17 ms·

Side Project Marketing Checklist

449 points by Zweihander 9y ago

huhtenberg 9y ago
Perhaps replace both subscription forms with a single link in the header? They take too much space and are distracting. I'd also reduce font sizes. This is not a presentation page, but an information dump. The more there fits on a single page, the better.
alfonsodev 9y ago
AARRR[1] is a good framework for your side project too, it makes you start thinking in the basic questions you should know how to answer. The tools and implementation choices are less important IMO, for some things you could event start with a google drive doc if that makes you move forward faster. [edit] Here a playlist from Google on how to implement AARRR in Firebase[2] [1] https://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version https://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pi... [2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl-K7zZEsYLnslvfInomPdIR17eV4BsUm https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl-K7zZEsYLnslvfInomP...
wiradikusuma 9y ago
Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942902
- federicoponzi 9y ago
  "6 days ago"... I'm not sure about HN rules, but isn't this submission considered a repost?
  - pbhjpbhj 9y ago
    Reposts aren't considered bad automatically; sometimes a story didn't get the traction it deserves, wrong time of day or competing stories crowd it out.
    - notatoad 9y ago
      okay, but in this case the original got ~600 points, which surely counts as "the traction it deserves"
ekianjo 9y ago
> [ ] Record/post video of you reading the post on YouTube. Lol, really? I don't see the benefit of doing that. It's way faster to read text than to watch a video.
- rustoo 9y ago
  It does help with SEO, if you give a link back to your site :)
  - ekianjo 9y ago
    and it wastes your time since you could be doing somethIng more productive instead or rehashing the same thing.
- Cerium 9y ago
  Sometimes reading is inconvenient, for example during commute while driving I listen to YouTube videos.
- blueandyshores 9y ago
  You're assuming that speed of consuming information is the goal. Plenty of people prefer videos over text because it communicates emotions and feelings better. Others remember more from people talking to them versus reading text on a page.
muzani 9y ago
It starts off nice, but past the blog part, it seems to just be mixing some low quality things with the high quality stuff. Something like "Attend meetups or conferences for your target market" can be extremely dangerous because this is a great way to spend a lot of time accomplishing nothing just to tick something off the list. Whereas something like "cold calling 20 customers" is so important it should be in bold. I would recommend this to be a list of marketing ideas depending on your phase, rather than an actual checklist of things to do.
- camillomiller 9y ago
  it depends from the market. Cold calling can be effective in the us but should be done with a lot of attention in Germany for example, or Europe in general. Here we are all much more skeptical towards companies or individuals that call you to offer something. Most of the time, even if the call is perfectly crafted and polite you would be perceived as an obnoxious spammer. Didn't want to diminish your comment, because I agree completely, but I think it's important to point that out for readers who might not operate in the States
  - secfirstmd 9y ago
    Agree, its not common in UK/Ireland so if someone does it, I reckon 90% of people just polietly try to hangup quickly
    - GordonS 9y ago
      And the remaining 10% will give a tirade of verbal abuse before hanging up - cold calling in the UK is not welcome.
      - user5994461 9y ago
        cold calling is not welcome anywhere.
  - a13n 9y ago
    I don't think it's really a US thing. I think it really depends on who your target customer is and how they're likely to feel about a cold phone call. Also cold outreach doesn't have to be over the phone. Email, Twitter, FB Messenger, LinkedIn mail, etc. could work better.
rustoo 9y ago
An online marketing veteran here! This list is really good. I can actually help people execute these to-dos on the list for their side projects :)
- irl_zebra 9y ago
  As a "online marketing veteran", you don't have anything critical of this list to add, or anything constructive? Did you even read the list, or are you just trying to drum up customers to your services and get some SEO action? At the very least say something useful if you're going to do that. This is worse than those bots that spam comments on blog posts with "great content" and a link back to their spam site. edit: I see you copied and pasted your post from the same article elsewhere. You're basically a spammer.
  - rustoo 9y ago
    Sorry!
spapas82 9y ago
Hello this list is too comprehensive and exhausting. Could somebody filter or sort this list by importance of each task? Ie you must absolutely do these tasks but if you skip these other tasks no big deal.
- jermaustin1 9y ago
