8 ms·
I forced myself to spend a week in Instagram instead of Xcode
- joeconway 1y agoFor anyone like me that’s never heard of Lagree before https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lagree-buddy-wrist-metronome/id6742166219 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lagree-buddy-wrist-metronome/i...
- tacticalturtle 1y agoFrom his website, I learned that he is a “VISIONAIRE, INVENTOR, and PHILANTROPIST (sic)”: https://www.sebastienlagree.com/ https://www.sebastienlagree.com/
- antoniojtorres 1y agoMaybe this is the final form of someone that permanently leaves xcode to market. Wow.
- sneak 1y agoThe author of the article makes a third party app that assists with these workouts, he isn’t Lagree.
- ToastBackwards 1y agolol, I didn't expect this before I clicked
- ed 1y agoIt’s a kind of Pilates. Sort of like Bikram for hot yoga.
- rcpt 1y agoRecently learned that Pilates is called what it is because it was invented by Joe Pilates
- qingcharles 1y agoI never knew that. Reminds me of the inventor of the backflip, John Backflip: https://theyardstickagency.co.uk/blog/the-strange-but-true-story-of-sir-john-h-backflip-and-a-cautionary-tale-of-artificial-intelligence https://theyardstickagency.co.uk/blog/the-strange-but-true-s...
- fourthark 1y agoDon’t worry, this is false and the article says so.
- qingcharles 1y agoYes, that's the joke.
- bgun 1y agotl;dr Engineer discovers that sales & marketing are real jobs. Calling it “content creation” or “influencers” are just another way of minimizing a side of business development that scares you. Thanks for the story, it was an enjoyable read!
- pixl97 1y agoMarketing is a real job in the same way both pharmacists and drug dealers are both real jobs. Its really easy for marketing to go from providing a useful product to using dark patterns like rage bait to peddle the equivalent of drugs to the masses. Marketing gets a bad name for a reason.
- limflick 1y agoI share your aversion to modern marketing tactics, but by your logic, programmers that develop the addictive social media algorithms are the meth cooks. Everyone is complicit. Modern day "tech bros" get a significantly worse rep than marketing folks these days. No use in participating in this blame game.
- SeanAnderson 1y agoI mean that kind of tracks? I had to take a computer science ethics course in college. It mainly focused on stuff like the Therac-25 case study, but I could easily see a more modern version of the course covering social media algorithms. I wonder if marketing courses also have an ethics component taught in them?
- lostlogin 1y ago> focused on stuff like the Therac-25 case study, but I could easily see a more modern version of the course A good example of bad that can happen but damn is that just plain lazy. More recent examples are surely more relevant and would generated more discussion.
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- PullJosh 1y agoI’ve been working on promoting my seating chart app for teachers, Shuffle Buddy, on social media. I had a 1M view pop on TikTok when I first launched and have now been clawing along to try for continued engagement. It’s reassuring to know that social media posts are hard for everyone and that it isn’t supposed to be easy. I keep looking for ways to create content that is genuinely beneficial to teachers and also convinces them to try my app, but it’s hard.
- wahnfrieden 1y agoAs a solopreneur I'm dreading the gutting of US TikTok... Things are going to get much harder for organic promotion if there's a separate US app under a non-TikTok name that only Americans can use. You can look into https://sideshiftjobs.com https://sideshiftjobs.com or https://playkit.xyz https://playkit.xyz for scaling organic posting btw (unaffiliated). Personally I just message a lot of people directly myself and get lucky with friendly responses because creators like my apps enough that they use it themselves (edtech market makes this easier as the apps are genuinely and wholesomely bettering). Then I convince them to start new accounts focused on my app promo, in addition to less frequent commissioned promo on their main accounts. For doing it yourself you need to get multiple devices and multiple accounts going, there are tools to help with that too. You can also post the UGC content that you pay others to produce for you, onto your own accounts. It's too difficult to consistently go viral without more frequent rolls of the dice. Focusing on a single branded account made more sense before current social media algos which don't care about your followers and won't even show it to them if the content isn't engaging enough to go viral beyond your following.
- jondwillis 1y ago“Organic” The post screenshots in those links are… uh.. hey I look forward to all of the free time everyone will have to do more productive things than “organically” shill for attention on behalf of commercial interests.
