Programming as a Marketing Weapon

blog.optimizationrobot.com

We've been kicking around similar ideas for our startup - this helps to jumpstart our motivation again.

It's a really effective approach, and I think it's cool that it flips the situation of 'programmers being bad at marketing' around.

It makes me sad, actually, that anyone has to justify creating useful little things because they are 'weapons'. You're making tools as content to get my (brief, sporadic) attention on some ads, so you get paid. 20k views a month for your greatest success - how much does that net you? And is it worth the mercenary attitude?

Hey Josh, please forgive the hyperbole of the post title.

I get what you're saying but I think you're taking this in a different way than it was intended. These tools are all something that hopefully helps somebody out (for instance I get emails and tweets about how useful people find ForAGoodStrftime all the time), and as such are a wildly different alternative to me buying a bunch of Google/Facebook/Banner ads.

This isn't about tricking anyone or any scummy advertising, it is much more: "If you found this tool useful, I'd appreciate it if would checkout this other project I've been working on."

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