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.
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?
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
> 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).
Thank you! And yes I have no intention of being hired. I have a well-paying job at a New York ad agency working on a Fortune 100 client. I'm busy enough as it is.
> 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.
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.
…and since there's so much overlap in the skillset between a conman and a good salesman, a technical co-founder looking to hire them can't tell the difference. The safest path to avoid hiring a fraud is to create a culture that has disdain for the entire profession.
Part of the problem is that a lot of products are just shit that can't be sold legitimately, only mis-sold based on false promises. If you're a salesperson in a company peddling such products, your option is to mis-sell and become a conman, or be replaced by a conman.
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.
> 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.
Oh, cool! That's the SPIN model[1], implemented by Neil Rackham at Xerox in the 70s.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
As a solo developer, one part of the reason to contract marketing is not exactly knowing what i do not know. While I try to keep focus narrow (i.e. optimize "this PPC campaign") I also explain that I know very little about it and hope to leverage experience of the firm doing just that, and if there is anything else that needs to be done - please let me know, don't be a robot executing program exactly as given. So far I did not have much success doing it this way. Each time I have to learn about specific area and only after some understanding, trial and error, I can hire someone who will just follow the steps.
I can take a shot at a tip on weeding at pretenders as a marketer: Ask them to describe, in technical detail, what the software does. Ask them about challenges the end user may have going through the process of using it. A bad marketer is all about creating a scummy sales pitch to get a quick buck. A great marketer is there on the frontlines understanding exactly the functions of the software and how they solve the customer's problems in implicit or explicit ways.
> 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.
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!
Ah got it. I had no intention of doing that. I do think most of us, marketers or developers would like to make some impact. That impact is not always financial. But marketing is not necessarily always about finances. It's about understanding users/consumers and what gets them excited.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
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.
I am an engineer but I admire marketing folks and their contributions to the development process. It adds valuable data points to the decision process. Are there any resources you would recommend for devs to get a hang of the marketing process / methods ? This will help us better understand marketing folks.
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.
Are there any good marketing resources you would suggest to founders? Is knowing how to build an effective Facebook add campaign key or is a focus on SEO especially BLB ( back link building ) paramount? Any blogs?
The challenge is: "how will a group of potential users trust this feature enough to try it after seeing advertisement?" Targetted development is straightforward with a userbase..
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.”
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.
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?
> 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.
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.
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.’
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Australia has good consumer-protection laws for advertising. In theory. In practice, smaller players ignore these with impunity, and even larger players can casually play around the edges of legality and strategically ignore them completely from time to time, managing it so that in the unlikely event of them actually getting fined they probably still come out ahead.
I know of one Clevo laptop manufacturer (frankly that’s enough to find them, but I’m not mentioning their name) that has perpetual discounts, never less than 20% off, mostly 30–40% off, half of the time in extensions of the offer. They do shuffle around which particular components have a discount at the current time, which I presume is a sneaky way of trying to satisfy the two-price advertising laws, but in years of monitoring them I have never seen them advertise any units at the nominal full price. What they’re doing is clearly against the spirit of the law, though that component pricing rotation might satisfy the letter of the law, though I doubt it. I complained to them once and was brushed off.
I know of an outdoors solar/battery/&c. manufacturer that has been advertising their own line of 12V/100Ah LiFePO₄ at $489–469 every time I’ve looked since last July (eleven occasions), on an alleged RRP of $1,299, more recently $899. Such a permanent “markdown” is categorically illegal. But I don’t even feel it worth complaining to them or ACCC because I know nothing will come of it.
And probably the biggest name in that style of solar/battery stuff has through almost all that time maintained a struck-out price for their 12V/100Ah LiFePO₄ battery of $900, but I’ve seen them selling it at a wide variety of prices in the range $630–830, and only once at $900, perhaps to maintain the validity of the magnitude of the “discount”.
The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, and lies are even more sustainable than that. No end of terrible products have remained on the market for a long, long time because they can keep getting new customers that don’t yet know that they’re lying. And if people catch on, just rebrand. Building on lies you won’t be the much-beloved-but-potentially-niche brand, but you’ll make plenty of money so long as you’re actually good at lying.
Your position that lies are unsustainable is, in the business world at large, naive and quite wrong. Only in very small markets do lies become unsustainable.
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?
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.
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? :)
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.) :)
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.
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.
> 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).
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.
Some more feedback, after watching the video and taking a quick look at the site:
- I think I really like the idea but I didn’t see how you get from comments to a conclusion. Somebody reads the comments and edits the Description and Outcome fields? In which case, what does the audit trail look like?
