Supercharge your engineering work through marketing

zeptonaut.com

4 points·zeptonaut22··3 comments

I think you make great points here and the comments around sensitivity to "bad marketing" resonate for me especially.

However, from a consumer standpoint, I find myself becoming more and more aggravated by badly done "click bait" content that employs techniques you describe above so poorly that the sender would of been better off just spamming my inbox.

Yep - totally agree. I do think that's another benefit to "starting small" though with marketing via individual comments: your failures are a little less public than they would otherwise be. The most important thing is to be useful: if you don't have anything to say that leads to a "conversion" but do have useful input, that's great: give the useful input and move on. Only give a link to your work if it's genuinely very well suited to the response.

I also think people underestimate the amount to which really successful people have taken the approach of marketing via individual answers: for example, here are responses from the head of two compliance automation startups (SecureFrame and Vanta) with a total valuation somewhere north of $2B... duking it out in the comment section of a forum 2 years ago. Small marketing wins add up.

This blog post is a bit of an apology note.

When I first graduated from college, I thought of marketing as a tool for people whose work wasn’t good enough to stand on its own.

Years down the road, I realize that many of the engineers at Google whose work I knew best… well, I knew about them because they were excellent marketers of their work too. Knowing the first 10% of marketing was a lot more likely to move the needle on my impact than learning another 1% of engineering, which was in fact a lot more difficult anyway.

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