Ask HN: What Marketing Skill to Learn First?

I'm inclined to say - learn how to define an ICP (ideal customer profile).

(Although, in these neck of the woods probably the first thing would be - How NOT to bore developers xD)

Anyway, if you are building a product, you might find it useful to do the ICP first.

When you have that down and mastered you can take your journey in so many directions and succeed fairly fast.

Some of the directions you can take when you have this skill down and mastered:

Content (you now know whom you are creating for), Ad buyer (you now have an idea of what they want, what problems they need solved or what they like to buy) SEO (you know what they search for)

And step further from that would be things like demand generation, viral content, establishing yourself as a thought leader and so on.