  The problem with filtering the list to only what is most important or necessary is impossible, but none of them are required. I have launched hundreds of products for myself and clients, and followed a formula for each one, and I believe it had about as good a chance of a successful launch as having a monkey throw darts at a wall. You always end up analyzing what you did when your launch succeeded, and your resulting formula is just the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy with checkboxes. The only real thing that truly helps a launch is having an audience already. It might not make the product succeed, but it will at least aid in getting the initial signups and feedback. I have also launched "free" products to no audience of my own, and instead found them in forums. After posting about the product, people typically would sign up in droves. And once I had a critical mass of sign ups, I then had an audience to market to. That would then lead me to selling a bigger version that we were giving away for free [1]. I call this piggybacking. There are a lot of "hacks" you can do to help your launch along, but I don't believe any of them are better than having a baked in audience already [2]. 1: http://jeremyaboyd.com/my-first-product-launches/ http://jeremyaboyd.com/my-first-product-launches/ 2: http://jeremyaboyd.com/tricks-to-monetize-your-side-projects/ http://jeremyaboyd.com/tricks-to-monetize-your-side-projects...
  - jamiek88 9y ago
    I suspect you are right, there is a large component of luck, timing, and built in audience. A lot of these types of tips are almost cargo cult type checklists. OP is thorough though and fairly comprehensive - it is interesting to read your thoughts on this too as someone who has used these techniques.
    - jermaustin1 9y ago
      I agree, it is a very thorough. But as I have found in consulting many "side-project" developers is they want a condensed list of at most 5 things they can do to guarantee success. Since on top of building the product themselves, they are also the ones having to build the email list, build the marketing campaign, etc. Like grandparent, they are looking for a faster list to check off. So my fast list is: [ ] Piggyback on an existing audience.
Fiahil 9y ago
That list explain perfectly why I don't want to work on "marketing stuff" anymore. So much opportunity to waste time and money on trivial things. A blog ? A "sneeze page" ? What's the point if you don't have anything interesting to write ? A/B testing landing page and newsletter ? Is that difficult to get honest feedback from people who care ?
- archagon 9y ago
  I feel this list is intended for full-on, VC-yearning startups. My admittedly limited experience is that if you're going for more of a small business product, you could eliminate about 75% of this list. The rest is just "industry hacking".
  - petra 9y ago
    What's the 25% left?
    - archagon 9y ago
      Depends on your product, I guess? For me, it's usually: make a splash page, make sure your assets (app icon, screenshots, trailers) are eye-catching and professional, write about different aspects of your product on your blog, condense your pitch down to a paragraph at most, e-mail every publication you can think of (and follow up), post in lots of topical forums and comment sections (esp. HN and subreddits), submit your product to publications that give out awards, try as much as possible to catch the eye of Apple's promo team if you're in the app business... but, caveat emptor, I'm also not great at it yet. It's a hard job.
- XCSme 9y ago
  Well, you need a landing page so users can actually buy your product. Maybe not A/B test but you should use something like hotjar or userTrack, at least in the beginning to see if your users are having difficulties actually converting.
- pyronite 9y ago
  > A/B testing landing page and newsletter ? Is that difficult to get honest feedback from people who care ? Individual feedback doesn't replace large-scale A/B testing. If you're getting feedback from people who care (possibly implying they know you personally), it's also possible that they could deliver biased or unrepresentative feedback.
dsr_ 9y ago
Missed a big step at the end of customer research: * Use the results of your research to make sure you are building something that customers will actually want/need enough to pay for.
tootie 9y ago
Wouldn't this list be completely different for b2b vs consumer sites?
andreasgonewild 9y ago
Monetizing, check, your, check, passion, check, kills it, period.
- gallerdude 9y ago
  Agree and disagree. Monetization is on one axis, passion is on another. I think if you start off just making something for yourself, it may be hard to monetize it, because it's only optimized for how you do things. On the other hand, if you do something only for monetization, it's super easy to get demoralized and just stop. Furthermore, monetization isn't an easy to thing to optimize for - it's very hard to see where the sweetspot is. But if you can find a right balance between creating something that you find a lot of interest in, and that a lot of other people would value, you can find a great balance of personal satisfaction and something sustainable.
