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A little nervous sharing this, since it is a work-in-progress, but here goes nothing :) I'm currently learning about sales and marketing and think I can share
by ayewo 6y ago
A little nervous sharing this, since it is a work-in-progress, but here goes nothing :)
I'm currently learning about sales and marketing and think I can share my modest knowledge on the topic in a way that is fairly systematic.
One of the draws of programming for me—and I believe this is true for a lot of developers—is that software development is fairly a systematic discipline to get into, unlike sales or marketing, for instance.
The path to learning how to program is fairly systematic i.e. learning follows a well-defined path where you learn your first "hello, world", then learn about constants, variables, expressions, conditionals, loops, functions etc.
Making recursion the first lesson is a recipe for confusion for most beginners to programming.
My goal with the guide is to explain sales and marketing—in a well-defined way similar to how programming is learnt—using plain language, while avoiding jargon, as much as possible.
Learning this way has been helpful to me and I think a guide like this would be helpful to developers out there that struggle with answering questions like whether to do sales or marketing first, build an audience before building a product etc.
I'm on the free tier of ConvertKit so I'm trying to figure the easiest way to automatically email subscribers a copy of the current draft of the guide.
Here's the current landing page: https://guide.ayewo.com/ https://guide.ayewo.com/
- curo 6y agoI've seen a couple marketing guides pitched at engineers, and I think there's more potential in this space for sure. The value prop is intriguing to me. Quick feedback: if you want more early reviewers, perhaps put up an example post. That would answer a few things for someone like me: is the writing good, what level is the material (beginner or intermediate), can I walk about with at least one non-obvious insight.
- ayewo 6y agoThanks for the feedback. I’ll put something up.
- octostone 6y agoHey, I’m also very interested in this! Just an FYI, IME using hello@domain or any similar role-based or impersonal email from an unproven domain OR while using a service that lumps you in with a bunch of other accounts will make it really hard to end up in a primary email inbox. Most of the time you’ll get diverted to promotions (Gmail) or spam (a bunch of others).
- ayewo 6y agoThanks for the feedback, octostone! I'll keep this in mind and definitely fix it, if I do move to another ESP. A bit of context: I set up the landing page with some basic copy two days ago (February 1). I saw this Ask HN on the front page yesterday (February 2) when it was about 7 hours old, so I made several edits to the copy to make the message clearer, before sharing the link here. So, I was plenty surprised by the number of subscribers‡ I got from this comment alone. Thank you to everyone who subscribed to be a reviewer! ‡If anyone is curious about my numbers, yesterday, I got 17 subscribers, currently at 20 subscribers! In the spirit of transparency, these are my current numbers for https://guide.ayewo.com/ https://guide.ayewo.com/: - 164 Visitors - 20 Subscribers - 12.2% Conversion Rate
- serjester 6y agoTo play devils advocate why should someone learn marketing and and sales from someone that doesn't have real world experience? The noise to signal ratio is already so high in the field. Good luck regardless.
- ayewo 6y ago> To play devils advocate why should someone learn marketing and and sales from someone that doesn't have real world experience? The noise to signal ratio is already so high in the field. The same way you can't become a programmer, if all you have is knowledge gained from reading a book on the topic; you have to put in the work by learning from your mistakes in a programming environment. My goal with the guide is to help a technical audience gain a basic, but clear understanding of the concepts that constitute sales & marketing that they can build upon. The guide is not promising readers that they'll become a highly-sought after sales person or marketer, overnight. > Good luck regardless. Thanks