Ask HN: As a dev: learn marketing? Or start side project? (startup skills) | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: As a dev: learn marketing? Or start side project? (startup skills)

55 pointsmettamage62 comments

TL;DR: as a dev, what's the most valuable skill to learn when wanting to become a more well-rounded solo founder and how do you learn that skill the quickest?

Some thoughts (I could be entirely off-base, hence the TL;DR): I have a side project in mind. I know nothing about marketing other than some basic ideas (I think I read half of the book Traction at one point?).

I was wondering, should I:

1. Learn marketing

2. Start a side project?

Goal: in 5 years from now, I want to be well positioned to launch a startup? What startup? I'm an idea guy by heart. I studied a master CS 5 years ago + did a software engineer career, in order to implement my ideas. In other words: I'll think of something that I find fun and will solve a problem.

Also, if learning marketing first is the smarter option. Should I learn marketing by taking a course, or should I take a side step (or step back) in my career and do a marketing role?

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I'm an idea guy by heart.

Try to lose this notion.

The key to success in a startup (apart from timing, luck, having the right idea, grit, focus, etc) is determination to see things through to completion. You have to believe in your idea and see it through to the end, where 'the end' is hopefully an exit of some sort probably years in the future. If you see yourself as "an idea guy" you will be distracted by the new shiny thing you think of, and if that happens when your startup is in a slump you'll give up before you see success.

You do need to be "an idea guy" to build a startup, but all the ideas need to be about driving the core idea forwards. You need to see yourself less as "an idea guy" and more as "a <whatever the startup is about> guy".

To that end, I'd recommend starting a side project to see if you can grow it without getting bored, giving up, etc.

> more as "a <whatever the startup is about> guy"

I can do that. This is why I enrolled into CS in the first place. I hated programming for 5 years. Now I kind of like it (10 years in). I think after another 5, I can even love it.

I have some skill in completely bending my mind and reshaping my personality from the ground up (what I can't reshape: being curious and having lots of imagination - fortunately, no need to reshape that).

A lot of people conflate marketing with promotion (i.e. advertising). It's not.

Marketing is about identifying the needs of a market and finding a way to serve them better than competitors. If you don't understand your market, how can you create a successful product for them? You can't, unless you're just lucky. And in that case, if you fail to understand the sources of your luck a more attuned competitor may steal market share from you anyway.

If you develop the product without understanding marketing you risk wasting time on something people don't want or that is strategically difficult to grow. For example, a hyperlocal events app faces different challenges to a two-sided marketplace like ebay, to a service company, etc. Even backed up by solid marketing it's difficult enough to create products people want. You can't just sprinkle on some magic marketing fairy dust after the product is built and expect to turn it into a hit.

You also need to understand your competition so you can find out how they're failing to meet the needs of niches. Or if they aren't and they're nailing it, come up with a different idea and move on.

If you're an idea guy, the most important thing to learn is to test ideas. That fundamentally involves marketing, perhaps combined with a prototype/MVP for ideas that pass initial filters. Don't fall into the trap of staying in your comfort zone as a developer unless you can find a marketer to work with who'll be the business brains behind your projects.

I agree with all your overall points. Minor nit though. Advertising is just one form of promotions that can include trial periods, sales, even meetups, blogs, newsletters, and things like that.

yep. came here to say the last paragraph. There are shit products that sell and great products that don't. gauging user interest is super important before investing time into building something.

(there was a post yesterday about tripAdvisor adding a broken link to pages to gauge interest before they invest in building the page, seems fitting here)

While you have a valid point, I disagree with how you said it.

Marketing is a term that comes from a going to a literal market to promote goods for sale.

A marketing team is different from the product team. A product team aims to understand the market and solve the problems for that market. While the marketing team's job is to let people know that you're solving the problems.

Marketing is about promoting. It's about letting people know you exist. Yes, you need to understand the market and solve a real pain but that part is product development. Marketing will worry about product placement, about knowing who the correct audience is, where to reach them, etc.