  - andreasgonewild 9y ago
    I just find that whenever I optimize for money; I start making weird decisions; decisions meant to please others, who may not share the passion. I'm all for people paying me to create and share the stuff that I already am; but then it needs to come without conditions, otherwise we're back to square one.
gallerdude 9y ago
I'm always unsure about marketing. I do think that the balance between the thing you're creating, and the marketing of it is a clean 50/50 split. Creating something great is extremely important, but telling people about it is equally so. One of biggest lies is "if you build it, they will come." You actually have to grab them by the necks, and show them what you've built. I think the second biggest lie is the opposite of the first one - that people don't care. My side projects are in game dev, and sometimes it feels like people are actively trying to ignore your stuff. The truth is, there's so many amazing, next-level games out there that being just great, isn't enough. I used to price my games at $1, because I was desperate to be heard. But the fact is, this isn't the real cost for most people. For most people, the real cost is oppurtunity cost. Yeah, I could play your game, but I'd rather spend my time playing the game that's 10x better.
- koonsolo 9y ago
  Maybe not 100% related to original story, but have you seen the article of Ryan Clark about marketing your indie game? It's by far the best one I came across with the best info as far as I know. http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RyanClark/20150917/253842/What_Makes_an_Indie_Hit_How_to_Choose_the_Right_Design.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RyanClark/20150917/253842/Wha...
- nugator 9y ago
  Can you point a newbie indie gamer in the right direction to finding a good selection of quality indie games?
tgarma1234 9y ago
I would like to see a side project finance checklist.
ziggzagg 9y ago
Only the marketing part of this "side" project feel like more than a full project to me.
jgmmo 9y ago
I dislike this list. It's too much, and does not discern between effectiveness. It's like they are equally weighted tasks. This is absolutely not the case. Half of this is common sense, 'make an about page, make a contact page', that is basic... Then there's a ton of stuff here that is hypothetically cool to do but practically speaking will not be productive. As a marketer I can tell you that there is some pareto optimization that can be done here. It's likely, I think, if you did this whole checklist that you'd find 20% of your efforts ended up bringing in 80% of your conversions. The trick is finding what that chunk of extremely lucrative marketing activities are for your product/industry.
- karlhughes 9y ago
  It is intentionally too much. My goal with the list was to make something exhaustive. The hard part - the reason companies have whole marketing departments - is to prioritize and execute on it. There's definitely some common sense stuff here, but for devs who are marketing their first side project, it might be helpful to have more rather than less. Finally, I welcome PR's on the project! It's open source and I'm looking for collaborators to help improve it. I'm a dev, not a marketer, so I'd love an industry pro to improve it.
  - osrec 9y ago
    I like it. I'm in the process of putting together a marketing strategy for my SaaS product (https://usebx.com https://usebx.com) right now, and this gives me some really good ideas to pick and choose from. Thank you :)
  - gsylvie 9y ago
    It's a great list. And I love the little inspirational quotes above each section. I think the "common sense" items should stay, since what is common sense to one is not always common sense to another. But akin to what others have said, it's not a checklist! I think I'd need 2 additional full-time staff on my side project working on nothing but this to implement it. To make it more specific to side projects I think it could use a preliminary strategizing paragraph. E.g., if you only have 2 hours / week to devote to marketing, here's how to use this list...
dabei 9y ago
Marketing is a must for an idea to become a successful business. However most side projects are much more about learning and exploration. It's easy to get excited about our side project and make it real. But that's a long way ahead. Pursuing it as a side project is impractical. Not only it requires more time than we have. But also we have to spend more time on things like marketing than the fun stuff that initially led us to start the project. I'd go so far as make it an explicitly non-goal to make profit when starting a side project. You will have more fun and there will be wider range of ideas you can explore.
suyash 9y ago
Love the list, quite comprehensive. To any beginner or even pro - my advice would be to cut out 80% items from the checklist and nail down the 20%. Your job is to which which is the 20% which will give you 80% bang for your buck.
handzhiev 9y ago
Things like this may scare you to hell from starting anything at all. One can do perfectly well without 90% of this checklist.

