9 ms·

The depressing truth about the software business is that most of the success stories take the form "and then I started spending all my time on marketing, and my

by johnrob 14y ago

The depressing truth about the software business is that most of the success stories take the form "and then I started spending all my time on marketing, and my business took off!". I say depressing because most software developers didn't choose their profession out of a burning desire to become a marketer.

davidw 14y ago
Nothing depressing about that - it's part of what needs doing. The thing I sometimes find a bit depressing is that there's more money to be made selling tools to the miners than there is in the actual products. For instance, I bet patio11 could make way more money from consulting/seminars/books/courses/motivational speaking (haha, just kidding, sorry Patrick:-) than from AR, from how he's describing it.
- fooandbarify 14y ago
  I'm not sure that's true. My hypothesis is that we find it easier to meet and communicate with people similar to us, so marketing a product aimed at other developers is an obvious path. There is lots of money to be made by getting out of our stupid little bubble--last week I went for coffee with a guy that sells a modern UI for a legacy system in the construction industry. His code base is probably not the prettiest, and he has less than ten clients, but he is a multi-millionaire.
  - davidw 14y ago
    Here's why I think it's true in some abstract sense. Actual details may not be quite so clear cut - apologies to patio11 if I'm tweaking things a bit to make a point. Let's take the bingo card thing and ignore Appointment Reminder: it makes good money, but seems to have some kind of upper bound in that he's never going to turn it into a multi-billion dollar business. On the other hand, he's developed some serious competence in things like A/B testing, email marketing, and things like that, and is able to demonstrate their effects on companies' profits and thus command a percentage of those profits or at least get paid really well. So, by selling to companies that deal in the millions of dollars, it's almost mathematical that he's going to bring in more money than by fiddling around with niche products. That's not to say he could have gotten to B without first going through A (sorry:-), as he gained those skills with the niche product.
    - fooandbarify 14y ago
      Ahh, I think I may have originally caught you before an edit (or just misread). There is probably more money to be made teaching eg. email marketing for someone in patio11's position, but that doesn't extrapolate well. For young developers like myself, I think it would be foolish to target other developers when there are so many valuable business problems that software can solve. (IOW I was contesting the idea that there is generally more money to be made selling shovels, but I do not contest the idea that patio11 or perhaps bdunn might be able to make more money selling shovels at this point.)
bdunn 14y ago
That's sort of like saying "the depressing truth about relationships is that you need to go out and meet people to get involved in one." I take a lot of pride in promoting my products. Marketing is just storytelling, and when your story aligns with the needs of someone else, a transaction occurs. Honestly, if you want to just write code all day (and there's nothing wrong with that) don't create a product - work for somebody else.
- Deinos 14y ago
  I couldn't agree more with this posting. I would take it a step beyond the story aligning with the needs of someone else and the transaction. If it is something you truly believe in, it becomes a story you enjoy telling over and over, regardless of the outcome. People enjoy spreading passion, and when you are spreading passion, it ceases to become marketing in the "traditional sense" of a self-serving corporate activity, and it just becomes the act of sharing interest and excitement.
- fauigerzigerk 14y ago
  That defeats the purpose. If I have a great idea for a product and I want to work on it, why would I go work for somebody else instead? A much better idea would be to join forces with a marketing guy or girl or hire one.
  - orangethirty 14y ago
    Life is not so simple. A lot of people don't have the option to develop their ideas. That is why joining people who are building something similar ends up being a good option for them. They might not get the same financial benefit, but they may get other intangible benefits from it (pride, sense of accomplushment, experience). Saying that joining a marketing person or hiring one is not the recipe for building a business. Realize that a business is not solely its marketing, nor programming. You cannot just take a program and market it, and become rich. Not so easy. It takes a lot of hustle (which is not marketing), and luck.
    - fauigerzigerk 14y ago
31reasons 14y ago
"most software developers didn't choose their profession out of a burning desire to become a marketer." I agree, if you choose to be a pure software programmer type then of course you can be just that. You can work in a core team or do research in academia. But if you have an entrepreneur itch you have to learn marketing and sales. In fact its pretty fun once you begin to realize that marketing also has lot of intellectual fun in it. A/B testing, human psychology, data analysis etc.
- patio11 14y ago
  Also being a dev who can market is an unfair advantage over substantially all devs and substantially all marketers. It is seriously unreal. An example near and dear to my heart: consider an engineer, a marketer, and one of us weird chimeras all studying a graph of feature adoption among the userbase. The engineer things "Hmm, only 20% of the customers use X. That's unfortunate. Maybe they don't need it." The marketer thinks: "Maybe we should mention that in our newsletter." The chimera says: "All users who haven't Xed with receive a guide to why they want to do that automatically on the 4th day of the trial and it is also covered in the onboarding process. That's live in production as an A/B test. We'll know in two weeks whether it is a discoverability problem or a user need problem. Oh, that's actually a good point, maybe we should talk to the users about this. BRB guys I'm off to call five successful trial accounts who don't X and ask why."