Maybe you learnt different things on your MBA than I did.

Maybe I learned marketing from marketing materials and not from a MBA - a non marketing qualifications.

You have two ears for a reason. What the MBA is informing you is marketing is a LOT MORE than promoting. I don't have an MBA, but I've learned that from decades of experience and listening to other people's expertise.

No, what the person with a MBA said was that marketing also included product development.

The person with this MBA's had no rebuttal to my reply pointing out that product development is not a marketing responsibility what they should build but how to get their solution in front of people who have that pain. It's marketing's responsibility for product placement to explain how the product solves their pain. To make the product understandable and relatable.

And no matter how many ears I have the fact they couldn't come up with a rebuttal to what I wrote and instead just talked about their MBA as a reason why they are right is very telling. And for someone who says they've learned from decades of experience and listening to people, you've also failed to rebut what I wrote. Since, there has been zero rebuttals to what I've written a smart person can only assume they have no rebuttals. So maybe you should learn from my experience and expertise and realise that product development does not belong to marketing and finding a problem to solve is not a marketing issue but a product development issue.

You might consider how a company (or individual) ought to decide which products to develop in the first place. Ideas are cheap. Companies often have a portfolio in different stages of development. Alternatively individuals need to decide which to focus on. In larger companies, product development typically includes cross-functional teams. While ideas can come from anywhere, without validating the market (and therefore understanding the market) odds of success are slim. Therefore marketers often aim to validate an idea's potential before moving through to MVP and staged releases.

You seem to believe that marketing's job is just to promote products. It's not. Under competent management, marketing should be involved with ideas early in the process and feed into the product teams to help them build things people want. Then, through iterative feedback, products can be improved to achieve product-market fit. Anyway, plenty of books on the subject. I like "Nail it then scale it". Good luck.

>You might consider how a company (or individual) ought to decide which products to develop in the first place.

By doing product research, this is done by the product management department. Not the marketing team.

> You seem to believe that marketing's job is just to promote products.

Clearly, you've not understood what I wrote. I mentioned several things that weren't promoting.

Overall, you have the right ideas you just have the wrong reasoning. It seems to think because the phrase is "market research" the responsibility belongs to the marketing department. The responsibility of validating ideas belongs to the product development team. Such as product positioning has the word "product" in it but is not a responsibility of the product team but a responsibility of the marketing team. You've understood the validating of ideas, etc. You've understood you need to understand the market. You've just not understood how to split responsibilities and how to set fair and proper expectations on roles.

The irony is priceless. Consider your long-winded comments as your running your mouth and meanwhile you have refused to listen to three different people explaining what marketing actuall is.

Priceless.

Three? I've had one person whose go to response was "I have a MBA" tell me that marketing is about finding the pain that you're going to build your product around who then said the product development team is cross functional - which is sometimes true but netherless doesn't change that it's not under the marketing department in any org unit charts. Just like how growth hacking teams are cross functional but are under the marketing department in org unit charts. They explained how product development works, not how marketing works. Which is why you'll never find what they said in any marketing books. You'll find them in product development books.

I've had you who has basically said twice I should be listening to other people while not bring anything to the table.

That would bring the count to two people. Only one person tried to explain anything. And the just kept saying the same stuff which I had earlier said was a valid point but disagreed with how they said it. Basically, they managed to be right while being wrong. So really the count is one. I would say the irony here is you not paying attention. Which is kind of why I suspect the two accounts are controlled by the same person.

Go in peace. You can lead a man to knowledge but you can't make him think. And yeah, it was two people, not three. Doesn't change the fact you don't listen AT ALL. But I suspect this isn't the first time in your life you've ever heard that.

Firstly, it was one. All you've said is "You should listen to MBA dude". That is not trying to explain jack.

Fun fact. I said at the start of all this I said there was a valid point but explained wrong. And at no point has anyone given any reason to dispute this. The best shot was "product development teams are cross functional"... Instead I got "I've got 20 years experience" or "I've got a MBA" like that was a valid rebuttal for someone disagreeing with how something was explained.