- wahnfrieden 1y agoIt's just an industry term with a particular meaning. You don't need to rage at me about people getting paid for doing ad work because you don't like the jargon and don't like marketing. People who do UGC work get paid enough to not have to work full-time if they don't want to, giving them more time for other things in life than most jobs. Typical jobs care more about exclusivity over your entire working day than the value of your output (hence why we have more of a "laborer" market than a "labor" market), let alone sharing that value back to you as is typical with UGC contracts. It's disappointing to see that kind of elitism here. edit: When you pay for ads/boosted content instead, all contemporary platforms have tried hard to make the paid ads look convincingly like “organic” content for long enough for the content’s hook to land - just look at X, Reddit, TT etc. At least with “organic” promo, established accounts have a reputation to preserve or foster when they choose what promo work aligns with their audience and their values. As a consumer I can usually evaluate how much to trust a creator too by how scrupulously they choose their promo. With paid ads I know I am just seeing it because they were the top bidder for my attention and that the only reputation protection from the platform is to avoid particularly criminal or other extreme content.
- johannesberlin 1y agoI’m surprised the owner of Lagree didn’t sue you for the name of the app, he’s notorious for that. I also recommend hiring smaller creators, they can be amazing if it’s the right person
- alexchantavy 1y agoI didn’t know people used Insta for b2b outbound like LinkedIn haha. > Build it and they will come is a fallacy. You have to tell people about the damn thing. Great lesson for engineering types
- levocardia 1y agoIt's basically "go where your customers are". Fitness influencers doing trendy workouts are all on Instagram.
- righthand 1y agoI think the hidden lesson in Field of Dreams is that “they will come” happens because of word of mouth. Shoeless Joe Jackson tells the other dead baseball players to come hang out. The townsfolk tell about baseball field to save the farm. But really “build it and they will come” in product development is pitched as if “they will come” because they are searching for it. Which is not really true if people don’t know your thing exists.
- spike021 1y agoI recently made a small game for iOS/macOS and basically every non-development part of the process between setting up the App Store stuff and trying to promote it have been a lot more work than I expected. Not even including the game design, which is really separate from the actual game development.
- wahnfrieden 1y agoHave you noticed the different roles that make up successful small businesses? You must anticipate and learn to wear several hats in turn if you're doing it alone
- spike021 1y agoIt's one of those things where I intuitively understand the roles when it comes to my normal job, but in doing this as a side project I foolishly thought it'd be more straightforward.
- wahnfrieden 1y agoWe get used to peers across different roles doing their work for us and mostly unseen, at day jobs
- fsckboy 1y agoTL;DR if you don't know who Sebastian Lagree is (my LA gf said "the pilates guy?") then don't read this.
- nesk_ 1y agoI didn't know who he is and still found this blog post really interesting because the real topic is about marketing your app when you're a software developer.
- fsckboy 1y agoit read to me more as a marketing piece itself than as a piece about marketing.
- nesk_ 1y agoThen it's the worst marketing piece because there's not an even single link to the app. You might not appreciate the topic, but this is definitely not an ad, just honest learning and sharing about a difficult part of the entrepreneur job.
- zerr 1y agoWhat is pilates?
- ricardobeat 1y agoFor anyone also wondering, Lagree seems to be a high-intensity workout system derived from pilates, and "Sebastian" is the inventor/guru.
- rdrd 1y agoAs a solo/indie dev who's currently early in building a product, I've been keeping a journal of "ideas" for content in a txt file in the codebase as I hate context switching and want to build this up before I get to it. Here's what I've done: - At the top of the file I've listed my audience, 3 personas - My content has to be useful to one of those - If I see an interesting post/take on social media I hold the link and write an idea for my own spin/take (takes 30 seconds) - log it - If I have a problem/issue that I resolve that would be useful to my audience - log it - If I have a key product/design/UX choice that took some time to think through - log it - If something takes me much longer than I thought because there's more to it (iceberge effect) - log it I've been doing this for about 6 weeks now and I've got 100 ideas for pieces of content. One of the best pieces of advice I read is that when you're solo, many times people/community rally around you. You are the product too so you have to share what you're doing, it's interesting to many, not just your customers. They care about the advice you give, the input you have, the way you build things. You are a subject matter expert in this domain, so you should structure your content with this in mind. "You escape competition through authenticity." - @naval
- RobRivera 1y agoI have a paper notebook next to my keyboard entitled 'sleep deprivation induced fever-dreams'. It is an excellent collection and useful tool so I dont let my ideas runaway with my attention. Often when I return to what I write, about 60% I look back at with the novelty gone, and reassess from a more suitable eye and cross them off the list.
