X was configured to optimize for the workload and
| Product Y wasn't). A market doesn't see a problem with that.
| It's technically not a lie, just misleading, and I think most
| engineers would find it dishonest.
|
| For an example with cars, imagine you said a Toyota Camry had
| better racing performance in a test race than a Tesla
| Roadster, because the Roadster was driven by a drunk person
| and had only 5% battery with deflated tires. That's what a
| lot of tech comparisons are like.
| libertine wrote:
| I understand you, it's not fair.
|
| But in some countries the law regarding comparisons between
| products (in advertising) it's very strict and it can
| easily blow on the faces of those who do it.
|
| That's why there are laws and regulators, to keep marketing
| in check, and ethical - at least within the margins of the
| law...
|
| ... this is one of the major problems that paints marketing
| as a shady practice: apparently there's no Law online, and
| no regulators are acting on it. In their defense, it's
| probably impossible to regulate it as it stands today...
| it's left to Facebook and Google to do part of this job.
|
| It's very common to see stuff that wouldn't even be put on
| air on TV, Radio, or printed in a magazine. But since it's
| online, all good.
| biztos wrote:
| > lies are unsustainable
|
| Lots of lies are perfectly sustainable, but I have a feeling
| they tend to be the flattering lies (to someone).
|
| _We only hire the best._
| pjc50 wrote:
| > lies are unsustainable.
|
| All sorts of things are "unsustainable". It only has to be
| sustainable long enough to cash out.
| libertine wrote:
| Scams, frauds, all leverage false advertising.
|
| But just because they use marketing tools to achieve that
| objective, it doesn't make marketing "evil" or "all about
| lies" - hell they're surely also using some tech stack to
| have the whole operation going.
|
| Does that make tech evil, or a vehicle to spread lies,
| scams, frauds?
|
| No. It's just what people do with it.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Any examples of marketeers in commercial companies
| refusing sales as a bad fit?
| libertine wrote:
| I don't understand your question, can you expand on it?
| CJefferson wrote:
| I see Tesla's promises on self-driving cars over many years
| as lies. It doesn't see to have done them any harm so far.
| libertine wrote:
| Tesla or Elon promising?
|
| I know there's an barely visible line.
| jimbokun wrote:
| It did _some_ harm, but certainly not enough to detour
| Tesla from it 's overall trajectory.
| Sohcahtoa82 wrote:
| I'm not sure I'd call their promises lies. I think there's
| a subtle difference between a lie and an over-promise.
|
| I think FSD will eventually happen, but Elon is very
| mistaken on the time frame. He always thinks we're 6 months
| away from it. I think we're closer to 6 years.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| I don't get this economy in which developers make stuff that for
| other developers who make stuff for other developers, and they
| all pretend this isn't going to crash down as soon as the tech
| party plateaus. Meanwhile behemoths keep becoming more behemothy
| elorant wrote:
| I have a simple rule for marketing which has proved to give nice
| results. Give a generous demo. Not that lame 15 days demo that
| most services provide. No one will manage to test your product in
| just 15 days. And even if they do it won't help create a habit
| out of using it. Give three months instead. It gives them time to
| schedule a period of using it, and then it provides a cushion to
| get accustomed to it.
|
| I was testing an IDE the other day that had only one month trial
| period. One month is not enough. It's a secondary tool. I won't
| use it on a daily basis because I have work to do. I'll use it on
| weekends, and probably not that much. I need plenty of time to
| test it on various projects to get accustomed with all its
| features and see how it compares to the one I have. Would it
| break them to give a two or three months trial time?
|
| Long demos does the trick for me. As always, ymmv.
| stavros wrote:
| How many products of yours have you tested this on? How many
| days on average did your customers have before conversion? In
| my tests, users try the product for an average of _a few
| minutes_ before converting. If they haven 't bought by the end
| of the day (at least for my product), they'll basically never
| buy.
|
| Given that, I might as well change my trial period to one day,
| which very much contradicts your results.
| elorant wrote:
| I have tested it on four different services, over a span of
| six years. All b2b. Conversion is between 2%-5%, after the
| demo ended, which is between two and three months. All
| contacts were cold calls. As I said, your mileage may vary.
| This is what worked for me.
| rikkipitt wrote:
| Begs the question, how can we find our own Marko Saric's? If
| you're a marketer and reading this, want to help me with
| paced.email? I'm in the same boat as the OP.
| cweill wrote:
| I don't see the different between marketing and customer
| development a la Lean Start-up. As a budding solo-developer
| myself (2 months in), I'm making sure to get my customers
| involved from day 0: speaking to as many as possible, learning
| about their pain points, and only building one feature at a time
| before reaching out again. Some of your most loyal customers will
| be along for the journey.
|
| Twitter has been huge for me to find my customers. I'll just DM
| people who talk about relevant topics and tweet once a day about
| what I'm working on. I just got my first paying customer (a big
| one too) through someone retweeting one of my tweets. At the end
| of the day your customers are people too.
|
| I agree that marketing is scary, and a good book about this is
| "Show Your Work".
| city41 wrote:
| I also feel like marketing has gotten much much harder in recent
| years due to extreme saturation of products. Take games for
| example, there were 11,000 released on Steam this year alone.
| I've noticed over the past couple years a lot of subreddits I
| frequent have been overtaken by people promoting their products.
| Even if you have something really great, it seems like you're
| sharing it with audiences who are now really worn out from it
| all.
