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Marketing is scary for a solo developer

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Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#131

Post by michaelje »

magicroot75 wrote: post #26

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…

I agree.

As a marketer, improving my understanding of the development process and technology in general has been one of the best skills I continue to learn. I have built a personal project iOS app but have no desire to be an engineer. (Know what you're good at and all that!)

I see it as a forever loop that continues to build on itself, going back and forth between marketing and engineering. Understanding users/behaviours/needs can greatly inform the product scoping and add clarity to the development process with the “why” that makes a product or feature more useful - which in turn then becomes easier to market and solve user use cases.

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#132

Post by yboris »

Marketing is hard. I have a personal charityware project Video Hub App that I've tried to promote. The most sensible place seems like Reddit, but even when posting to a fitting subreddit, my posts sometimes get taken down because you're not allowed to "self promote". Which means there is almost no avenue I can find.

I had success with my first post of the app on HN, but it feels rude to re-post it to HN often. It's been 3+ years and I've had over 3,600 purchases, but I still don't know how to share my app (paying for ads is not an option I want to consider).

https://videohubapp.com/ & MIT open source https://github.com/whyboris/Video-Hub-App

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#133

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

playpause wrote: post #120
fny wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Marketing and sales should be siloed away from devs. This is why you need a product person to intermediate. Marketing and sales has very different incentives from developers. Marketers are often trigger happy with features because they "sell" despite the fact that these feature may have a short shelf life and may take resources away from developing of more essential product features. Developers are similarly alle…

Off topic, but there is something intensely irritating about replies that start with “No.” It’s fine to disagree and argue whatever point you want, but when you open with “No.” it seems like you’re saying “You are objectively wrong; I will now enlighten you with the correct viewpoint.”

I'd say that it's central to the topic as it illustrates the problem perfectly.

Marketing is a dialogue between the producer and the user/prospective user. If the first response to someone trying to be helpful is "No." then that dialogue has been essentially shut down immediately and neither side is going to learn anything.

No one who wants to understand the other side's needs is going to respond that way. So they're showing that they have no interest in marketing what they're working on.

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#134

Post by kayodelycaon »

magicroot75 wrote: post #26

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…

> I think marketers and developers need a stronger culture between ourselves.

I fully agree.

I've worked with an incredible b2b salesman before. He wasn't very technical, but he was always curious about what was possible and how difficult it would be to accomplish. Going to a conference with him as the technical expert was amazing. Customers were a gold mine for information. We always looked deeper to find the problems to solve, not the features to create. Learned a lot from him.

Sadly, I haven't had this dynamic since.

Since then, I've run into marketing departments. My issue with them is they constantly switch tools, want immediate results, and destroy site performance without any concern for the path of destruction they leave behind. And marketing is good at selling stuff internally as they are externally. As a result, few people in management care about how marketing impacts anything else in the company.

On the flip side, marketing is the first department to be stabbed in the back when numbers come up badly. It's not really a surprise to me they treat other departments as scapegoats pass blame to.

Things don't have to be this way. :(

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#135

Post by runnerup »

konschubert wrote: post #51
tymm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Were you able to make your Google ads profitable?

Yes, but only if I manually counted conversions that google didn't see due to ad blockers. But yes. It was great. I felt like I had a dial that I could turn up and down to make my business go. Then, bam, second suspension. "Misleading ads". I have no intention to mislead anyone. Makes me feel very helpless.

I wonder if unscrupulous competitors reported you en mass.

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#136

Post by libertine »

CJefferson wrote: post #127
libertine wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> my default view is that I don't want to lie or over-promise This is the greatest prejudice around marketing in the tech community. A simple exercise you can do that debunks that frame of thought: lies are unsustainable. Unless you're a government or a monopoly that has their predictable flow of revenue, lies aren't affordable. You can lie and scam people, but that's not a long term strategy, because you'll burn off…

I see Tesla's promises on self-driving cars over many years as lies. It doesn't see to have done them any harm so far.

Tesla or Elon promising?

I know there's an barely visible line.

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#137

Post by kstenerud »

vbezhenar wrote: post #105
magicroot75 wrote: post #26

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…

Many developers don't want to deliver a high-impact product. They want to enjoy the process of creation, earn some reasonable money and make lifes of some people better.

A high impact product doesn't necessarily mean a money maker. I'll never make a cent off https://concise-encoding.org but I'd certainly like it to become high impact and make everyones lives better! And that requires some good marketing, which unfortunately I'm only mediocre at.

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#138

Post by davedx »

smugglerFlynn wrote: post #82
davedx wrote: post #53

I take it one step further. Having worked with large marketing departments, I have decided I don’t like marketing at all. It tends to follow psychological tactics to gain attention, often in deceptive or underhanded ways. You van see this by looking at the kind of features products like Hubspot offer: lots of creepy “tracking” of leads. Contrast with sales: sales is about directly showing people your product and gett…

There are all sorts of deceptive tactics used in Sales as well. I think it all boils down to your personal professionalism and culture in the end: some people choose to go the easy route, some people don’t. Unfortunately, mass culture of both Sales and Marketing industries seems to heavily rely on deception today. Could it be that the reason you contrast Marketing with Sales is because you’ve seen how marketing indus…

I don't know. The sales dept I worked most closely with was for a utility company, which is extremely price competitive, so the hustlers who go out there to sell to people can be pretty aggressive tactically, but I still find that if you ignore the pushiness, it's mostly honest and above board. (Used cars salespeople have a bit of a different reputation on honesty I hear but I don't have direct experience there).

Whereas marketing, it's in the DNA of the whole industry to be sneaky, even creepy. The constant tracking, the bending and distortion of truths, the dark patterns and deceptive practices, it's pretty rotten. Count up all the trackers and spyware installed on the average website. Guess who pushed to get them all installed? Almost certainly the marketing department.

There are honest folk who work in marketing and genuinely care about the product, the customer, and approach their job ethically, but from what I've seen they're in the minority.

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#140

Post by _teyd »

mdorazio wrote: post #130
j4yav wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's designed from the ground up for async collaboration and focus (you collaborate on decisions like you might an issue, rather than interruptive chat discussions or worse, meetings.) It's based on how I saw collab work at a unicorn I worked at that was doing remote work well pre-pandemic, and that I've seen replicated elsewhere. However, it feels very foreign to people who haven't experienced that. What I've seen i…

> It's designed from the ground up for async collaboration and focus (you collaborate on decisions like you might an issue, rather than interruptive chat discussions or worse, meetings.) This doesn’t really tell me anything. Can you provide a real-world example of how it would work on a project? Is there a ~10 second video or gif of it in action? Or even more basic, what specifically made you angry enough with existi…

The app has a list of topics that anyone can add to. Each topic has a due date so you know when it is wrapping up, and they also have an explicit context and outcome; the topic creator sets the context, and the outcome is the bit that everyone collaborates on by editing together/using the discussion thread. Once the topic is done and a decision made, you lock the topic, saving the context, decision, and the discussion thread for later reference.

It's better than Slack because it lets you engage with discussions more mindfully and across time zones, rather than as they come up in easy to miss and fragmented threads, and ensures that the decision is self-documenting when it's done. It's also better than something like Notion, an Issue, or Google Doc because it has better embedded conversation threads, and comes with the structure for separating context and decision.

Everything else we tried was too free form, this brought just enough structure to get everyone on the same page and make decisions/discuss topics without getting in the way, while having some consistency to finding them and how the conversations were structured.

Does this help? There is a video up at https://asyncgo.com, but it suffers from how hard it has been to figure out how to talk about the app clearly.

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