449 points by Zweihander 9y ago

Perhaps replace both subscription forms with a single link in the header? They take too much space and are distracting. I'd also reduce font sizes. This is not a presentation page, but an information dump. The more there fits on a single page, the better.

alfonsodev 9y ago

AARRR[1] is a good framework for your side project too, it makes you start thinking in the basic questions you should know how to answer. The tools and implementation choices are less important IMO, for some things you could event start with a google drive doc if that makes you move forward faster. [edit] Here a playlist from Google on how to implement AARRR in Firebase[2] [1] https://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version https://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pi... [2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl-K7zZEsYLnslvfInomPdIR17eV4BsUm https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl-K7zZEsYLnslvfInomP...

wiradikusuma 9y ago

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942902

federicoponzi 9y ago
"6 days ago"... I'm not sure about HN rules, but isn't this submission considered a repost?
- pbhjpbhj 9y ago
  Reposts aren't considered bad automatically; sometimes a story didn't get the traction it deserves, wrong time of day or competing stories crowd it out.
  - notatoad 9y ago
    okay, but in this case the original got ~600 points, which surely counts as "the traction it deserves"

ekianjo 9y ago

> [ ] Record/post video of you reading the post on YouTube. Lol, really? I don't see the benefit of doing that. It's way faster to read text than to watch a video.

rustoo 9y ago
It does help with SEO, if you give a link back to your site :)
- ekianjo 9y ago
  and it wastes your time since you could be doing somethIng more productive instead or rehashing the same thing.
Cerium 9y ago
Sometimes reading is inconvenient, for example during commute while driving I listen to YouTube videos.
blueandyshores 9y ago
You're assuming that speed of consuming information is the goal. Plenty of people prefer videos over text because it communicates emotions and feelings better. Others remember more from people talking to them versus reading text on a page.

muzani 9y ago

It starts off nice, but past the blog part, it seems to just be mixing some low quality things with the high quality stuff. Something like "Attend meetups or conferences for your target market" can be extremely dangerous because this is a great way to spend a lot of time accomplishing nothing just to tick something off the list. Whereas something like "cold calling 20 customers" is so important it should be in bold. I would recommend this to be a list of marketing ideas depending on your phase, rather than an actual checklist of things to do.

camillomiller 9y ago
it depends from the market. Cold calling can be effective in the us but should be done with a lot of attention in Germany for example, or Europe in general. Here we are all much more skeptical towards companies or individuals that call you to offer something. Most of the time, even if the call is perfectly crafted and polite you would be perceived as an obnoxious spammer. Didn't want to diminish your comment, because I agree completely, but I think it's important to point that out for readers who might not operate in the States
- secfirstmd 9y ago
  Agree, its not common in UK/Ireland so if someone does it, I reckon 90% of people just polietly try to hangup quickly
  - GordonS 9y ago
    And the remaining 10% will give a tirade of verbal abuse before hanging up - cold calling in the UK is not welcome.
    - user5994461 9y ago
      cold calling is not welcome anywhere.
- a13n 9y ago
  I don't think it's really a US thing. I think it really depends on who your target customer is and how they're likely to feel about a cold phone call. Also cold outreach doesn't have to be over the phone. Email, Twitter, FB Messenger, LinkedIn mail, etc. could work better.

rustoo 9y ago

An online marketing veteran here! This list is really good. I can actually help people execute these to-dos on the list for their side projects :)

irl_zebra 9y ago
As a "online marketing veteran", you don't have anything critical of this list to add, or anything constructive? Did you even read the list, or are you just trying to drum up customers to your services and get some SEO action? At the very least say something useful if you're going to do that. This is worse than those bots that spam comments on blog posts with "great content" and a link back to their spam site. edit: I see you copied and pasted your post from the same article elsewhere. You're basically a spammer.
- rustoo 9y ago
  Sorry!

spapas82 9y ago

Hello this list is too comprehensive and exhausting. Could somebody filter or sort this list by importance of each task? Ie you must absolutely do these tasks but if you skip these other tasks no big deal.