| yoran wrote:
| I think every solo developer should read "The E-Myth Revisited" (
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/81948.The_E_Myth_Revisit...).
| It describes exactly this problem.
|
| For your business to succeed, you must play each role:
|
| 1. The Entrepreneur: a future-focused visionary who pursues
| opportunities
|
| 2. The Manager: a past-focused worrier who plans and organizes
|
| 3. The Technician: a present-focused worker who concentrates on
| the task at hand
|
| Solo developers (also technical startup founders) spend too much
| time in their Technician role. But you need all 3 for your
| business to succeed.
| iveqy wrote:
| So was this advice or marketing material? ;)
|
| Maybe both.
|
| Nice to see that more that myself are struggling with this.
| raunometsa wrote:
| Both!
|
| 1) Marketing: it has contributed to my Twitter following today
| (+50 so far), other effects are probably not so visible. Maybe
| someone checking out my websites, etc.
|
| 2) Advice: - you have to do marketing or no one knows you exist
| - try to get over the fear of exposure - work on less scary
| things (SEO)
| mauvehaus wrote:
| It's any solo business, really, and it's more than just
| marketing. I hate doing bookkeeping as well. Wrenching on
| machinery runs the gamut from fun but unprofitable to "sweet
| hell, how does an induction motor work, and why won't this one
| start?!". Photography is a lot less fun when you're doing it for
| promoting your work. Editing photos is a skill neither I nor my
| wife has. We've been outsourcing that work.
|
| Hell, my nontechnical wife does our website (on squarespace),
| because as a recovering programmer, I'd fall prey to the instinct
| to keep tweaking stuff instead of hitting publish.
|
| But doing all that shit is ultimately worth it if you love what
| you do and also eating :-)
|
| I'm trying to look at the marketing part as being an educator,
| not to other people in my trade, but to the public who know about
| as much about it as I do about bookkeeping and photoshop.
|
| Now don't go looking for my blog on my website and tell me off
| about it not being there. I know. I'm just as bad about
| publishing as the author of TFA :-)
| calltrak wrote:
| I know how you feel. I am trying to promote https://fabform.io
| shamelessly. The struggle is real :)
| aembleton wrote:
| Why do you set a max-width but not centre the main container?
| It just looks a bit odd to me.
| scubakid wrote:
| Marketing is scary for solo devs, and reading posts about how we
| should be doing more of it is also scary. For those of you who've
| successfully followed advice like this (versus myself, where I
| usually slink right from the comment section back to product
| development), which modern marketing channels have you found to
| be the best investment of your time?
| alexmingoia wrote:
| At the end you touch on why it's hard: fear of failure. When you
| put yourself out there you have to accept rejection. For
| developers, coding is an easy way to hide. It's also why working
| for yourself is hard. Having a boss tell you what to do lets you
| off the hook.
| rikroots wrote:
| My problem isn't fear of failure. Rather it's something around
| fear of being in the spotlight, or fear of being ridiculed,
| that keeps me from marketing my canvas library more
| aggressively.
|
| For instance, I've submitted to HN various links to the library
| 22 times in the past 30 months. My particular fear about
| submitting to HN is the thought of being accused of spamming
| the site, which I'd find humiliating. I don't have such fears
| about posting to Twitter (with appropriate tags) because
| Twitter is more ephemeral - I also get a rush from retweets,
| even if most retweets are bot-driven.
| tppiotrowski wrote:
| I've felt this. I post my project on HN or Reddit and then I
| spend the rest of the day looking at analytics and refreshing
| my email for new comments. But external validation like usage
| and opinions are not in my control so it feels like an
| emotional roller coaster ride.
|
| Instead of upvotes and likes, I now focus on optimizing
| things I can control like render time and amount of network
| bytes downloaded or adding a new feature. The reward from
| this feels more enjoyable/consistent than my DAUs
| Zealotux wrote:
| I have been running into that exact problem for months now, I
| have early users messaging me with "why don't you talk more of
| your product? this just what I was looking for it took me hours
| to find it". So while I agree with the point but honestly: this
| kind of advice is not helping much, it's like telling an
| introvert to socialize.
|
| Courses could help maybe? Hiring a consultant for a few hours?
| Looking for a co-founder specialized in marketing? I think my
| product is decent, but I always feel awkward Twetting about it,
| even more since I'm not an avid Twitter user at all.
| MayeulC wrote:
| Maybe incentivize your clients to talk about it? Companies seem
| successful at marketing on social media using giveaways,
| discounts, etc. It might work for companies as well?
| numlock86 wrote:
| As a _pure_ developer you always want at least one person just
| for sales /marketing if that's not your thing and you want your
| product visible. Even with SEO the "best product" might stay
| unnoticed. There are exceptions, of course. But betting on
| making "the next big thing" like that is just a dream of
| millions that only really happened to a dozen of people. And
| even in those few cases it's debatable if it was just because
| of how good the product was.
| koonsolo wrote:
| Can you reframe it as informing/educating your (potential)
| users?
|
| Your product is important, but users knowing how to use it, and
| what new features are there is also important.
|
| At least for me this different mindset made a difference.
| magicroot75 wrote:
| I work solely in marketing/advertising and have no clue how to
| code. I generally enjoy technology, which is why I'm on HN.
|
| I think marketers and developers need a stronger culture between
| ourselves. The tools of marketers (data mining, consumer behavior
| analysis, surveys, market testing, etc) aren't just a veneer to
| be applied at the completion of a development project. Marketing,
| when done correctly, informs UX. Marketing can provide developers
| with insights into the problems they should try to solve.
