Marketing for Product-Obsessed Developers | Hacker News Reader

Marketing for Product-Obsessed Developers

marclou.beehiiv.com

90 pointsmarclou21 comments

> "Take a standalone feature of your main startup and make a free version of it."

> "It’s also a good strategy to validate potential features. Instead of cluttering your main product, launch a standalone feature as a free tool."

Creating free, viral 'mini-apps' to promote your main product is a genius idea. It's like hitting two birds with one stone — marketing your main product and testing new features without messing it all up.

I've been following Marc Lou[1] for a while, and I really dig his approach as a 'solopreneur.' It's cool to see someone who's real about the ups and downs of the bootstrapping journey. No sugar coating and honest about some life issues along the way like depression.

[1] https://twitter.com/marc_louvion

Looking here https://marclou.com/, it seems a somewhat classic entrepreneur selling to entrepreneur kind of projects.

Not that it could not work for other products, it sounds sensible but I've seen so many of those that learned to be careful.

During a gold rush, sell shovels.

Yeah exactly, I'll be skeptical of any sales or marketing material made by people which succeeded by selling said material. They have to prove their experience somewhere else than this very specific niche.

I got the same vibes. Marketing to developers who don't like marketing by pretending to be a developer who doesn't like marketing but doing almost nothing but marketing.

Take a standalone feature of a product and make it free

Indirectly this also forces decomposition and building loosely coupled features even at a product level. The speed for delivery and iteration acts as a force function to build pipelines and systems to adapt the new feature into the product should it be a runaway success.

May be the small engineering benefits for a building obsessed dev.

Free tools work great for traffic. What’s the best way to convert users into paying users after?

I have tried a lot of things for my side project like limited generations of the output and then putting a signup requirement if you want to use the tool more often but people are simply not converting to the main solution.

Link to free tool: https://www.hackathon.camp/free-tools/hackathon-certificate-...

What are your users main alternative to upgrading to your paid product?

This is cool, I don't realistically know how to market a website at all, besides there being this thing called "SEO".

How does one learn to market themselves this way? I come from a culture that values privacy & humility and it's really hard to express myself in public like this. I have no trouble doing it IRL, but doing it online just seems... wrong to me.

I understand that if I want to sell products, people need to find out about it someway and good marketing is what drives people to your product, but it just seems like such a foreign language to me.

I’d love a book like Founding Sales, which was excellent and taught me as a developer how to sell, but focused on marketing instead. And maybe product-led growth rather than a sales cycle.

Thanks i'll check it out!

Yep, makes sense as a marketing guide by using the free product as the top of funnel for your sales pipeline

Doesn't this just offload the work of marketing the main product to marketing the free tool?

I've been following this strategy and it works pretty well for me.

A few tips if you want to pursue this strategy (sorry, English is not my mother language):

- It can be great for SEO, so pay attention to keywords for these free tools

- Collect email addresses if possible

- Mention your main product, multiple times. But don't annoy your users (minimize popup, snag screen...)

- Minimize your time on building these tools, ideally less than 2 weeks

- Picking features to make it free: ideally not a core features (obviously), but fun and good for marketing (visual appealing, wow effects etc.)

- Submit to as many directories as you can. People love free tools

- Subdomain/subfolder or separated domain? Ideally subfolder for SEO juice, but it could live on its own and you can 301 redirect later. Also you might want to turn one of these tool into a paid one, separated domain would be better in this case.

- If you collect email addresses, do not promote the main product after at least 3-4 product email updates of that free tool. People _might_ remember your free tool, but almost never remember your main product.

Here are 2 examples:

1. I build a native ChatGPT/AI app for Mac called BoltAI[0]. One of the features was to "chat with screenshots", basically take the screenshot with a shortcut key then type your prompt and let GPT-4 Vision handle your request.

I turned it into a free, standalone app called ShotSolve[1] and it's been welcomed by many users. So far it brought ~1k visitors to BoltAI with about 5% converted to paid customers. I also collected about 500 emails, which I could nurture into paid users later (hopefully)

2. I build a tool to send web articles to Kindle called KTool[2]. It supports multiple type of content and so I figured I could build free, standalone tools for each of these content and give it for free for the right community.

- [Send Hacker News threads to Kindle](https://ktool.io/hacker-news-to-kindle)

- [Send AZW3 to Kindle](https://ktool.io/azw3-to-kindle)

- [Send Reddit to Kindle](https://ktool.io/reddit-to-kindle)

The HN tool brough about 20K visitors to my product and helped kickstart the initial growth of my product.

Each tool drives about 200-500 visitors monthly to the main product.

[0]: https://boltai.com

[1]: https://shotsolve.com

[2]: https://ktool.io

What are the risks of offering access to GPT4 ?

Users bring their own keys so no risks. I might add support for Llava later

> If you collect email addresses, do not promote the main product after at least 3-4 product email updates of that free tool.

I would generalize to: if you collect email addresses, do not use them for anything other than the original stated intent. For example, if the collection form said "enter email to get notified when this launches", use the collected addresses for the launch announcement, and then get rid of them.

This is the email marketing equivalent of donating 100% of your profits to charity; I applaud it, but it’s not good business advice.

This is ethical email marketing.

Here's another bad business advice: don't be a spammer, don't facilitate spamming, don't work with spammers.

Looks like I’m doing something similar without being aware of it. My latest free macOS app IsThereNet [1] is really just a swift file bundled as an app. But it got a lot more press than I expected and brought enough users for my Clop app [2] where my marketing efforts did very little.

I like to help others by sharing my efforts into fixing macOS incoveniences. But going from a script that runs fine for years on my Mac to a thing that can run on other Macs requires 1-2 days of concentrated effort so I don’t do this for everything I create.

[1] https://lowtechguys.com/istherenet

[2] https://lowtechguys.com/clop

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