You never shut up, do you?

Why would I? Pointing out you being wrong is quite entertaining.

Au contraire, you continually proving my point is quite entertaining. I bet you play a mean pinball!

Nah, I don't play pinball. Not my thing.

However, I'm confused as to what point you think is getting proven? You've never really made a point. Unless it's I should listen to my elders without them justifying their point, which is funny.

I was needing to read this. I was previously understanding marketing as propaganda. Thanks.

Marketing is important, but like many skills, it needs to be applied to be valuable. All the books in the world won't tell you what resonates with your audience.

Start building an email list, and post regularly, 2-4 times per month. Don't wait until you have a product. Obviously you at least need to try to have a general idea of who your audience is.

As a solo founder, you'll need to have your hands in everything. That doesn't mean you'll always do the work, perhaps you can hire contractors, but you shouldn't have any blind spots. So round out your knowledge. For instance, if you're a front-end dev, learn to build the backend and the cloud essentials. (Don't use the idea that you can punt to Vercel or Heroku as an excuse - you still need a foundational understanding)

I'm a full-stack dev (I've worked with Go, C#, Python, JS and Java - just 3 month projects on average, except for JS). My academic background also includes cyber security and low level hardware (e.g. I've reimplemented Meltdown, Spectre and reversed binaries with IDA Pro). As far as technical stuff is concerned: I'm confident I can learn anything I need to.

I feel there are no "idea guys". There surely are "money guys" - people who can _sell_ an idea and get investors, customers, loans, ... Those are important in my experience, and lots of famous CEOs are just that.

You can either become a money guy, or attract money guys. Money guys are typically looking for things they can sell, so that's one way to get one: Have a project or even just skills they can work with. If you want to become one, getting into marketing sounds like a good start.

I personally gave up on the idea that I can be great at building stuff _and_ selling stuff. My advise would be to try different things, see what you're truly passionate about, and accept the notion that you'll eventually need help with the other stuff.

I like this idea. Having ideas is necessary, but everyone has ideas. Just having ideas isn’t enough. In a joint venture you can’t be the idea guy, you’ve gotta be bringing something else to the table. Are you the money guy or the builder/doer? If you’re neither of those, you’re likely not a good fit.

> I'm an idea guy by heart

Execution guys often like to present themselves like that, it sounds more fun, more creative, more hip than the grunt work that is behind every success story.

Thus, people tend to think being an idea guy is a key to success.

The world is full of idea guys, you just don't hear about them because that's not even close to being enough.

Be an execution guy.

I have a CS degree and pursued a marketing MBA. To make it short: i) a great product with basic marketing trumps a bad product with "fantastic marketing" on the long ii) the product makes the money, not the marketing iii) one can't hold both a CS and a marketing role at the same time as business grows, you will have to choose one or the other. About learning marketing, practice trumps theoretical knowledge. IMHO: build a great product and team-up with a competent marketer.

Thanks, really helpful advice :)

This is a great piece of advice, I think will be doing this in the long run

It's not a great question and I'll explain what business is then you will understand.

Paul Graham famously said that success is selling something people want. Period.

A lot of "ideas guys" might have an idea that seems good but straight away, you will need the skills to really prove the concept, to refine it, to pivot if necessary, to take advice lightly, to understand the industry and competitors.

Once you start selling, you might need better sales people or no sales people. You might need marketing but you might not. There are two ultimate requirements for success: 1) You do whatever you need to do to make the business succeed (spend in the right places, change, stop doing stuff etc.) and 2) You need to be able to hire a good team that can make this happen.

So the reason the question is not good is that you are asking about a specific tool rather than the top-level skills that everyone needs.

Caveat: Some people succeed without being great; some people who are great fail. Business is scary, not everyone can do it and being tough and confrontational is a skill that needs to be there to deal with everything else.

Good luck!

