23 ms·

Marketing is scary for a solo developer

• rikkipitt 5y ago
  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.
• erulabs 5y ago
  Hey this article inspired me to tweet about my product. Maybe I'll even get a like this time :P
• ineedasername 5y ago
  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.
• candiddevmike 5y ago
  Yes, it is. Speaking of which, if anyone wants to help me as a marketing cofounder, please email me (contact info in profile).
• tymm 5y ago
  As a solo developer (https://simplepush.io 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?
  • ushakov 5y ago
    ads don’t work unless you have Coca Cola budgets why not share your project here more often and other sites like ProductHunt, IndieHackers?
    • tymm 5y ago
      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.
    • dt3ft 5y ago
      Because it gets downvoted to hell :)
  • pul 5y ago
    I've done some search ads for https://www.nslookup.io 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. [1] https://plausible.io/nslookup.io?period=custom&from=2020-12-01&to=2021-12-13&entry_page=%2Fdns-records%2Ffacebook.com https://plausible.io/nslookup.io?period=custom&from=2020-12-... [2] https://plausible.io/nslookup.io?period=custom&from=2020-12-01&to=2021-12-13&entry_page=%2Flearning%2Fdns-record-types%2Fhttps://plausible.io/nslookup.io?period=custom&from=2020-12-01&to=2021-12-13&entry_page=%2Flearning%2Fdns-record-types%2F https://plausible.io/nslookup.io?period=custom&from=2020-12-...
  • HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
    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.
    • tymm 5y ago
      Really appreciate your suggestions! Some things are just hard to see from the inside. > 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. Would you still increase the price if the main competitor with the biggest market share is already cheaper (one-time payment of $5)?
      • HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
        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.
      • inpharmer 5y ago
        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.
• cblconfederate 5y ago
  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
• dwighttk 5y ago
  Marketing is scary for most people with souls
• iveqy 5y ago
  So was this advice or marketing material? ;) Maybe both. Nice to see that more that myself are struggling with this.
  • raunometsa 5y ago
    Both! 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)
• alexmingoia 5y ago
  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.
  • rikroots 5y ago
    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.
    • tppiotrowski 5y ago
      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
• Zealotux 5y ago
  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.
  • MayeulC 5y ago
    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?
  • numlock86 5y ago
    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.
  • koonsolo 5y ago
    Can you reframe it as informing/educating your (potential) users? Your product is important, but users knowing how to use it, and what new features are there is also important. At least for me this different mindset made a difference.
• JimWestergren 5y ago
  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.
  • AussieWog93 5y ago
    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).
    • WJW 5y ago
      I'm reminded of this famous article from the Deming institute: https://deming.org/nobody-gives-a-hoot-about-profit/ https://deming.org/nobody-gives-a-hoot-about-profit/ 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.
• ushakov 5y ago
  my advice: build a great product and offer it to consultancies, who can suggest it to their clients i spent $0 and 0s on marketing/ads/promotions but make a nice side-income off consultancies selling my software and services it's a win-win: you get revenue, they get something they can offer their clients
  • j4yav 5y ago
    Where do you find these consultancies who'd use your software? It sounds perfect for my product/situation.
    • ushakov 5y ago
      usually they find me first! after we establish a relationship, we just exchange ideas what other software/features we could build that they could sell it's a great thing - they get to make money doing sales, i get make money building software if you'd like to, you can e-mail me and i can suggest some agencies
      • joannabugreplay 5y ago
        this sounds amazing!!!
• TekMol 5y ago
  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.
  • ushakov 5y ago
    Revolut for example does not advertise They built a great product and offer customers money to refer to others (e-mail me if you want a code)
    • TekMol 5y ago
      If they don't advertise, I would love to know how they got over ten million people to watch this video ad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QabM_PvBtsI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QabM_PvBtsI 14 million views and only 776 likes? That sounds very much like this video was somehow shoved down peoples throats.
      • ushakov 5y ago
        maybe it was embedded in some marketing materials
        • TekMol 5y ago
          Could be. I often wonder if views of an embedded YouToube video increase the view count.
