Marketing is scary for a solo developer

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.

First, this doesn’t do anyone any favours. Second, if marketing types would stop being such know it alls, you would have an easier time interacting with developers while they’re building something. Third, marketing isn’t special. And finally, you don’t even understand how or why developers build things.

Be nice and build developers up, especially on a thread with a bunch of people sharing their innermost fears. This whole “you’ve been wrong since the beginning; the cure is me” is terrible marketing. Not to mention that it’s cruel.

Be decent to hackers.

Marketing and sales has very different incentives from developers. Marketers are often trigger happy with features because they "sell" despite the fact that these feature may have a short shelf life and may take resources away from developing of more essential product features. Developers are similarly allergic to additional development because it's (1) work (2) often results in technical debt.

You need to have an intermediary to think about what features actually matter and how they fit into a broader development roadmap otherwise you risk building a product with lots of bells and whistles no one really cares about that's a beast to maintain.

They are suggesting that just as a unit test is an important aspect of determining functionality, it may be helpful to have a metric of how much excitement a certain feature may engender.

I'm not going to judge the quality of that advice; I just offer the possibility that it was a well-intentioned attempt to add a view from a different professional perspective.

perhaps we can be forgiving to someone who is perhaps acting in a socially awkward manner?

This is such a user-facing mindset. I’d say most of the development work I do isn’t even something the user will know about and definitely not get excited about. Also, I do not care about what happens after a feature gets built, my job is not to make sure the right things are being built, it’s to make sure things are being built right. Do your job and I’ll do mine.

I strongly agree with this! If you're working towards a product (and not just a hobby project) then these are crucial requirements. If they can be found out before writing any code, then they should be, since it will save time in the long run.

For me it's also the kind of thing that can lead to costly changes after the fact, which is prone to rub developers up the wrong way. It seems like the principle of phase containment might apply - if you found it early in the development cycle, then it would have been easier to fix.

I think this entirely depends on what kind of people you hire, and what type of environment you put them in. I've worked with developers who's sole focus was on just building whatever they were told, they focused on the technical aspects, and didn't care whether it would be deployed, or if the user would even use it.

I've also worked in teams, where everyone was a product engineer, which essentially just means that we focused on building products, and while the tech side was important, it was more important to make sure the product got build, and eventually used. We often worked side by side with our business teams, marketing and design people, and it was honestly the most fun I've ever had. Knowing that I was building something that people were actually going to use, just motivated and excited me.

Up until a couple months ago, I thought Marketing teams/organizations were a bit hand wavy. But recently, I took a digital marketing course at Georgia Tech, which changed my perspective completely: marketers (can/do/should) apply data driven techniques.

As an engineer, I now (at least try) to think about how the feature I'm building will impact the end-user; it's easy to fall into a trap where you are writing code without thinking about your end users.

I found what you said really interesting, and am sharing it with my SO who is a marketing and business contractor. Thank you for sharing!

As a marketer, improving my understanding of the development process and technology in general has been one of the best skills I continue to learn. I have built a personal project iOS app but have no desire to be an engineer. (Know what you're good at and all that!)

I see it as a forever loop that continues to build on itself, going back and forth between marketing and engineering. Understanding users/behaviours/needs can greatly inform the product scoping and add clarity to the development process with the “why” that makes a product or feature more useful - which in turn then becomes easier to market and solve user use cases.

I fully agree.

I've worked with an incredible b2b salesman before. He wasn't very technical, but he was always curious about what was possible and how difficult it would be to accomplish. Going to a conference with him as the technical expert was amazing. Customers were a gold mine for information. We always looked deeper to find the problems to solve, not the features to create. Learned a lot from him.

Sadly, I haven't had this dynamic since.

Since then, I've run into marketing departments. My issue with them is they constantly switch tools, want immediate results, and destroy site performance without any concern for the path of destruction they leave behind. And marketing is good at selling stuff internally as they are externally. As a result, few people in management care about how marketing impacts anything else in the company.

On the flip side, marketing is the first department to be stabbed in the back when numbers come up badly. It's not really a surprise to me they treat other departments as scapegoats pass blame to.

Things don't have to be this way. :(

"If you build it they will come" is a sure fire way to have your hopes and dreams dashed on the rocks of reality. Marketing is as important as the dev skills to make a product happen. They are two sides of the same coin of success.

There can be communication challenges between our disciplines though.

Frequent changes in direction can leave software in a bit of a shambles. This is probably the thing that creates the feeling that development is "a sacred space for creation". It takes time to both make the change, and end up with code that is pleasant to work with. On teams I've been on, this has sometimes led resistance to the marketing perspective.

I, personally, am often uncomfortable with the language of marketing (both on the analysis side, and on the promotion side). On the promotion side, marketing teams like to make claims that are aspirational or appeal to emotional needs, rather than actually true from a technologists perspective. On the analysis side, marketing often looks like it's working from incomplete information, and extrapolating trends that I don't feel confident exist. It feels like guessing, and I don't like to gamble.