- pessimizer 1y agoAnd, if you're like me, you notice sometimes that you've been rediscovering the same interesting thought over and over again, and should really give it some structure and start building on it, rather than rewriting it again and and again, years apart. That's on the list of things I think that LLMs could help with. Of course that's also an opportunity to combine the best of all of those iterations together, and still toss out a bunch of paper (or archive a bunch of bits.)
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- mattfrommars 1y agoPeople who code for mobile development, like OP, is IOS development their full time job? Because as someone who does web development, to learn the in and out of Swift programming language and using XCode feel major vendor lockin and prefer say React Native due to its interoperability.
- RobRivera 1y agoIf you browse job listings, you will find titles for 'iOS developer' and 'Android Mobile Developer'
- mattfrommars 1y agoYup, I know that but my reason to ask was that if most people who develop for IOS also know web development, as in full stack development. or are they usually IOS developer fulltime.
- tcoff91 1y agoMost are full time iOS developers.
- cosmic_cheese 1y agoEven if using a framework like RN, solo devs would be putting themselves in a precarious position if they don't understand the underlying systems and frameworks. Without that knowledge they won't be able to effectively debug and figure out if issues are stemming from the cross-platform framework or the native platform/framework and subsequently will be entirely dependent on outside parties for fixes. So if they're learning the native frameworks anyway, they may as well use them. These days with Swift and Kotlin most logic code transfers pretty cleanly and most apps can be LEGO'd together from UIKit/SwiftUI/Compose components, so the workload isn't as high as one might expect. Aside from that, early on it's usually better to start with one platform, nail the UI and interaction, and then once the app is proven worry about the other platform.
- k4rli 1y ago
- cycomanic 1y agoI didn't know about Sebastian Lagree and Lagree Fitness, but looking him up does not leave a good impression. The press covers on is homepage look incredibly fake, e.g. a "digital cover" from cosmopolitan.ro which is clearly designed to look like he was on the cover of the real cosmopolitan. Same thing for Forbes. His "thing" seems to be a kind of modern pilates and he sues everyone who criticises him. Seems like a real wholesome person and a community I'd really like to join /s But to each their own.
- upmostly 1y agoI've always struggled to find the right balance as a solo/indie dev. However, recently I decided to try something I'm calling the SaaS Schedule Sandwich. Each month is split into four weeks: - Week 1: Build - Week 2: Market - Week 3: Build - Week 4: Video Journal And so far it's kept me honest and not made me go live in a cave and code for a year. I actually released the first video journal last week for our new product: https://youtu.be/cSY-C8oiUU8 https://youtu.be/cSY-C8oiUU8
- swyx 1y agoTLDW - whats your one sentence pitch for your product?
- upmostly 1y agoA new kind of database workbench for developers/founders/teams for: - managing your database - creating beautiful dashboards quickly - writing, running and sharing queries (think postman but for db) - visually building workflows to export and manipulate your database (so underrated) - eventually building apps directly on to your database (think retool but a desktop app) It's an all in one, modern way to interact with your database. Desktop app.
- rdrd 1y agoJust watched your video, really love the style and openness. My only suggestion is niche it down a bit. The SQL tutorial guides and features sound great, but the functional list feels a bit like a laundry list. Even here you describe it as a tool for "developers/founders/teams". Try targeting a specific domain, tech stack, database type, or developer segment (e.g., large B2B teams, small B2B teams, indie devs, or funded startup founders) to stand out. If you pick a clear niche, you can build a stronger SEO strategy around long tail keywords and tailor both the product and the messaging and work out what order to build out features. Even if long term you plan on wanting it to be a tool for all databases, segments etc. It's much easier to produce content with this in mind, e.g. if you were targetting getting the most out of Postgres you could easily produce a bunch of content for PostgreSQL 18 which formally came out of beta a few weeks ago and has native support for UUIDv7 etc. Fwiw I’m doing a ton with SQLite atm as a solo dev. If your landing page had said "THE VERY BEST TOOL FOR SQLITE MANAGEMENT TO HELP SOLO DEVS AND SMALL TEAMS MAXIMIZE SQLITE PERFORMANCE AND PRODUCTIVITY" there’s a good chance I would have signed up for updates but atm it felt a little generic, some of the features I might use, some I definitely would not.