• metadata 5y ago
  Jon Yongfook has a brilliant approach - he writes code one week, then does only marketing another week. https://twitter.com/yongfook 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/...".
  • mritchie712 5y ago
    This is one of those bits of advice that you hear and say, "This is smart, I'm doing it... next week"
  • unbanned 5y ago
    I am not clicking that link.
    • mritchie712 5y ago
      To Twitter?
  • pawelwentpawel 5y ago
    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.
  • 5y ago
• _teyd 5y ago
  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.
  • Flankk 5y ago
    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.
  • hluska 5y ago
    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.) :) (Note 2 - Chill and have fun.)
• winrid 5y ago
  What I do is have a whiteboard and I can't move the post-it notes to the "done" section until there are some kind of tests, docs, and a blog post. This works because there's limited space on the board and I'm OCD. :P
• sergioisidoro 5y ago
  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.
  • holler 5y ago
    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.
    • sergioisidoro 5y ago
      Hey, if you're interested in connecting, so we can help each-other let me know. Peer support could be a way out of this mental block?
• calltrak 5y ago
  I know how you feel. I am trying to promote https://fabform.io https://fabform.io shamelessly. The struggle is real :)
  • aembleton 5y ago
    Why do you set a max-width but not centre the main container? It just looks a bit odd to me.
• magicroot75 5y ago
  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.
  • glitchc 5y ago
    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.
  • enriquto 5y ago
    > 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.
• bootstrapsite 5y ago
  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? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29459901#29462551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29459901#29462551
• dt3ft 5y ago
  I am trying to promote https://pdf2qrcode.com https://pdf2qrcode.com shamelessly. The struggle is real :) Edit: the downvotes confirm the above.
• konschubert 5y ago
  I've started to sell a physical product that I make and have had my google merchant account suspended twice. The algorithms claim that my ads are misleading. I don't think they are, I hope they aren't. The first time, I appealed and it got un-suspended. No reason given. I thought: Cool, must have been a mistake but it's been sorted out. Then, after a couple days, another suspension. Now I don't know what to do. Google ads and google merchant center seems to be a science in itself, but I don't have the time to learn it all, nor the budget to pay a consultant.
  • tymm 5y ago
    Were you able to make your Google ads profitable?
    • konschubert 5y ago
      Yes, but only if I manually counted conversions that google didn't see due to ad blockers. But yes. It was great. I felt like I had a dial that I could turn up and down to make my business go. Then, bam, second suspension. "Misleading ads". I have no intention to mislead anyone. Makes me feel very helpless.
      • tymm 5y ago
        Sorry to hear that. Did you try other platforms on which you didn't get suspended? Did you have to tune your Google ads campaign before it worked or did it work for you from the first try?
        • konschubert 5y ago
          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.
• sebastianconcpt 5y ago
  This is the kind of problem that ended up making me shutdown my SaaS in 2015. But more than marketing the problem was sales.
• davedx 5y ago
  I take it one step further. 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.
  • smugglerFlynn 5y ago
    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?
    • davedx 5y ago
      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.
• city41 5y ago
  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.
• mauvehaus 5y ago
  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 :-)
• sergiomattei 5y ago
  > But Raz's Chartbrew is making only $137 MRR after working on it for more than 3 years. Great post, but I don't understand what naming and shaming specific low-MRR founders contributes to your core message.
  • raunometsa 5y ago
    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).
    • nathanfig 5y ago
      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.
    • joannabugreplay 5y ago
      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.
• XCSme 5y ago
  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).
  • halfmatthalfcat 5y ago
    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.
  • Nemi 5y ago
    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. Probably one of the best examples of altruistic content marketing was Joel Spolsky. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/ 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.
• evancoop 5y ago
  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?
• davnicwil 5y ago
  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. [0] https://davnicwil.com/negative-feedback-is-positive/ https://davnicwil.com/negative-feedback-is-positive/
• codpiece 5y ago
  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.
  • koonsolo 5y ago
    Why does it feel gross? You would be helping a lot of people. Do you think how for example Andrew Chen markets himself and his book is gross?
    • codpiece 5y ago
      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.