|
| From what I can tell, many developers view the development
| process as a sacred protected space for creation. This is not the
| optimal means to delivering a high-impact product. Developers
| should be asking themselves during the development process: "Is
| this feature going to excite a group of users, and do we have
| some statistical mechanism to predict that excitement?"
|
| When you create something that you already know will excite
| people, the product launch becomes much simpler.
| itsmemattchung wrote:
| > The tools of marketers (data mining, consumer behavior
| analysis, surveys, market testing, etc) aren't just a veneer to
| be applied at the completion of a development project.
| Marketing, when done correctly, informs UX.
|
| Up until a couple months ago, I thought Marketing
| teams/organizations were a bit hand wavy. But recently, I took
| a digital marketing course at Georgia Tech, which changed my
| perspective completely: marketers (can/do/should) apply data
| driven techniques.
|
| As an engineer, I now (at least try) to think about how the
| feature I'm building will impact the end-user; it's easy to
| fall into a trap where you are writing code without thinking
| about your end users.
| pawelwentpawel wrote:
| What's your opinion of the Georgia Tech course? I'm just on
| their website checking out the curriculum, seems pretty
| straight to the point.
| dempseye wrote:
| Can you drop the link to it? I'm not sure if you mean the
| bootcamp.
| pawelwentpawel wrote:
| Yes, it seems to be called a bootcamp, not a course.
| That's what I'm looking at - https://bootcamp.pe.gatech.e
| du/digitalmarketing/curriculum/
| andrew-nguyen wrote:
| He's talking about this course in the OMSCS program:
| https://omscs.gatech.edu/mgt-6311-digital-marketing
| michaelje wrote:
| I agree.
|
| As a marketer, improving my understanding of the development
| process and technology in general has been one of the best
| skills I continue to learn. I have built a personal project iOS
| app but have no desire to be an engineer. (Know what you're
| good at and all that!)
|
| I see it as a forever loop that continues to build on itself,
| going back and forth between marketing and engineering.
| Understanding users/behaviours/needs can greatly inform the
| product scoping and add clarity to the development process with
| the "why" that makes a product or feature more useful - which
| in turn then becomes easier to market and solve user use cases.
| embwbam wrote:
| How might an experienced solo developer work with an
| experienced marketer? My network has ended up being very thin
| in that regard. Would you partner on some developer's zany
| project? Or are you folks available to consult?
| Swinx43 wrote:
| You are absolutely correct. I have been working as an engineer
| with marketing departments of organisations and the degree to
| which these two sides can benefit a product or company when
| working together is phenomenal.
|
| "If you build it they will come" is a sure fire way to have
| your hopes and dreams dashed on the rocks of reality. Marketing
| is as important as the dev skills to make a product happen.
| They are two sides of the same coin of success.
| xwdv wrote:
| > Developers should be asking themselves during the development
| process: "Is this feature going to excite a group of users, and
| do we have some statistical mechanism to predict that
| excitement?"
|
| This is such a user-facing mindset. I'd say most of the
| development work I do isn't even something the user will know
| about and definitely not get excited about. Also, I do not care
| about what happens after a feature gets built, my job is not to
| make sure the right things are being built, it's to make sure
| things are being _built right_. Do _your_ job and I'll do mine.
| pc86 wrote:
| I don't think I've ever seen a more defensive comment on HN.
|
| "User" doesn't mean the person clicking around a website.
| _Someone_ is using your software, I hope?
| chadash wrote:
| > _my job is not to make sure the right things are being
| built, it's to make sure things are being built right_
|
| If you build the right things the wrong way, then you have
| technical debt. If you build the wrong things the right way,
| then you have _nothing_ (except maybe an aesthetically
| pleasant code base that won 't get used?). Every developer
| should try to have some part in making sure the _right thing_
| is being built.
| matwood wrote:
| > Every developer should try to have some part in making
| sure the right thing is being built.
|
| Bingo. For as much as developers hate technical debt, it
| seems many miss the obvious way to avoid it is to not build
| something _at all_.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| You're aware this discussion is in the context of a solo
| founder microstartup right? There is only one person/a few
| people doing all the jobs.
| jimbokun wrote:
| I don't know, building the wrong thing in the right way, that
| never gets used by anyone, sounds kind of depressing to me.
| sanderjd wrote:
| I think you're exactly right about this!
|
| But just to provide some insight (which you probably already
| have) into the mind of a different kind of person: I can both
| recognize the truth that marketing is critically and
| synergistically important, and also have just a deep seated
| allergy to it. I have concluded that being a freelance /
| independent developer or even a very early stage startup
| developer is not a great fit for me for this reason. I thrive
| more when there is lots of work to do that is not deeply
| attached to marketing a new product.
| hippich wrote:
| There is one more possibility (relevant to solo devs) - lack of
| trust that marketing professionals can deliver results.
| Personally, I do realize how important marketing is and how
| inadequate my skills in marketing are. But at the same time, my
| experience contracting out marketing taught me that there are
| very few good pros and i am much more likely to at best hire
| someone who has about the same level of experience as I am.
|
| If someone has tips on how to weed out pretenders (who
| themselves do not realize they are pretending) - I would love
| to learn about it. Unfortunately, my budget typically is too
| small to keep hiring until i hit the gold.