Start a side project, this will teach you more things than just marketing.

A quick list of learnings:

1. How to do deploy solutions quickly and efficiently. As a software developer, you will start by trying to make everything looks/works perfectly. Only time will teach you that this is not really required. Perfection is the enemy of a startup.

2. If you're going to build a product as a side project, you will learn than progress will not be as fast as you anticipate.

3. SEO, traffic, and building a network around you as some comments pointed out.

But if you'd like a book to start with before launching, I would recommend Value Proposition Design [0]. It will help you to understand who would benefit from your product and why they should care. This will be an ongoing process, but it will help to filter your ideas to make something appealing to your audience.

[0] https://www.strategyzer.com/books/value-proposition-design

The basicis:

https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-brainstorm-great-bu...

High level:

https://www.oreilly.com/content/how-to-create-products-peopl...

How to get started:

https://stackingthebricks.com/guides/your-first-10k/

A helping hand:

https://stackingthebricks.com/launchftw/

As a dev, think of marketing as a premature optimisation. In addition, if you learn the theory but have nothing to apply it to, all the knowledge will just erode.

I built 3 side projects without marketing knowledge. 2 of them have less than 5 clients. But those clients give me a lot of feedback. I am at the stage where I will have to either learn sales/marketing or outsource it in order to grow the projects.

So go for the second option - build something.

(no data to back it up, just personal, limited experience)

I wonder if marketing can be automated.

"Marketing" exists to bring the right solutions to the people who need them. Maybe that is something we could do via software.

Advertising is usually seen as a negative, annoying thing. But if marketing would be more efficient, wouldn't it be a wonderful thing? If you saw a box and knew that inside is a tool that will make you more productive and increase the quality of your life - wouldn't you want to look inside?

Could we build that box via software?

Practice generating traffic.

An example could be a blog. Start with 1 article and promote it.

This is something you could do today, then you'll have an idea what it's like to do marketing.

This is the most valuable skill to learn. Also try to build an audience around a topic you know well on social media.

Learn how to sell. I can't tell you how. I don't consider myself good at it. But if there was something I wish I was good at 15 years into my career, it's selling. Everything is selling. Especially if you're into building a startup in the future - convincing someone to buy into your business, or convincing customers why a feature is worth the price they have to pay.

I think the ability to sell and close deals is the most critical skill set for early-stage company CEOs. I have noticed technical founders generally lack experience in customer-facing roles or closing deals will need to acquire these skills. I think you should possess a natural instinct for strategy, motivating people, and garnering investment in your ideas from others.

Honestly, lack of marketing knowledge shouldn't hold you back. It's something you'll learn eventually through hit and trial. No matter how good a course or a book, no marketing plan has a 0% failure rate. In fact, I would say worrying about marketing is a hindrance than anything. You'll start experimenting with ads, social channels, when you should be worrying about getting feedback and customers. The fact is business consists of moving so many levers that by the time you learn of all of them, you'll be 50. Let's say you learn marketing, then, what about Sales? Customer success? Accounting?

What makes or breaks a business isn't lack of expertise in these domains, it's simply focus and confidence in the problem you're trying to solve. Most of the times, founders don't have enough of that. If you think your idea has a good market, simply start talking to your customers, building, and getting feedback. You don't need more than that.

Just a side note from someone who was/still is in your situation: there’s not that much in software/digital marketing, that you can’t learn even better by actually practicing it.

Basically get out there and talk about things you do, get people interested, and take off from there!

As someone who has taken a number of marketing courses I still agree with this. And whatever the sophistication of digital marketing these days, for a startup or even a smaller company it’s mostly unnecessary.

And if it gets to the point where you want to do press outreach etc. you probably want to hire a pro with a Rolodex who knows how the game works.

Some advice:

1. Find a social media site that works for you, and post regularly, daily if possible, but don't spend too much time per day. Twitter works well. Then build up your follower account. No matter which startup you launch in the years to come, a strong follower count will help your marketing efforts.