      • koonsolo 5y ago
        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.
        • codpiece 5y ago
• lbriner 5y ago
  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! Good luck.
  • libertine 5y ago
    > 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.
• teewuane 5y ago
  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. Thanks!
• prionassembly 5y ago
  What in the oompa-loompa is a microfounder?
  • jb1991 5y ago
    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.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
• prionassembly 5y ago
  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.
  • ayewo 5y ago
    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).
• giantg2 5y ago
  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.
• meatsauce 5y ago
  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.
• intrasight 5y ago
  I've come to believe that as a solo developer, you are the product. So my "marketing" strategy this year is to put my developer notes on Github. Basically let people into my head and see my development process unfold.
• NickSingh 5y ago
  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-made-as-a-developer-turned-marketer-pitching-to-robots-not-humans https://www.nicksingh.com/posts/the-1-marketing-mistake-i-ma...
  • aembleton 5y ago
    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.
• Invictus0 5y ago
  The comments here are proof enough that marketing is completely foreign and misunderstood by a lot of developers.
• MrDresden 5y ago
  From this standpoint (solo dev & marketing) I have a question; Would it make sense to make a twitter channel around a product for marketing purposes and direct traffic to it or rather to my personal one? I have almost no following at the moment, so they would both effectively be equivalent (be starting from scratch). In one way I can see the benefit in building an audience for other products in the future, but it still feels a bit odd to me.
• cweill 5y ago
  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".
• supperburg 5y ago
  Minecraft had zero marketing. Tesla had zero marketing. Anyway, if you wanted to market your product how would you even do that? Just buy ads on YouTube and google?
  • aembleton 5y ago
    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.
    • supperburg 5y ago
      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.
  • datavirtue 5y ago
    Advertising is an aspect of marketing, just like engineering.
• yboris 5y ago
  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). https://videohubapp.com/ https://videohubapp.com/ & MIT open source https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App
  • datavirtue 5y ago
    Create sock puppets and promote through them..."organically."
• scubakid 5y ago
  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?
• elorant 5y ago
  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.
  • stavros 5y ago
    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.
    • elorant 5y ago
      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.
• CommonGuy 5y ago
  Man this hits home... We have similar marketing problems with our product (https://kreya.app 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.
• dahart 5y ago
  > But how do I get over the fear of exposure? 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.
• kordlessagain 5y ago
  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.
  • datavirtue 5y ago
    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."
• make_it_sure 5y ago
  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
  • jimbokun 5y ago
    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.
• bastardoperator 5y ago
  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.
  • WORMS_EAT_WORMS 5y ago
    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.
• pkdpic 5y ago
  Very helpful post. Good length too. Seems applicable even if making an income with side projects really isn't your goal.
• semireg 5y ago
  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.
  • sombremesa 5y ago
    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?
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
• SleekEagle 5y ago
  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.
• yoran 5y ago
  I think every solo developer should read "The E-Myth Revisited" (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/81948.The_E_Myth_Revisited https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/81948.The_E_Myth_Revisit...). It describes exactly this problem. For your business to succeed, you must play each role: 1. The Entrepreneur: a future-focused visionary who pursues opportunities 2. The Manager: a past-focused worrier who plans and organizes 3. The Technician: a present-focused worker who concentrates on the task at hand Solo developers (also technical startup founders) spend too much time in their Technician role. But you need all 3 for your business to succeed.
• wenbin 5y ago
  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. [1] I run listennotes.com
• canadianwriter 5y ago
  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.
• dialcortez 5y ago
  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!
• Exendroinient 5y ago
  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.
• SavantIdiot 5y ago
  "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.
• clairity 5y ago
  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.
• inDigiNeous 5y ago
  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.
• hwers 5y ago
  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.
  • vishnumohandas 5y ago
    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. In my specific case, this has held true. [1] https://zeta.tech https://zeta.tech
• spfzero 5y ago
  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.
• alexdrue 5y ago
  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.
• raunometsa 5y ago
  OP here. Having a shower. Brb.
  • mukundesh 5y ago
    Nice one, would have loved some more tips..