  - coliveira 14y ago
    Agreed that this may be news for lots of programmers, but I think you're overstating their advantage. I once took a serious marketing course in a business school, and the idea of A/B testing is very old. Any professional marketer knows about it, and is currently being done by people that don't know anything about coding (by asking programmers to code it for them).
    - 31reasons 14y ago
      Yes the idea is very old, I recently happen to read 25 year old document with A/B testing and CPM discussion in it. Whats news is that people with hard skills can actually make money by working for themselves and not for someone who knows marketing.
antidaily 14y ago
It's like working out or writing. Do a little every day. And if you absolutely can't, delegate. Find someone who can.
- Evbn 14y ago
  I yearn for the day I can delegate my working out. Waiting for my Rosie robot!
orangethirty 14y ago
A software developer can be one without being in the software business. No need to market anything, ever. Now, if you want to sell software, then you better learn how to sell. The depressing truth about the software business is that most of the success stories take the form "and then I started spending all my time on marketing, and my business took off!". What's depressing is this line of thinking. You just can't program something and expect people to buy it. You have to sell it.
- mingmecca 14y ago
  It's depressing because to a typical cynical programmer (and we're prone to be cynics spending our time looking for bugs) selling anything has a coat of slime on it. Marketing is mostly about deception and half-truths, and promoting a product effectively means maximizing the positives and minimizing/omitting the negatives: "Look at this shiny car!" (engine leaks oil) "Buy our shiny lightweight computer!" (can't change battery) etc... Good programming is the search for The Right Way to solve a particular problem, Truth if you will. Marketing and sales seem to be about un-Truth. It is little wonder that there are so many programmers who look at sales/marketing with disdain.
  - ahoyhere 14y ago
    It's actually an extremely powerful marketing technique to tell people exactly who the product is wrong for. It's an extremely powerful marketing technique to shape the product from its very beginning to discourage certain types of customers. Honesty is a killer app in marketing, assuming you pick your customer base (audience) carefully. That's how I've made lots of money. How you are describing "marketing" is actually "marketing" as you describe it -- simplified, glossed over, and half-true at best.
    - Evbn 14y ago
      The technique you describe here is not the same as honesty. Example: "This product is not for uncreative people who think you have to work 60 he's a week at a desk to retire at 70." is a subtle appeal to snobbery/wishful thinking that makes them want to prove they are creative get-aheaders, and they can "prove" that buy joining your customer base.
herval 14y ago
This is quite common in any area of work, not just programming: the more you become "the man", the less time you'll have to do the thing you love, since you're likely to spend it administrating and coordinating a lot of people to keep the ball running. I guess the trick is getting to also enjoy this other side of things - or have the luck to start off with a partner whose main passion is the business side of things...
thirdtruck 14y ago
I can still picture myself sitting next to a shelf full of programming books and thinking the same thing, johnrob, so I know how that feels. When I started looking into advancing my career, though, I realized that I would just have to market myself to my prospective employers. The self-sell vs. product-sell marketing skills overlap far more than not. Focusing one one leads to a lot more autonomy (and sometimes profit), though.
adrianhoward 14y ago
I say depressing because most software developers didn't choose their profession out of a burning desire to become a marketer. I started development (age 10) coz - well - it was a computer! Getting it to do shit was fun. More than thirty years on I still find making the computer do shit is fun. Along the way though I found I got a real buzz about seeing people use the stuff that I made the computer do. That was freaking cool. So now I do both. This involve being sure that I'm helping build something that folk will actually want to use (UX, Customer Development, Lean Startup, Lean UX, etc.), building stuff (UX & dev), and making sure that the people who will like using my stuff can find it and discover value there (UX and dev and marketing). I don't acquire marketing skills because it's fun (although bits of it are - how could I not find the intersection of things like statistics, socal & cog psych, etc, etc. fascinating). I do it because I get a stupid amount of entertainment value from seeing people use and enjoy stuff that I help make - and I get a kick out of helping other folk achieve that too. And if you want that you need marketing skills (or need to work with people who do). And I don't find it even the tiniest little bit depressing ;-)

by johnrob 14y ago

davidw 14y ago

Nothing depressing about that - it's part of what needs doing. The thing I sometimes find a bit depressing is that there's more money to be made selling tools to the miners than there is in the actual products. For instance, I bet patio11 could make way more money from consulting/seminars/books/courses/motivational speaking (haha, just kidding, sorry Patrick:-) than from AR, from how he's describing it.