| ghaff wrote:
| In general, contracting something out can be useful if you
| have some specific task to perform. We use a bunch of
| agencies and other outside firms. But it's almost always for
| something specific like running a webinar series on $X or
| providing social media tooling or other things like that.
|
| Marketing also covers a _very_ wide spectrum. For a small
| operation, the person you might hire to create content and
| /or messaging for a product is probably different from the
| one you would hire to create a digital demand generation
| program.
| glitchc wrote:
| Is there a mechanism to make this transition easier or access
| folks as like-minded as you? As a technology developer,
| chatting with technology enthusiasts can be very enlightening
| as they attempt to understand your technology and figure out
| the target market.
| z3t4 wrote:
| It also goes the other way. As a marketer dont treat marketing
| as a sacred protected space. Work with the developer as the
| developer is very good at solving problem and can make sure
| that the best technology is chosen to reach the marketing goal
| as efficient as possible.
| vbezhenar wrote:
| Many developers don't want to deliver a high-impact product.
| They want to enjoy the process of creation, earn some
| reasonable money and make lifes of some people better.
| jimbokun wrote:
| > earn some reasonable money and make lifes of some people
| better.
|
| This requires delivering a high-impact product.
| oblio wrote:
| So you'd think, but you'd be wrong, in many cases.
| kstenerud wrote:
| A high impact product doesn't necessarily mean a money maker.
| I'll never make a cent off https://concise-encoding.org but
| I'd certainly like it to become high impact and make
| everyones lives better! And that requires some good
| marketing, which unfortunately I'm only mediocre at.
| monetus wrote:
| Thanks for the self-promotion; this seems really neat and I
| might try my hand at a nim implementation.
| Invictus0 wrote:
| > don't want to deliver a high-impact product
|
| > earn some reasonable money
|
| These two are in opposition
| handrous wrote:
| You've forgotten about the effect of investment. Work on a
| team doing contract early-stage development for funded
| (that's important) startups and greenfield "experimental"
| projects for larger corporations and you can work on four
| projects in one year, zero of which ever see enough ROI to
| pay back just _your personal_ pay. And then do it again the
| next year.
|
| The end result is that you feel like a tiny part of some
| weird, random, extremely expensive process to (rarely)
| create successful new businesses. Like part of a living
| pachinko machine that burns cash. But you can get paid
| plenty for it!
| dagw wrote:
| I've worked on some seriously "low-impact" internal tools
| at large companies, and the pay was fine.
| KronisLV wrote:
| Aren't large and well paying companies a bit of an
| exception in many cases?
|
| For example, here in Latvia we don't quite have such a
| large tech scene, outside of WITCH companies.
|
| Thus, it feels like that argument isn't entirely valid in
| all that many circumstances.
| hasmolo wrote:
| not really, you can make good money not at a big corp, amd
| not work on high impact stuff. yelp, intuit, adobe all fit
| the bill
| oblio wrote:
| I like how the definition of Big Corp has changed.
|
| > Adobe
|
| 22 000 employees.
|
| Revenue of $12.86 billion.
|
| They're a literal Fortune 500 company (and not that far
| off from Fortune 200): https://fortune.com/company/adobe-
| systems/fortune500/
| yunohn wrote:
| That's because HN (and the general media) have come to
| brand just FAANG as evil megacorps.
|
| We've forgotten about general tech/companies, consulting,
| fossil/energy, etc etc that are also very very mega.
| derwiki wrote:
| Not at Megacorp they aren't
| aniforprez wrote:
| Megacorp usually at least starts with a good product that
| sells well
| oblio wrote:
| And once that takes off, think of Google, for example,
| they also build another 1000 external products and 10000
| internal apps.
| ebiester wrote:
| However, may developers do want a high-impact product. That's
| orthogonal to making gazillions of dollars.
|
| "I want what I write to matter to someone" is the fundamental
| calling of many founders.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| > I think marketers and developers need a stronger culture
| between ourselves.
|
| I fully agree.
|
| I've worked with an incredible b2b salesman before. He wasn't
| very technical, but he was always curious about what was
| possible and how difficult it would be to accomplish. Going to
| a conference with him as the technical expert was amazing.
| Customers were a gold mine for information. We always looked
| deeper to find the problems to solve, not the features to
| create. Learned a lot from him.
|
| Sadly, I haven't had this dynamic since.
|
| Since then, I've run into marketing departments. My issue with
| them is they constantly switch tools, want immediate results,
| and destroy site performance without any concern for the path
| of destruction they leave behind. And marketing is good at
| selling stuff internally as they are externally. As a result,
| few people in management care about how marketing impacts
| anything else in the company.
|
| On the flip side, marketing is the first department to be
| stabbed in the back when numbers come up badly. It's not really
| a surprise to me they treat other departments as scapegoats
| pass blame to.
|
| Things don't have to be this way. :(
| LanceJones wrote:
| I write code and do marketing (for a living). So how do you
| label/categorize me?
| oblio wrote:
| Unicorn.
|
| Somewhat off topic, and speaking of unicorns:
| http://widgetsandshit.com/teddziuba/2011/07/the-
| craigslist-r...