- I get that you think this will reduce the need for meetings, but: 1) I think suggesting “no meetings” sounds faddish/unrealistic and 2) the calculator is cheesy, it’s both obviously not what real meetings cost and also accurate to the penny…
- In my last BigCorp job, the thing to sell against would be Slack and Jira, IMO the two worst technologies in most dev orgs today. Good that you mention them but maybe give some examples of why using AsyncGo is better, especially vs. Jira.
- The pricing seems a little odd. It seems like this would target remote startups but then maybe they never pay you (5 users free). But it’s not freemium because “all features unlocked.” And from 6-50 users it’s the same price. I’m no pricing expert but if I can’t see you you’d make money on me, I’d worry about committing to the product.
- We all want money but selling your consulting service in the same place as your product makes it look like you don’t believe in the product. And does anybody really hire this kind of consultant based on a website? Seems far fetched, I would stick to the product on the website.
- For many people lock-in is a dealbreaker especially if the company might not stick around. How do I get my data out?
- Browser extensions are nice but is it for all/most browsers?
- Update the Blog! I see this a lot: you start a blog because it seems like a good marketing trick then you don’t keep up with it. Post at least monthly, or take it down, because a stagnant blog implies a stagnant product, and here you have all these HN eyeballs ready to read your blog! Not every post has to be about the product directly, you can talk about adjacent things, blog about the tech stack, about remote work culture, etc.
Good luck with it! Again, I think I like the idea, it reminds me a bit of early Basecamp, but it could use some more explanation to get people to try it.
- 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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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/...".
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.
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.
Several months ago I decided to split my time 50/50, spend mornings on dev, and afternoons on marketing. it worked quite well so far. At least way better than the 99% dev and 1% marketing I-will-start-just-after-this-last-bugfix. I tried 1 week / 1 week before but during the marketing week I was overwhelmed by the wish to work on a new feature, or fix this damn bug :)
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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 :-)
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.
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?
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/
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.
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.
Sorry to bother, but just in case you have the time, since I’m having the same issue as GP, could you also have a look at https://shop.invisible-computers.com ?
As I mentioned above, my google merchant center account also got suspended twice.
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?
> 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.
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.
As an often-self-employed solo developer with few marketing skills, what seems to kind of map to 'adding a marketing employee', is getting something working into the hands of a user/customer/client. At that point the product begins to take shape fast.
I've usually corresponded with them before this happens of course, so maybe the part about finding a prospective user is actually me doing marketing. I want to make sure they are really interested and that they seem like they'd be patient and generous with good-quality feedback. And don't have a deadline, that practically goes without saying. A client like that is almost like your cofounder.
After product-meets-reality, I ask lots of questions, even about things I had already assumed. I even question the things that are seemingly working, to try to get from 'that part works great' to 'actually, now that you mentioned it, there might be a problem there.' It takes a lot of back-and-forth, so you are really risking annoyance, hence look for the right person.
I try to first pick out high-return changes I can do in a few weeks. I don't try to turn things faster than that in the beginning. I may have found a big problem in the design, a misunderstanding, a complete miss on something newly-obvious etc. A back-to-the-drawing board issue might take a lot longer. On something like that, having had someone working marketing earlier would no doubt have saved a lot of time.
I save by not paying someone, but I pay with a longer and less predictable development cycle. That trade-off works for me; might not for others. As well, since this is Hacker News, I should say that with outside investors they would no doubt prefer hiring professional marketing and sales folks.
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.
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.
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.
I don't understand. Your product already says "easiest way to design and print labels, period." How much more of a leap is it to "tell the user why it'll help and save them time"? In fact it seems less "problematic" than what is already there?
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).
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.
My favorite manager, who went on to co-found Zeta[1], told me once that ideas that can be thought of have already been executed to near-perfection by the thousands of entrepreneurs that came before me. That I'll have to (build -> sell -> pivot) x n to gain an insight that will help me create something uniquely useful.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don't see the different between marketing and customer development à 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".
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!
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.
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.
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?
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?
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?
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.
I'm not an expert marketer, but I'm a dev. I would say that it would be great if you could take time to learn some marketing basics to get your projects on anyone's eyeballs. Yes, there's every aspect that we need to consider as marketers specialize in marketing, but it would be healthy for us individuals to learn a little bit of everything.
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?
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
You can look at is as "hustle on social media". But you can also look at it as "be authentic and help people". You probably have knowledge that others find very valuable.
For my own product, I noticed that trying clever hacks is never that successful. Delivering proper value gets more and better responses. Looking backwards it always seems obvious "of course people prefer that".
It's possible that twitter is not for you, but maybe insightful blog posts are. A tweet lives for a day, but a blog post for years.
Maybe you can find a communication channel that works both for you and your audience.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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).
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...
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.
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.
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."
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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.