jermaustin1 9y ago
The problem with filtering the list to only what is most important or necessary is impossible, but none of them are required. I have launched hundreds of products for myself and clients, and followed a formula for each one, and I believe it had about as good a chance of a successful launch as having a monkey throw darts at a wall. You always end up analyzing what you did when your launch succeeded, and your resulting formula is just the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy with checkboxes. The only real thing that truly helps a launch is having an audience already. It might not make the product succeed, but it will at least aid in getting the initial signups and feedback. I have also launched "free" products to no audience of my own, and instead found them in forums. After posting about the product, people typically would sign up in droves. And once I had a critical mass of sign ups, I then had an audience to market to. That would then lead me to selling a bigger version that we were giving away for free [1]. I call this piggybacking. There are a lot of "hacks" you can do to help your launch along, but I don't believe any of them are better than having a baked in audience already [2]. 1: http://jeremyaboyd.com/my-first-product-launches/ http://jeremyaboyd.com/my-first-product-launches/ 2: http://jeremyaboyd.com/tricks-to-monetize-your-side-projects/ http://jeremyaboyd.com/tricks-to-monetize-your-side-projects...
- jamiek88 9y ago
  I suspect you are right, there is a large component of luck, timing, and built in audience. A lot of these types of tips are almost cargo cult type checklists. OP is thorough though and fairly comprehensive - it is interesting to read your thoughts on this too as someone who has used these techniques.
  - jermaustin1 9y ago
    I agree, it is a very thorough. But as I have found in consulting many "side-project" developers is they want a condensed list of at most 5 things they can do to guarantee success. Since on top of building the product themselves, they are also the ones having to build the email list, build the marketing campaign, etc. Like grandparent, they are looking for a faster list to check off. So my fast list is: [ ] Piggyback on an existing audience.

Fiahil 9y ago

That list explain perfectly why I don't want to work on "marketing stuff" anymore. So much opportunity to waste time and money on trivial things. A blog ? A "sneeze page" ? What's the point if you don't have anything interesting to write ? A/B testing landing page and newsletter ? Is that difficult to get honest feedback from people who care ?

archagon 9y ago
I feel this list is intended for full-on, VC-yearning startups. My admittedly limited experience is that if you're going for more of a small business product, you could eliminate about 75% of this list. The rest is just "industry hacking".
- petra 9y ago
  What's the 25% left?
  - archagon 9y ago
    Depends on your product, I guess? For me, it's usually: make a splash page, make sure your assets (app icon, screenshots, trailers) are eye-catching and professional, write about different aspects of your product on your blog, condense your pitch down to a paragraph at most, e-mail every publication you can think of (and follow up), post in lots of topical forums and comment sections (esp. HN and subreddits), submit your product to publications that give out awards, try as much as possible to catch the eye of Apple's promo team if you're in the app business... but, caveat emptor, I'm also not great at it yet. It's a hard job.
XCSme 9y ago
Well, you need a landing page so users can actually buy your product. Maybe not A/B test but you should use something like hotjar or userTrack, at least in the beginning to see if your users are having difficulties actually converting.
pyronite 9y ago
> A/B testing landing page and newsletter ? Is that difficult to get honest feedback from people who care ? Individual feedback doesn't replace large-scale A/B testing. If you're getting feedback from people who care (possibly implying they know you personally), it's also possible that they could deliver biased or unrepresentative feedback.

dsr_ 9y ago

Missed a big step at the end of customer research: * Use the results of your research to make sure you are building something that customers will actually want/need enough to pay for.

tootie 9y ago

Wouldn't this list be completely different for b2b vs consumer sites?

andreasgonewild 9y ago

Monetizing, check, your, check, passion, check, kills it, period.

gallerdude 9y ago
Agree and disagree. Monetization is on one axis, passion is on another. I think if you start off just making something for yourself, it may be hard to monetize it, because it's only optimized for how you do things. On the other hand, if you do something only for monetization, it's super easy to get demoralized and just stop. Furthermore, monetization isn't an easy to thing to optimize for - it's very hard to see where the sweetspot is. But if you can find a right balance between creating something that you find a lot of interest in, and that a lot of other people would value, you can find a great balance of personal satisfaction and something sustainable.
- andreasgonewild 9y ago
  I just find that whenever I optimize for money; I start making weird decisions; decisions meant to please others, who may not share the passion. I'm all for people paying me to create and share the stuff that I already am; but then it needs to come without conditions, otherwise we're back to square one.