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| You're a person, not a department. I don't have an issue
| with the profession. I have an issue with misaligned
| corporate structures.
| GnarfGnarf wrote:
| Interesting. Although I'm a developer, I was forced to take
| some sales training courses when I worked for Xerox. Imagine
| spending three weeks in a hotel suite in El Segundo with
| thirty salesmen & programmers.
|
| The essence of what Xerox taught was: to sell, find out what
| problems your customer has, and figure out how your
| product/service can help him/her solve the problem. That's
| it.
|
| Xerox was very good at sales.
| RNCTX wrote:
| > Things don't have to be this way. :(
|
| You're right, all you have to do to eliminate it is get rid
| of all of the ridiculous metrics that people try to apply to
| human interaction, ban billion dollar "platforms" like the
| social media companies, and reduce everything back down to
| face to face scale.
|
| We would be better off, I'm not being facetious.
| ketzo wrote:
| Engineers tend to have this conception of all salespeople
| (and, to the point of the GP, marketers) as con-artists: "how
| can I convince this rube to buy my crap?"
|
| When in reality, as you discovered, the best salespeople are
| the ones who are able to really, truly understand the
| problems of their customer base and help them find solutions.
| That is an _incredibly_ special skill, and one that should
| never be underrated.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| I guess the problem is that for every good salesman there's
| 10 conmen masquerading as good salesmen.
| bonestamp2 wrote:
| > Marketing, when done correctly, informs UX.
|
| What do you mean by this? I don't disagree in anyway, just
| looking for your insights.
| kdelok wrote:
| > The tools of marketers (data mining, consumer behavior
| analysis, surveys, market testing, etc) aren't just a veneer to
| be applied at the completion of a development project.
|
| I strongly agree with this! If you're working towards a product
| (and not just a hobby project) then these are crucial
| requirements. If they can be found out before writing any code,
| then they should be, since it will save time in the long run.
|
| For me it's also the kind of thing that can lead to costly
| changes after the fact, which is prone to rub developers up the
| wrong way. It seems like the principle of phase containment
| might apply - if you found it early in the development cycle,
| then it would have been easier to fix.
| enriquto wrote:
| > This is not the optimal means to delivering a high-impact
| product.
|
| This is just a single data point, but for a view "from the
| other side", my honest and immediate answer to this question
| is: "I don't care".
|
| When writing programs, my concern has never been "to deliver a
| high-impact product". In fact, I find this language very
| annoying; and saying that my program is a "product" feels like
| a very offensive insult. The goal is never to deliver a
| product, much less a high impact product. The goal is always to
| solve a problem that I have, regardless of whether any other
| person on earth has the same problem. Now, I may have been
| given that problem because it was deemed useful to other
| people, but during the actual act of programming I prefer to
| make an abstraction of that and focus only on the problem
| itself.
|
| EDIT: I appreciate that there are managers and such that keep
| proposing meaningful problems. I also like to find problems
| myself, and sometimes I appreciate when (rarely) they turn out
| to be shared with others, who in turn are happy that I solved
| them. But this is always a happy secondary effect, never the
| main goal.
| ttymck wrote:
| I understand your viewpoint, but I feel like you are talking
| about something else entirely. GP discussed (paraphrasing):
| "building a product, trying to get customers", so to respond
| by saying "it's not a product, I don't want customers" isn't
| exactly continuing the discussion.
|
| For hobby projects, I agree with you whole-heartedly.
| hluska wrote:
| That's the other side of the builder mindset. It's
| relatively easy for builders to build things that solve
| their own problems. That's a tool and builders like tools.
| It takes a really big mental leap to go from "I built a
| thing" to "I built a product."
|
| The thing is, things are products. But the answer isn't
| "all hackers are wrong, you're dumb for not involving me
| early on." Rather, the answer is 'chill, you've got this.'
| hluska wrote:
| That's the marketing mindset. Marketers are not builders and
| they are incapable of understanding why we build things.
| Sometimes we build something to solve a problem that we have.
| Sometimes we build something because we want to learn. Other
| times, we build things because we're bored.
|
| We don't need a product placement meeting before we type git
| -m commit "First commit" and if we did, the bast majority of
| cool things would never have been built. Sometimes we just
| build because that's what builders do.
| mbreese wrote:
| But -- the original post is about a developer who clearly
| is treating their project as a product. So, the top comment
| completely makes sense in that context.
| cortesoft wrote:
| Look, I am a builder at heart, too. I love writing software
| for all sorts of reasons.
|
| When I am working for someone who is paying me, though, I
| am only building for one reason; to deliver value to my
| employer. That is the entire reason I am being paid. I
| build for other reasons at other times.
|
| I really hate working with other developers who think like
| you do. It is so hard to work with people who care more
| about the code itself than what it is for. We aren't
| working for the same goal, and sometimes the beautiful code
| actually makes it harder to accomplish our actual goal.
| bvaldivielso wrote:
| Your point is not against GP's point. It seems from your
| comment that you don't want to deliver a high-impact product,
| and that even the thought of your program as a "product" is
| offensive. Well, GP is not forcing you to work towards high-
| impact products. If you want to solve your own problems, then
| do, and follow whatever workflow you want.
| sulam wrote:
| Do you work in research, or maybe open source?
| hluska wrote:
| This is such a typical marketing response. Instead of building
| people up, you've got to come in and tell them that they've
| been wrong since the start? And the path to being right is
| through hiring someone like you??
|
| First, this doesn't do anyone any favours. Second, if marketing
| types would stop being such know it alls, you would have an
| easier time interacting with developers while they're building
| something. Third, marketing isn't special. And finally, you
| don't even understand how or why developers build things.