fooandbarify 14y ago
I'm not sure that's true. My hypothesis is that we find it easier to meet and communicate with people similar to us, so marketing a product aimed at other developers is an obvious path. There is lots of money to be made by getting out of our stupid little bubble--last week I went for coffee with a guy that sells a modern UI for a legacy system in the construction industry. His code base is probably not the prettiest, and he has less than ten clients, but he is a multi-millionaire.
- davidw 14y ago
  Here's why I think it's true in some abstract sense. Actual details may not be quite so clear cut - apologies to patio11 if I'm tweaking things a bit to make a point. Let's take the bingo card thing and ignore Appointment Reminder: it makes good money, but seems to have some kind of upper bound in that he's never going to turn it into a multi-billion dollar business. On the other hand, he's developed some serious competence in things like A/B testing, email marketing, and things like that, and is able to demonstrate their effects on companies' profits and thus command a percentage of those profits or at least get paid really well. So, by selling to companies that deal in the millions of dollars, it's almost mathematical that he's going to bring in more money than by fiddling around with niche products. That's not to say he could have gotten to B without first going through A (sorry:-), as he gained those skills with the niche product.
  - fooandbarify 14y ago
    Ahh, I think I may have originally caught you before an edit (or just misread). There is probably more money to be made teaching eg. email marketing for someone in patio11's position, but that doesn't extrapolate well. For young developers like myself, I think it would be foolish to target other developers when there are so many valuable business problems that software can solve. (IOW I was contesting the idea that there is generally more money to be made selling shovels, but I do not contest the idea that patio11 or perhaps bdunn might be able to make more money selling shovels at this point.)

bdunn 14y ago

That's sort of like saying "the depressing truth about relationships is that you need to go out and meet people to get involved in one." I take a lot of pride in promoting my products. Marketing is just storytelling, and when your story aligns with the needs of someone else, a transaction occurs. Honestly, if you want to just write code all day (and there's nothing wrong with that) don't create a product - work for somebody else.

Deinos 14y ago
I couldn't agree more with this posting. I would take it a step beyond the story aligning with the needs of someone else and the transaction. If it is something you truly believe in, it becomes a story you enjoy telling over and over, regardless of the outcome. People enjoy spreading passion, and when you are spreading passion, it ceases to become marketing in the "traditional sense" of a self-serving corporate activity, and it just becomes the act of sharing interest and excitement.
fauigerzigerk 14y ago
That defeats the purpose. If I have a great idea for a product and I want to work on it, why would I go work for somebody else instead? A much better idea would be to join forces with a marketing guy or girl or hire one.
- orangethirty 14y ago
  Life is not so simple. A lot of people don't have the option to develop their ideas. That is why joining people who are building something similar ends up being a good option for them. They might not get the same financial benefit, but they may get other intangible benefits from it (pride, sense of accomplushment, experience). Saying that joining a marketing person or hiring one is not the recipe for building a business. Realize that a business is not solely its marketing, nor programming. You cannot just take a program and market it, and become rich. Not so easy. It takes a lot of hustle (which is not marketing), and luck.
  - fauigerzigerk 14y ago

31reasons 14y ago

"most software developers didn't choose their profession out of a burning desire to become a marketer." I agree, if you choose to be a pure software programmer type then of course you can be just that. You can work in a core team or do research in academia. But if you have an entrepreneur itch you have to learn marketing and sales. In fact its pretty fun once you begin to realize that marketing also has lot of intellectual fun in it. A/B testing, human psychology, data analysis etc.