These can be difficult gaps to bridge, but ultimately, I feel like we have the same goal: building the right thing for the right audience.

the vast majority of folks in software engineering should not be thinking in terms of user exitement, or market value or brand positioning etc.

if I were a solo indie entrepreneur/engineer who had to wear all the hats I couldnt delegate to others? heck yes I should follow your advice.

marketing, product design and UX are all incredibly important. but they are not the responsibility, or anywhere in the top concerns, of a software engineer. for the business overall? heck yes

But just to provide some insight (which you probably already have) into the mind of a different kind of person: I can both recognize the truth that marketing is critically and synergistically important, and also have just a deep seated allergy to it. I have concluded that being a freelance / independent developer or even a very early stage startup developer is not a great fit for me for this reason. I thrive more when there is lots of work to do that is not deeply attached to marketing a new product.

If someone has tips on how to weed out pretenders (who themselves do not realize they are pretending) - I would love to learn about it. Unfortunately, my budget typically is too small to keep hiring until i hit the gold.

What do you mean by this? I don't disagree in anyway, just looking for your insights.

As a dev I had to learn marketing inversely, to allow me to better understand the process of ensuring clients a smooth and trust-worthy process... In running my business I have to daily be involved in absolutely every aspect of it (without being too controlling of course) because managing delivery and client experience is a key to gaining and retaining new and follow-up work.

The best method of self-marketing/promoting I've found is to build my own products/portfolios that represent what would be useful and engaging to new potential clients. Working product demos also help marketers to better be acquainted with what they are ultimately selling, and make intuitive screen shots and presentations of the products in support of their efforts. That way I also have a template I can build quicker from, but I also demonstrate to clients that I can actually do the work.

IT is far too complex in presentation these days; many clients are not focused on tech stacks, methods, tools, services, or things developers are usually focused on. Modern clients are usually most concerned about their requirements and business needs, a marketer should focus on being a translator in a way when it comes to marketing development work, linking that work to productivity, progress, and things that satisfy requirements and provide benefits in a clear and usually less-technically inclined manner than a developer would detail a solution...

E.G.... We keep selling "the cloud" to everyone, but if you ask a client what "cloud" is they simply don't know/don't really care what it really is, as long as it fulfills their business goals.

In a world where people are using imagery alone to market their capability, the real working examples of what we do as a company are often what wins us new work.... Even if we don't win new work, the products we build usually end up being valuable and highly useful to us ultimately in real life.

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.

I’ve never had a question at a consult seize up my brain like that before. A good salesperson would have said “of course, and here’s why…”. I am not a good salesperson and floundered.

Reflecting afterwards I realized the truthful answer isn’t that I’m a good wedding photographer, but that I’m a good wedding photographer for a particular subset of people.

Then it becomes purely a marketing problem... how can I make everyone in the world in this segment aware of my 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/

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.

Here’s the thing, for non-technical marketers, they’ve become so used to SaaS/cloud because it’s easy.

The moment I see “self-hosted” and “own server” my brain freezes up and I think about how much work that might be to set up.

You can keep it self hosted but maybe say “3 steps and set up in an hour”

Or just submit to the cloud because most marketers and business owners don’t value self-hosted as a net positive!

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?

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.)

- 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.

For example (and this draws entirely from my own anecdotal experience), I find that in the course of marketing, I often get the best feedback/inspiration from users/community members, and this is very helpful in deciding what to implement next. However, I find that this pseudo-research process is only effective if I take enough time to process the information in whole. In other words, if a user has an extremely compelling idea, it can be tempting to implement it right away. If I resist and take my time, considering the idea in the context of the dozen other points of feedback I've collected, I can often distill the jumble of ideas into a stronger, singular feature. If I jump in right away, I'll inevitably end up in a state of feature creep.

I need someone who can live and breath marketing the way I live and breath software. I can get into a marketing groove but it going to detract from building. No way around that. Switching back and forth is going to burn me out.

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.

Was that experience unusual? And couldn't those people help you making your ad adherent to whatever rule Google uses?

I bought a laser cutter and some other production equipment, and started making home decor. I sell pretty simple stuff, like door signs and coasters.

Google Merchant Center also suspended my account for being "misleading". I have no ads, just a product feed for Google Shopping. They won't tell me what's "misleading" about my products.

In my specific case, this has held true.

[1] https://zeta.tech

why not share your project here more often and other sites like ProductHunt, IndieHackers?

[1] https://plausible.io/nslookup.io?period=custom&from=2020-12-...

[2] https://plausible.io/nslookup.io?period=custom&from=2020-12-...

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.

Given that, I might as well change my trial period to one day, which very much contradicts your results.

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.

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).

Do you think how for example Andrew Chen markets himself and his book is gross?

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).

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)

They built a great product and offer customers money to refer to others (e-mail me if you want a code)

Then you don't understand what marketing is.