|
| Be nice and build developers up, especially on a thread with a
| bunch of people sharing their innermost fears. This whole
| "you've been wrong since the beginning; the cure is me" is
| terrible marketing. Not to mention that it's cruel.
|
| Be decent to hackers.
| kristiandupont wrote:
| And in another thread you wrote "Marketers are not builders
| and they are incapable of understanding why we build things."
|
| You are not exactly making developers look good here.
| MarcellusDrum wrote:
| I'm a developer, and I can't find anything disrespectful in
| OP's comment. I don't know anything about marketing to
| determine if what they are saying is true, but they are
| giving their opinion based on their experience, which I find
| valuable and worth considering.
| fny wrote:
| No. Marketing and sales should be siloed away from devs. This
| is why you need a product person to intermediate.
|
| Marketing and sales has very different incentives from
| developers. Marketers are often trigger happy with features
| because they "sell" despite the fact that these feature may
| have a short shelf life and may take resources away from
| developing of more essential product features. Developers are
| similarly allergic to additional development because it's (1)
| work (2) often results in technical debt.
|
| You need to have an intermediary to think about what features
| actually matter and how they fit into a broader development
| roadmap otherwise you risk building a product with lots of
| bells and whistles no one really cares about that's a beast to
| maintain.
| playpause wrote:
| Off topic, but there is something intensely irritating about
| replies that start with "No." It's fine to disagree and argue
| whatever point you want, but when you open with "No." it
| seems like you're saying "You are objectively wrong; I will
| now enlighten you with the correct viewpoint."
| HeyLaughingBoy wrote:
| I'd say that it's central to the topic as it illustrates
| the problem perfectly.
|
| Marketing is a dialogue between the producer and the
| user/prospective user. If the first response to someone
| trying to be helpful is "No." then that dialogue has been
| essentially shut down immediately and neither side is going
| to learn anything.
|
| No one who wants to understand the other side's needs is
| going to respond that way. So they're showing that they
| have no interest in marketing what they're working on.
| ianbutler wrote:
| I think this is a bad take depending on the context,
| especially for small companies. First you're painting
| developers with a rather broad brush. I know plenty of
| developers who like to think about how features impact end
| users and like to interact with people in general to figure
| out how to build the right features that create that impact.
| Good developers are perfectly capable of interacting with
| broader teams to create something that really benefits users.
|
| Similarly not all marketers are "trigger happy with features"
| a lot of marketers understand how feature work impacts
| developers and actually take time to figure out the most
| important features to build and market and don't have short
| shelf life.
|
| In my experience you've basically just described people bad
| at their jobs all around.
|
| Following your advice would just be adding potentially
| unnecessary headcount and creating an unnecessary
| communication gap between two critical teams, again with a
| focus on small business or startups. I do think larger
| companies could do well with less compartmentalization as
| well though.
| matwood wrote:
| All I can think about while reading your comment is "I'm a
| people person, dammit!" from Office Space. It was not a
| playbook on how to run an actual software company.
|
| All employee incentives should be aligned around selling more
| product and lowering cost of delivering said product. The
| closer that marketing and software work together the more
| they can empathize with each groups challenges.
|
| Using your example, what makes a product feature essential if
| it does not in fact sell?
| hluska wrote:
| I catch your point but honestly, developers are in a better
| place to make those kinds of decisions. It just takes some
| mindset training.
|
| When a potential customer has a problem, they go through
| several hoops before they have any hope of finding a
| solution. First, they have to recognize and identify a
| problem. Second, they have to motivate themselves to solve
| that particular problem over all others.
|
| Once a potential customer has made those leaps, they are
| potentially your potential customer. That's when the language
| leap comes into play. My favourite example is "I built a
| scraper but it turns out the market wants an automated tool
| to crawl their entire website and return some data." Catch
| what happened there?? I built a scraper but the paying market
| doesn't know what a scraper is.
|
| If your language matches up with a potential customer's
| language, there is a chance they will see you, pay attention
| and decide that you could solve their problem. That's around
| the time when marketing campaigns will make you question
| Darwin but try to act surprised...:)
|
| Once you catch that stuff, it's easier to push back on shitty
| bloatware marketing feature requests. What's the real problem
| here? Does that new feature solve a problem or does it just
| increase the chances that a potential customer will find
| you??
|
| If it increases the chance a customer will find you, it might
| be a good feature. In my experience, it usually means you
| should do some tech support calls so you can figure out what
| words your customers use...
| winternett wrote:
| I too want to work with a marketer for my web design business,
| but I've found that many simply want to do early stage lead
| generation and then "drop" the clients over to me as a client
| manager, which doesn't reassure clients that marketing promises
| will be upheld... I think the best (development) marketers are
| people who invest in learning the nuances of the business (e.g.
| knowing there are quite distinct differences between coding in
| ASP.Net and PHP). The same can be said for tech recruiters...
| aY yAY yAy... lol.
|
| As a dev I had to learn marketing inversely, to allow me to
| better understand the process of ensuring clients a smooth and
| trust-worthy process... In running my business I have to daily
| be involved in absolutely every aspect of it (without being too
| controlling of course) because managing delivery and client
| experience is a key to gaining and retaining new and follow-up
| work.
|
| The best method of self-marketing/promoting I've found is to
| build my own products/portfolios that represent what would be
| useful and engaging to new potential clients. Working product
| demos also help marketers to better be acquainted with what
| they are ultimately selling, and make intuitive screen shots
| and presentations of the products in support of their efforts.