2. Do start a side project. You'll find out which tech stack you prefer and gain some minimum experience. You'll also come up against some problems you'll need to solve, and spend time thinking about those problems and how to solve them quickly and efficiently in the future. E.g. how to best implement auth. If possible implement payments, just to know how they work and be ready once you have a startup going.

Learn to love the problem, helping the customer, identifying and understanding their pain points. You are already strong on the "solution" side of things - but you need to avoid just creating solutions looking for problems.

Hi!

First, congratulations on your project! As Onion said: determination is the key. I'd like to recommend a blog article called "Biggest Mistakes First-time Startup Founders Make": https://www.ratherlabs.com/post/biggest-mistakes-first-time-...

It provides an interesting read about startup projects and how to start making them.

Wish you the best of luck!

Consider joining a small but growing startup as an employee. It's a bit of a gamble, but if you find one that grows from e.g. <10 to >50 people in 3-5 years, that will be the best way to learn marketing (and sales, customer support, product, etc etc) which is not replicable through any books, courses etc.

You can learn what does _and doesn't_ work, work with and learn from a team (and hopefully a good founder), and then apply those lessons to your own side project or startup.

As someone who is a programmer at heart, I have always launched new software projects for the last decade or so. Almost all of my projects tanked as I could not market or position my products efficiently.

Naturally, I want to recommend learning marketing if your goal is to earn money from your products where you can sustain yourself from your own products.

Marketing isn’t a problem if your product is good. You could waste a lot of time learning the usual marketing tactics. It’s way better to spend this time talking to customer and learn how to build.

If you build something people really want you just need to tell them that you built a solution and you got a client.

There are also a lot of great products that don’t communicate what they do well — there’s some intersection between marketing and good UX there.

Making something “people want” inherently has “marketing” implied - people don’t want something they’ve never heard of!

If it's obvious someone with marketing skills can also steal it and sell as their own .. but if not, they won't know until it's too late

Eh, I wouldn't agree with this. As much as it comes up a lot on Hacker News, it's not always as easy as 'build it and they'll come'.

Many mediocre products and services have won out over good ones due to decent marketing, and you can likely name many of them in the enterprise world especially. You'll probably need a base level of competence for people to keep using your product/service at all, but most people's attitudes are "if it does what I need it to, it's good enough"

Do both, pick a few very small ideas that you can build and learn to market, don't treat these “the idea” but more as training grounds for yourself and keep them small and self-contained. These could be products that already exist, in fact that's probably preferable for learning.

You've got to do both or find a co-founder that rounds off your startup team, in this case I guess it would be someone on the sales/marketing/commercial side.

If you do go down the route of learning and upskilling in marketing. You'll probably find a solid startup idea along the way.

  We saw this happen so often that we made up a name for it 
  
  -- Paul Graham

Before the Startup http://www.paulgraham.com/before.html

'I'm an idea guy by heart' -> Who isn't, it's the easiest part.

Not all devs are. I am. I am also a dev. I'm the type of idea guy that is willing to learn whatever it takes. I'm now done learning dev. I got it handled. Time for the next phase.

Idea is usually 1% and execution is 99%. I have learned that the hard way, so I am not sure if emphasizing the 1% is the way to go. Take Google for example - the idea to provide search based on keywords with some ranking is very simple, execution not so much.

Marketing’s important sure, but if you want to be well rounded and run a startup I’d suggest getting a basic knowledge of at least these as well: Finance, Law as it relates to your business, HR/employment, Risk mgmt.

Why not both? Do a side project where you learn both marketing and execution. Learn how to delegate work for non essential components and how to take a product to market.

If you start at #2 you will eventually have to learn #1.

If you start at #1 you will eventually start #2 to apply what you learnt at #1.

Or maybe find a co-founder. Of course learning is always good. I'm in the same boat so I have no idea which one is best.

The best way to learn how to launch startups is to launch startups.

> solo founder

Why do you want to be a solo founder?

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