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Comment by justboxing | Hacker News Reader

> Marketing: The worst. I’m bad at it and it just does not interest me.

This resonates with me, and I am sure a whole lot of other engineers working on side projects out here.

What's the solution? How do you find a "Marketing" person on a side-hustle budget? Without any network.

Like OP, I know my side-projects need to be marketed, but I also don't enjoy cold emailing or cold-calling and would really leave it to an expert in that domain, as long as I can pay him/her by output and not on a full-time salary or a contractor rate...

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In this day and age, marketing is not limited to cold calling or posting on Facebook to one's inner circle of friends.

You need to wear your engineer hat to do very tightly focused marketing. Say you are making a widget for wordpress which lets you accept bitcoins - your target market is likely to be very small compared to a mass market site like HN. Find out where those people who want to pay or receive btc payments hang out or find out where people who want to extend btc into blogs hang out and connect with them - read their discussions and learn their cadence. Talk up your solution at opportune points in the discussion.

Do a little every day - no zero days, remember? - and over time, you will either get more comfortable talking up your product to the lay audience or realize your market doesn't actually like your product and wants something else.

I enjoy marketing for fun ( I work at an ad agency) and always feel I could contribute to open source / people's side projects, but there is never an opportunity. No one ever lists the need for a marketer, and reaching out generally goes unanswered.

There are marketers out there who want to contribute, but just don't see opportunities.

The few marketers we reached out to asked us "What is your budget?", and then instantly dropped off when we told them our budget wasn't anywhere near the "$10000+" dollars per month they were used to.

I mean, what the hell? We're searching for someone to help with something that doesn't even have visitors, much less customers, yet. What are they expecting?

Sounds like big agency or freelance guys. If their 30%+ cut isn't $3k or more, its not worth the work.

Those people were looking for leads, just like a freelance developer would. But I do not know where you find freelance marketers who want to help build something, not to add a client to their portfolio.

Depends what you consider for "opportunity", would you do it for free and just have a cut at the end of a month based on the profit?

I've reached out to projects that aren't profitable at all, just side-projects I thought were cool. If someone builds a project I think is cool, I sometimes want to help out in a way that benefits them and I enjoy, even when their is no money involved.

Hi! I have a side project and would love to get some marketing ideas / support.

Please get in touch vic@smalldata.tech

Cheers!

A lot of people have asked in this thread if I did any customer development. Many of these projects aren't actually indented to be companies, fwiw. But some were.

My day job for years has been a developer at early stage startups, so I'm fully aware of the amount of sheer grinding involved in customers. And the years of iteration to achieve something that resembles product-market fit. I've incorporated some of these tricks we've used as I've learned them from our teams.

Some of the low-cost things I've tried, with varied success:

- Writing to influential bloggers, - Social media grind - Adwords

But ultimately these are side projects. Can't pound the pavement in the middle of work.

It is much easier to build a business around a product if you start by solving a problem that people are actively searching online about -- rather than building whatever is exciting you at the moment.

For example, what questions are you seeing repeatedly on StackExchange or Quora? If you are a developer, what issues do you see other developers continually asking about?

Could you build a solution to meet that need? If so, marketing that solution to the first 100 users becomes so much easier. It just about answering those questions as they come up.

Suddenly though, you are not building something to satisfy your curiosity but you are building something to satisfy someone else's need. Is that something you want to do?

Those questions are also not that easy to find.

Email me, I can share a technique I use to find them.

> as long as I can pay him/her by output and not on a full-time salary or a contractor rate...

Does this kind of thing actually exist? Or it is wishful thinking? I'm under the impression that anyone worth their salt won't settle for payment solely based on output/performance.

> Does this kind of thing actually exist?

I thought that sales people who get commission per sale fall in this category. But I might be wrong, maybe sales and marketing are 2 different roles? Not sure.

For instance, what I was referring to was this. I've created a niche job board and have steady traffic for the last few months now. I want to hire someone from recruiting background who can get me paid job listings, and I pay him/her per listing he/she closes. How do I find such a person(s)

No good sales person will work on 100% commission, unless they can make huge money in a market they already know. 100% commission on a product that isn't even fully developed - no way.

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