- kristianp 1y agoThey create a fake story about a new feature to promote the app. And then they work out how to create fake text messages. I don't like the approach they used. Get real users to provide a real testimonials instead.
- levocardia 1y agoIndeed. I would love a better post about "how to do authentic marketing without devolving into the worst caricature of a social media marketing bro."
- gyomu 1y agoWelcome to promoting your product baby. No one cares if it's fake or not except the little voice in your head. If you can post fake messages today that promote your product and will start getting you users, why wait for real users to provide real testimonials that align with what you want to communicate to do the same thing 3 months from now? Of course you want to seek out real testimonials from satisfied customers and share those as much as you can; you don't want to lock yourself in a bubble where you post how amazing your app is while emails of dissatisfied users pile up in your inbox; but it's not an OR situation, it's an AND situation. You might also be surprised to hear that the family laughing together while drinking Coca Cola in those video ads isn't a real family, they're not really having fun, and they're not really enjoying Coca Cola for the sake of it - they're on a filming set in front of a green screen paid by the hour.
- nucleogenesis 1y agoFor me it’s just that I just don’t want to lie to make money. Commercials are on their face a work of fiction unless stated otherwise — for customer testimonials in commercials that are fake (in the US anyway) there has to be text saying as much. Because otherwise they’d be lying…
- gyomu 1y agoI don't see any lies in the screenshots from the original article being discussed here. They are a staged conversation with a contact named "Speedometer FAQ" - not pretending like it's with a real person, or real customer testimonials. If it makes you feel better, you could put "simulated text messages" at the bottom of such images.
- lunarcave 1y agoIt's a nice write up. > Build it and they will come is a fallacy. This is true. But is this the alternative? No trying to minimize the efforts of people who do this as real jobs or influencing - you do you. However, generating fake message screenshot, sending unsolicited messages etc? And the winner is the one who gets the biggest rise from the consumer, authentic or not. Distribution is hard, I get it. But isn't this the equivalent of everyone just rocking up to the village square in the most outrageous costumes and screaming into the megaphone?
- nicbou 1y agoThe alternative is to build the audience first, then sell things to it. If you don't command an audience, you must use someone else's, usually at a cost. You don't have to be the loudest and most outrageous if your product is great and you speak the right message to the right audience.
- nextworddev 1y agoThis whole post should teach you just one thing: indie app game is dead, and you need to spend money to make any money
- Poomba 1y agoare you talking based on personal experience too, or just based on this article?
- nextworddev 1y agoBoth. Selling apps has gotten very capital intensive.
- agcat 1y agoRooting for you! Thanks for sharing your process.
- abhishekbr 1y agoSounds like great advice. Thanks for sharing.
- nicbou 1y agoI have been doing something similar for years. My website helps immigrants settle in Berlin. Recently, I've been writing a lot about health insurance. For the last few months, I've been monitoring all health insurance topics in some communities, and actively answering questions. It gave me a much better sense of what confuses people, down to tiny details like "I was given two documents by my insurer, and there is only one upload field in the visa application system". Another couldn't buy the insurance I recommended them because the options in a dropdown did not match his situation 1:1. No one addresses these blockers; they only cover things at a high level. Every time I couldn't answer a question with a link to my insurance guide, I updated the guide. I rewrote some guides 2-3 times this year. On the other end, I was in constant contact with the health insurance broker who answers questions from my readers. That's 5-6 questions per day. Again, I tried to learn from each of those. I think you have to stay close to your users. You might notice tiny details that make a bigger difference than the superfeature you're thinking of building.
- yoshyosh 1y agohighly recommend focusing on just tiktoks/reels rather than stories that expire every 24 hours. They will pick up more views beyond your audience, especially if you "warm up" your account by engaging with content just on your niche. Look forward to the next experiment!
- endymion-light 1y agoEnjoy this - I really really struggle marketing as someone that sits a lot in the creative technology space, it always feels quite dirty, so it's nice to read someone's perspective from it