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"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

"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.
- 31reasons 14y ago
  Yup, marketing is a soft-skill that any developer with a little interest (sometimes desperation) can learn quickly. I've been learning all about it from Mixergy videos and reading all kinds of stuff on warriorforums and applying it to my projects. Its about realizing that 90% of your development effort will goto waste if you don't understand marketing.

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.
31reasons 14y ago
Yup, marketing is a soft-skill that any developer with a little interest (sometimes desperation) can learn quickly. I've been learning all about it from Mixergy videos and reading all kinds of stuff on warriorforums and applying it to my projects. Its about realizing that 90% of your development effort will goto waste if you don't understand marketing.