| That way I also have a template I can build quicker from, but I
| also demonstrate to clients that I can actually do the work.
|
| IT is far too complex in presentation these days; many clients
| are not focused on tech stacks, methods, tools, services, or
| things developers are usually focused on. Modern clients are
| usually most concerned about their requirements and business
| needs, a marketer should focus on being a translator in a way
| when it comes to marketing development work, linking that work
| to productivity, progress, and things that satisfy requirements
| and provide benefits in a clear and usually less-technically
| inclined manner than a developer would detail a solution...
|
| E.G.... We keep selling "the cloud" to everyone, but if you ask
| a client what "cloud" is they simply don't know/don't really
| care what it really is, as long as it fulfills their business
| goals.
|
| In a world where people are using imagery alone to market their
| capability, the real working examples of what we do as a
| company are often what wins us new work.... Even if we don't
| win new work, the products we build usually end up being
| valuable and highly useful to us ultimately in real life.
| syngrog66 wrote:
| theres wisdom in what you advise, but I think theres one glitch
| with the wording which might cause a backlash. what you say a
| "developer" should be doing/thinking, is really not what a
| software engineer does or should be doing. you're talking about
| product development. in a small enough shop where a few people
| must where all the hats, sure one person might be wearing the
| product development and software engineering hats. in a larger,
| more established company, they will not.
|
| the vast majority of folks _in_ software engineering should not
| be thinking in terms of user exitement, or market value or
| brand positioning etc.
|
| if I were a solo indie entrepreneur/engineer who had to wear
| all the hats I couldnt delegate to others? heck yes I should
| follow your advice.
|
| marketing, product design and UX are all incredibly important.
| but they are _not_ the responsibility, or anywhere in the top
| concerns, of a software engineer. for the business overall?
| heck yes
| cjf101 wrote:
| I strongly agree with the heart of what you are saying. One of
| the worst bugs you can have in a product is to have built the
| wrong product. A good channel of communication between people
| who understand the customer and people who are building and
| designing the product is not just valuable: it's critical.
|
| There can be communication challenges between our disciplines
| though.
|
| Frequent changes in direction can leave software in a bit of a
| shambles. This is probably the thing that creates the feeling
| that development is "a sacred space for creation". It takes
| time to both make the change, and end up with code that is
| pleasant to work with. On teams I've been on, this has
| sometimes led resistance to the marketing perspective.
|
| I, personally, am often uncomfortable with the language of
| marketing (both on the analysis side, and on the promotion
| side). On the promotion side, marketing teams like to make
| claims that are aspirational or appeal to emotional needs,
| rather than actually true from a technologists perspective. On
| the analysis side, marketing often looks like it's working from
| incomplete information, and extrapolating trends that I don't
| feel confident exist. It feels like guessing, and I don't like
| to gamble.
|
| These can be difficult gaps to bridge, but ultimately, I feel
| like we have the same goal: building the right thing for the
| right audience.
| craftinator wrote:
| I think you may have put yourself at a social disadvantage by
| using the phrase "high impact product", which is a trigger
| phrase for several developers I know. It's a trigger phrase
| because they work at places where hearing that during a meeting
| means "we are about to throw away a lot of work you've done,
| because we didn't bother to do any market research before we
| did the first 6 months of sprint cycles". To them, it just
| sounds like a lot of low-level manager speak that results in
| massive technical debt, rushed redesigns, working overtime, and
| the expectation that "changing software is easy".
|
| I found what you said really interesting, and am sharing it
| with my SO who is a marketing and business contractor. Thank
| you for sharing!
| mellavora wrote:
| I think this post deserves a friendlier response. magicroot
| seems intent on offering helpful advice. Nowhere does (s)he say
| "hire me" or that they have the only answer; in fact the
| opposite.
|
| They are suggesting that just as a unit test is an important
| aspect of determining functionality, it may be helpful to have
| a metric of how much excitement a certain feature may engender.
|
| I'm not going to judge the _quality_ of that advice; I just
| offer the possibility that it was a well-intentioned attempt to
| add a view from a different professional perspective.
|
| perhaps we can be forgiving to someone who is perhaps acting in
| a socially awkward manner?
| exdsq wrote:
| I think it's just the insecurities of developers realizing
| they don't understand an important subject because it's
| separate to their work. Magicroots advice is great.
| Suggesting devs should be siloed from marketing in the
| context of a solo developer building products is insane.
|
| Signed, an insecure developer with bad marketing skills
| oblio wrote:
| The reality is that a lot of developers like to build just
| for the sake of building.
|
| This can lead to the "if you build it, they will come"
| mentality.
|
| Or worse, "we'll build it and we don't care if they come
| (and if they do come, they'd better RTFM!)" mentality.
|
| A huge amount of developers just want to be shielded from
| any kind of customer interaction, and I'm not talking about
| call center support.
| lmarcos wrote:
| > The reality is that a lot of developers like to build
| just for the sake of building.
|
| Very true. I build for the sake of building in my free
| time.
|
| > Or worse, "we'll build it and we don't care if they
| come...
|
| True as well. If I am working on a personal project is
| because I believe it's the best project ever conceived
| (obviously I know I'm wrong, but there is always "what if
| I'm not?!").
|
| > A huge amount of developers just want to be shielded
| from any kind of customer interaction, and I'm not
| talking about call center support.
