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Marketing is scary for a solo developer

raumet.com

41–50 of 280 posts

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#41

Upvoting for the honesty. And I feel the same way. Earlier I had a consultancy company but I noticed that the clients rather wrote contracts with the other consultancy companies that had sellers, was good with small-talk, met in person and and gave them coffee. It didn't matter that my service was much better with half the cost.

Jordan Peterson, of all people, spoke about this once. One of the things his experience taught him was that when you are "talking to a company", you are not taking to the company itself but one of their employees who has their own goals and career ambitions. For example, in my business (selling open-source oscilloscopes, mostly direct to public but sometimes to universities or retailers), I found that offering a broa…

I'm reminded of this famous article from the Deming institute: https://deming.org/nobody-gives-a-hoot-about-profit/

It's true, too. The only people with a real interest in the profitability are those with significant equity and even those will balance the profit motive with their other interests. But most employees don't have significant equity in the company they work for and by the very nature of a company most low-level decisions will be made by regular employees. Profit is a secondary concern among many that you can use to increase your leverage (ie, sometimes being involved with a very profitable new project can be leveraged into promotion). As Dr. Ackoff says in the linked article, paying lip service to company profits is just the cost employees must pay in order to maximize their rewards.

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#43
As a solo developer (https://simplepush.io) that hates marketing as well, I often find myself trying to make use of paid ads. Probably because it is easier to spend some money than writing a good article. However it hasn't really worked for me so far. Wondering if other solo developers had some success with paid ads?

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#44

I work solely in marketing/advertising and have no clue how to code. I generally enjoy technology, which is why I'm on HN. I think marketers and developers need a stronger culture between ourselves. The tools of marketers (data mining, consumer behavior analysis, surveys, market testing, etc) aren't just a veneer to be applied at the completion of a development project. Marketing, when done correctly, informs UX. Mar…

> This is not the optimal means to delivering a high-impact product.

This is just a single data point, but for a view "from the other side", my honest and immediate answer to this question is: "I don't care".

When writing programs, my concern has never been "to deliver a high-impact product". In fact, I find this language very annoying; and saying that my program is a "product" feels like a very offensive insult. The goal is never to deliver a product, much less a high impact product. The goal is always to solve a problem that I have, regardless of whether any other person on earth has the same problem. Now, I may have been given that problem because it was deemed useful to other people, but during the actual act of programming I prefer to make an abstraction of that and focus only on the problem itself.

EDIT: I appreciate that there are managers and such that keep proposing meaningful problems. I also like to find problems myself, and sometimes I appreciate when (rarely) they turn out to be shared with others, who in turn are happy that I solved them. But this is always a happy secondary effect, never the main goal.

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#45

I work solely in marketing/advertising and have no clue how to code. I generally enjoy technology, which is why I'm on HN. I think marketers and developers need a stronger culture between ourselves. The tools of marketers (data mining, consumer behavior analysis, surveys, market testing, etc) aren't just a veneer to be applied at the completion of a development project. Marketing, when done correctly, informs UX. Mar…

This is such a typical marketing response. Instead of building people up, you’ve got to come in and tell them that they’ve been wrong since the start? And the path to being right is through hiring someone like you??

First, this doesn’t do anyone any favours. Second, if marketing types would stop being such know it alls, you would have an easier time interacting with developers while they’re building something. Third, marketing isn’t special. And finally, you don’t even understand how or why developers build things.

Be nice and build developers up, especially on a thread with a bunch of people sharing their innermost fears. This whole “you’ve been wrong since the beginning; the cure is me” is terrible marketing. Not to mention that it’s cruel.

Be decent to hackers.

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#46

I've started to sell a physical product that I make and have had my google merchant account suspended twice. The algorithms claim that my ads are misleading. I don't think they are, I hope they aren't. The first time, I appealed and it got un-suspended. No reason given. I thought: Cool, must have been a mistake but it's been sorted out. Then, after a couple days, another suspension. Now I don't know what to do. Googl…

Were you able to make your Google ads profitable?

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#47
post #43

As a solo developer ( https://simplepush.io ) that hates marketing as well, I often find myself trying to make use of paid ads. Probably because it is easier to spend some money than writing a good article. However it hasn't really worked for me so far. Wondering if other solo developers had some success with paid ads?

ads don’t work unless you have Coca Cola budgets

why not share your project here more often and other sites like ProductHunt, IndieHackers?

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#48
post #43

As a solo developer ( https://simplepush.io ) that hates marketing as well, I often find myself trying to make use of paid ads. Probably because it is easier to spend some money than writing a good article. However it hasn't really worked for me so far. Wondering if other solo developers had some success with paid ads?

I've done some search ads for https://www.nslookup.io in the early days, but I don't think it has done much. I don't track users, so I don't know if it got me any returning users. In any case, facebook's recent downtime [1] and a well-received blog post [2] brought in much more traffic.

[1] https://plausible.io/nslookup.io?period=custom&from=2020-12-...

[2] https://plausible.io/nslookup.io?period=custom&from=2020-12-...

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#49

At the end you touch on why it’s hard: fear of failure. When you put yourself out there you have to accept rejection. For developers, coding is an easy way to hide. It’s also why working for yourself is hard. Having a boss tell you what to do lets you off the hook.

My problem isn't fear of failure. Rather it's something around fear of being in the spotlight, or fear of being ridiculed, that keeps me from marketing my canvas library more aggressively.

For instance, I've submitted to HN various links to the library 22 times in the past 30 months. My particular fear about submitting to HN is the thought of being accused of spamming the site, which I'd find humiliating. I don't have such fears about posting to Twitter (with appropriate tags) because Twitter is more ephemeral - I also get a rush from retweets, even if most retweets are bot-driven.

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#50

I've started to sell a physical product that I make and have had my google merchant account suspended twice. The algorithms claim that my ads are misleading. I don't think they are, I hope they aren't. The first time, I appealed and it got un-suspended. No reason given. I thought: Cool, must have been a mistake but it's been sorted out. Then, after a couple days, another suspension. Now I don't know what to do. Googl…

When I made an account to buy Google ads (and almost immediately gave up), I was always getting contacted by people at Google sales trying to make me actually buy the ads. They offered all kinds of help on creating and focusing the content.

Was that experience unusual? And couldn't those people help you making your ad adherent to whatever rule Google uses?

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