patio11 14y ago
Also being a dev who can market is an unfair advantage over substantially all devs and substantially all marketers. It is seriously unreal. An example near and dear to my heart: consider an engineer, a marketer, and one of us weird chimeras all studying a graph of feature adoption among the userbase. The engineer things "Hmm, only 20% of the customers use X. That's unfortunate. Maybe they don't need it." The marketer thinks: "Maybe we should mention that in our newsletter." The chimera says: "All users who haven't Xed with receive a guide to why they want to do that automatically on the 4th day of the trial and it is also covered in the onboarding process. That's live in production as an A/B test. We'll know in two weeks whether it is a discoverability problem or a user need problem. Oh, that's actually a good point, maybe we should talk to the users about this. BRB guys I'm off to call five successful trial accounts who don't X and ask why."
- coliveira 14y ago
  Agreed that this may be news for lots of programmers, but I think you're overstating their advantage. I once took a serious marketing course in a business school, and the idea of A/B testing is very old. Any professional marketer knows about it, and is currently being done by people that don't know anything about coding (by asking programmers to code it for them).
  - 31reasons 14y ago
    Yes the idea is very old, I recently happen to read 25 year old document with A/B testing and CPM discussion in it. Whats news is that people with hard skills can actually make money by working for themselves and not for someone who knows marketing.

antidaily 14y ago

It's like working out or writing. Do a little every day. And if you absolutely can't, delegate. Find someone who can.

Evbn 14y ago
I yearn for the day I can delegate my working out. Waiting for my Rosie robot!

orangethirty 14y ago

A software developer can be one without being in the software business. No need to market anything, ever. Now, if you want to sell software, then you better learn how to sell. The depressing truth about the software business is that most of the success stories take the form "and then I started spending all my time on marketing, and my business took off!". What's depressing is this line of thinking. You just can't program something and expect people to buy it. You have to sell it.

mingmecca 14y ago
It's depressing because to a typical cynical programmer (and we're prone to be cynics spending our time looking for bugs) selling anything has a coat of slime on it. Marketing is mostly about deception and half-truths, and promoting a product effectively means maximizing the positives and minimizing/omitting the negatives: "Look at this shiny car!" (engine leaks oil) "Buy our shiny lightweight computer!" (can't change battery) etc... Good programming is the search for The Right Way to solve a particular problem, Truth if you will. Marketing and sales seem to be about un-Truth. It is little wonder that there are so many programmers who look at sales/marketing with disdain.
- ahoyhere 14y ago
  It's actually an extremely powerful marketing technique to tell people exactly who the product is wrong for. It's an extremely powerful marketing technique to shape the product from its very beginning to discourage certain types of customers. Honesty is a killer app in marketing, assuming you pick your customer base (audience) carefully. That's how I've made lots of money. How you are describing "marketing" is actually "marketing" as you describe it -- simplified, glossed over, and half-true at best.
  - Evbn 14y ago
    The technique you describe here is not the same as honesty. Example: "This product is not for uncreative people who think you have to work 60 he's a week at a desk to retire at 70." is a subtle appeal to snobbery/wishful thinking that makes them want to prove they are creative get-aheaders, and they can "prove" that buy joining your customer base.

herval 14y ago

This is quite common in any area of work, not just programming: the more you become "the man", the less time you'll have to do the thing you love, since you're likely to spend it administrating and coordinating a lot of people to keep the ball running. I guess the trick is getting to also enjoy this other side of things - or have the luck to start off with a partner whose main passion is the business side of things...

thirdtruck 14y ago

I can still picture myself sitting next to a shelf full of programming books and thinking the same thing, johnrob, so I know how that feels. When I started looking into advancing my career, though, I realized that I would just have to market myself to my prospective employers. The self-sell vs. product-sell marketing skills overlap far more than not. Focusing one one leads to a lot more autonomy (and sometimes profit), though.

adrianhoward 14y ago

I say depressing because most software developers didn't choose their profession out of a burning desire to become a marketer. I started development (age 10) coz - well - it was a computer! Getting it to do shit was fun. More than thirty years on I still find making the computer do shit is fun. Along the way though I found I got a real buzz about seeing people use the stuff that I made the computer do. That was freaking cool. So now I do both. This involve being sure that I'm helping build something that folk will actually want to use (UX, Customer Development, Lean Startup, Lean UX, etc.), building stuff (UX & dev), and making sure that the people who will like using my stuff can find it and discover value there (UX and dev and marketing). I don't acquire marketing skills because it's fun (although bits of it are - how could I not find the intersection of things like statistics, socal & cog psych, etc, etc. fascinating). I do it because I get a stupid amount of entertainment value from seeing people use and enjoy stuff that I help make - and I get a kick out of helping other folk achieve that too. And if you want that you need marketing skills (or need to work with people who do). And I don't find it even the tiniest little bit depressing ;-)