|
| But if we are talking in the context of developers
| working for companies (not developers working on their
| personal projects) then the only responsible person of
| working on features no one will use is the project
| manager (or product owner): they own the product, they
| decide what comes next (with the help of devs).
| oblio wrote:
| There are plenty of companies where developers go partly
| rogue.
|
| Or work on behind the scenes stuff with little oversight
| and unclear actual benefits.
|
| Some developers are actually good at promoting their
| initiatives.
| woutr_be wrote:
| > From what I can tell, many developers view the development
| process as a sacred protected space for creation.
|
| I think this entirely depends on what kind of people you hire,
| and what type of environment you put them in. I've worked with
| developers who's sole focus was on just building whatever they
| were told, they focused on the technical aspects, and didn't
| care whether it would be deployed, or if the user would even
| use it.
|
| I've also worked in teams, where everyone was a product
| engineer, which essentially just means that we focused on
| building products, and while the tech side was important, it
| was more important to make sure the product got build, and
| eventually used. We often worked side by side with our business
| teams, marketing and design people, and it was honestly the
| most fun I've ever had. Knowing that I was building something
| that people were actually going to use, just motivated and
| excited me.
| edge17 wrote:
| Where is that community supposed to form though? I would think
| those relationships tend to get made in the office, but the
| environment seems to he going more towards remote.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| So how does a solo founder _find_ a marketing enthusiast
| partner?
| supperburg wrote:
| Minecraft had zero marketing. Tesla had zero marketing.
|
| Anyway, if you wanted to market your product how would you even
| do that? Just buy ads on YouTube and google?
| datavirtue wrote:
| Advertising is an aspect of marketing, just like engineering.
| aembleton wrote:
| Tesla had and continues to have enormous amounts of marketing.
| Loads of articles have been written about them; plenty of press
| generated. Elon Musk, making grandiose claims about self
| driving gets repeated ad nauseam. All this is marketing.
| supperburg wrote:
| Actually none of that was a factor for the model s, x,
| roadster or really even the model 3. In both the former and
| latter case the viral popularity was fueled by the fact that
| the products were intrinsically good, although flawed, and
| filled a gap in their respective markets that was neglected
| by large corporations. The "Elon musk is just a marketing
| guru" thing is a super annoying misinformation spread by
| people who only started paying attention to Tesla and EVs in
| general after Elon musk became famous.
| NickSingh wrote:
| I'm a Software Engineer turned Marketer, and the gap between the
| two worlds is pretty big. I recently wrote about the #1 Marketing
| Mistake I made (which I think many other devs might fall into
| when thinking about marketing), which I think HN might like:
| https://www.nicksingh.com/posts/the-1-marketing-mistake-i-ma...
| aembleton wrote:
| I enjoyed that. By the way, the expression is "couldn't care
| less". If a robot could care less about a celebrity, then there
| would be some value in them as it would be possible for the
| robot not to care as much.
| dwighttk wrote:
| Marketing is scary for most people with souls
| pkdpic wrote:
| Very helpful post. Good length too. Seems applicable even if
| making an income with side projects really isn't your goal.
| JimWestergren wrote:
| Upvoting for the honesty. And I feel the same way. Earlier I had
| a consultancy company but I noticed that the clients rather wrote
| contracts with the other consultancy companies that had sellers,
| was good with small-talk, met in person and and gave them coffee.
| It didn't matter that my service was much better with half the
| cost.
| AussieWog93 wrote:
| Jordan Peterson, of all people, spoke about this once. One of
| the things his experience taught him was that when you are
| "talking to a company", you are not taking to the company
| itself but one of their employees who has their own goals and
| career ambitions.
|
| For example, in my business (selling open-source oscilloscopes,
| mostly direct to public but sometimes to universities or
| retailers), I found that offering a broad array of payment
| options and proper invoicing was more important than bulk
| discounts.
|
| The employees I'd talk to weren't trying to optimally allocate
| their employer's resources, but minimise the fucking around
| required to get the purchase signed off on (or, in a few cases,
| get those sweet, sweet Amex points).
| WJW wrote:
| I'm reminded of this famous article from the Deming
| institute: https://deming.org/nobody-gives-a-hoot-about-
| profit/
|
| It's true, too. The only people with a real interest in the
| profitability are those with significant equity and even
| those will balance the profit motive with their other
| interests. But most employees don't have significant equity
| in the company they work for and by the very nature of a
| company most low-level decisions will be made by regular
| employees. Profit is a secondary concern among many that you
| can use to increase your leverage (ie, sometimes being
| involved with a very profitable new project can be leveraged
| into promotion). As Dr. Ackoff says in the linked article,
| paying lip service to company profits is just the cost
| employees must pay in order to maximize their rewards.
| CommonGuy wrote:
| Man this hits home... We have similar marketing problems with our
| product (https://kreya.app), even though we think it is much
| better than competing products.
|
| Our "marketing attemps" such as using Show HN (never reached the
| front page) or publishing blog posts didn't amount to much.
| Posting on reddit did gain us some traffic, but that went over
| pretty quickly.
|
| We currently rely on organic traffic, but growing this way is
| just soooo slow.
| Exendroinient wrote:
| Marketers are people without morals, probably most of them can be
| classified as a high functioning sociopaths. Developers are
| realistic and mostly care about product being as good as
| possible. In the terms of marketing product isn't that important
| but rather finding the biggest market which implies telling
| fantastical stories to naive people. These modes of thinking are
| entirely opposite of each other.
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