gallerdude 9y ago

I'm always unsure about marketing. I do think that the balance between the thing you're creating, and the marketing of it is a clean 50/50 split. Creating something great is extremely important, but telling people about it is equally so. One of biggest lies is "if you build it, they will come." You actually have to grab them by the necks, and show them what you've built. I think the second biggest lie is the opposite of the first one - that people don't care. My side projects are in game dev, and sometimes it feels like people are actively trying to ignore your stuff. The truth is, there's so many amazing, next-level games out there that being just great, isn't enough. I used to price my games at $1, because I was desperate to be heard. But the fact is, this isn't the real cost for most people. For most people, the real cost is oppurtunity cost. Yeah, I could play your game, but I'd rather spend my time playing the game that's 10x better.

koonsolo 9y ago
Maybe not 100% related to original story, but have you seen the article of Ryan Clark about marketing your indie game? It's by far the best one I came across with the best info as far as I know. http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RyanClark/20150917/253842/What_Makes_an_Indie_Hit_How_to_Choose_the_Right_Design.php http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RyanClark/20150917/253842/Wha...
nugator 9y ago
Can you point a newbie indie gamer in the right direction to finding a good selection of quality indie games?

tgarma1234 9y ago

I would like to see a side project finance checklist.

ziggzagg 9y ago

Only the marketing part of this "side" project feel like more than a full project to me.

jgmmo 9y ago

I dislike this list. It's too much, and does not discern between effectiveness. It's like they are equally weighted tasks. This is absolutely not the case. Half of this is common sense, 'make an about page, make a contact page', that is basic... Then there's a ton of stuff here that is hypothetically cool to do but practically speaking will not be productive. As a marketer I can tell you that there is some pareto optimization that can be done here. It's likely, I think, if you did this whole checklist that you'd find 20% of your efforts ended up bringing in 80% of your conversions. The trick is finding what that chunk of extremely lucrative marketing activities are for your product/industry.

karlhughes 9y ago
It is intentionally too much. My goal with the list was to make something exhaustive. The hard part - the reason companies have whole marketing departments - is to prioritize and execute on it. There's definitely some common sense stuff here, but for devs who are marketing their first side project, it might be helpful to have more rather than less. Finally, I welcome PR's on the project! It's open source and I'm looking for collaborators to help improve it. I'm a dev, not a marketer, so I'd love an industry pro to improve it.
- osrec 9y ago
  I like it. I'm in the process of putting together a marketing strategy for my SaaS product (https://usebx.com https://usebx.com) right now, and this gives me some really good ideas to pick and choose from. Thank you :)
- gsylvie 9y ago
  It's a great list. And I love the little inspirational quotes above each section. I think the "common sense" items should stay, since what is common sense to one is not always common sense to another. But akin to what others have said, it's not a checklist! I think I'd need 2 additional full-time staff on my side project working on nothing but this to implement it. To make it more specific to side projects I think it could use a preliminary strategizing paragraph. E.g., if you only have 2 hours / week to devote to marketing, here's how to use this list...

dabei 9y ago

Marketing is a must for an idea to become a successful business. However most side projects are much more about learning and exploration. It's easy to get excited about our side project and make it real. But that's a long way ahead. Pursuing it as a side project is impractical. Not only it requires more time than we have. But also we have to spend more time on things like marketing than the fun stuff that initially led us to start the project. I'd go so far as make it an explicitly non-goal to make profit when starting a side project. You will have more fun and there will be wider range of ideas you can explore.

suyash 9y ago

Love the list, quite comprehensive. To any beginner or even pro - my advice would be to cut out 80% items from the checklist and nail down the 20%. Your job is to which which is the 20% which will give you 80% bang for your buck.

handzhiev 9y ago

Things like this may scare you to hell from starting anything at all. One can do perfectly well without 90% of this checklist.