I still consider myself more of a developer than a marketer, though I've had a ton of success at marketing. To up my skills, I did a few things: 1.) I went bac

I still consider myself more of a developer than a marketer, though I've had a ton of success at marketing. To up my skills, I did a few things: 1.) I went back to University in my late twenties and completed a degree in marketing. I was already good at building shit and long stints in sales had shown me that if a qualified person came to me, I could convert them into a paying customer. Alas, I sucked at generating leads, so I went back to school, hoping that I'd learn. In retrospect, the business degree was mostly useless, but I picked up some good lessons. The best lesson was about measuring and reporting success. The second best lesson was that the world's most respected marketers often release dud campaigns (to start with), measure everything, and correct their course. As part of my business degree, I took electives in social and cognitive psychology and research methods/stats. The business degree had some unintended benefits too. For one, on average I did between 10-15 presentations a semester. Over the course of the degree, I went from hating giving presentations to absolutely loving it. Also, oddly, I wrote way more useful code over the course of finishing my business degree than I did in a computer science program. And, I founded a company right out of my program, mostly because of encouragement, advice and (crucially) introductions from professors and especially mature students in my program. 2.) I internalized a lesson from University and made a habit of releasing dud campaigns, measuring them and learning how to correct my course. This is still my secret weapon and I'm successful at it because it uses many of the same skills I use writing code. It's odd to me that so many people treat marketing more like a liberal art/creative process when it deserves to be treated more like a scientific process. If you start with a hypothesis "ie - people with purple hair will like my product most", run experiments to validate/invalidate that hypothesis and meticulously record the results, you will learn some very interesting things about your product and customers. You'll also likely learn that your product needs a bunch of help to appeal to enough people to make a living. And, you'll often learn that your initial hypotheses about who your customers will be are often wrong. So, fuck it, release duds, measure everything and go from there. Feel free to email me if you'd like some examples of this. I know some people think it's a little weird to treat marketing like this, but it not only made it fun, it helped me learn and develop myself into a good marketer.