9 ms·

Must be very tough to start something like this while still holding down a full time job. Hard to say how much time is spent developing vs marketing. Probably

Must be very tough to start something like this while still holding down a full time job. Hard to say how much time is spent developing vs marketing. Probably something like 90% design, development, user support, and 10% marketing. Where marketing means writing blog posts and engaging on social media (mainly reddit, facebook, twitter). I tried some paid advertising experiments a couple of years ago but they didn't work well at all. May try another experiment this year now that the product is more polished and has a higher value.

zongitsrinzler 11y ago
Having a full time job is a timesink, thankfully I find it easy working abnormal hours. Plus on the other end it gives me a good salary + whatever I make on my own. Regarding marketing we are in a similar spot. Only 10% of time goes to marketing and paid advertising doesn't work. I recommend reading Traction (http://tractionbook.com/ http://tractionbook.com/), it gives you a good model on how to go about growing your company.
- jryan49 11y ago
  Do you have a life outside of working though?
apapli 11y ago
If you have the time, Hubspot offer a free "inbound marketing" certification course. It's about 4 hours worth of videos and might help you with your marketing planning. It's totally non-product focused so you can apply the methods they teach with any technology (although theirs of course does it all very well). Good stuff with your software and I enjoyed reading your post. You need to increase your pricing though - and it seems to me you haven't fully figured out the true value of your product, so that you can "value price" it. Email me if you'd like help putting the value proposition together. (My contact details are in my HN profile). I'm by no means an expert in what you do but I've been in sales for 15 years... so can probably still help you a bit.

zongitsrinzler 11y ago

Having a full time job is a timesink, thankfully I find it easy working abnormal hours. Plus on the other end it gives me a good salary + whatever I make on my own. Regarding marketing we are in a similar spot. Only 10% of time goes to marketing and paid advertising doesn't work. I recommend reading Traction (http://tractionbook.com/ http://tractionbook.com/), it gives you a good model on how to go about growing your company.

jryan49 11y ago
Do you have a life outside of working though?

apapli 11y ago

If you have the time, Hubspot offer a free "inbound marketing" certification course. It's about 4 hours worth of videos and might help you with your marketing planning. It's totally non-product focused so you can apply the methods they teach with any technology (although theirs of course does it all very well). Good stuff with your software and I enjoyed reading your post. You need to increase your pricing though - and it seems to me you haven't fully figured out the true value of your product, so that you can "value price" it. Email me if you'd like help putting the value proposition together. (My contact details are in my HN profile). I'm by no means an expert in what you do but I've been in sales for 15 years... so can probably still help you a bit.