Ask HN: I'm a good programmer, I know nothing about marketing. Where do I start?

I'm working on a webapp for time management. (www.timeblocker.dev, if you're curious).

I keep procrastinating by tweaking technical things, but let's face it - there's no value to increasing the performance/maintainability of something that no one is using.

I know I need to market it, and I've made some posts here and there about it, but I feel like I have no idea what I'm doing.

Is there some sort of Marketing 101 youtube series or Coursera course that just covers some base level knowledge?

Not sure I have any good marketing references, but I would ask / say

- Why would I want to use this over my current calendar?

- What makes your product different?

- Who responds to this? Can you find a niche who wants this?

Do not spend money on advertising until you can reach some users and learn from them.

I would recommend going through the https://startupschool.org videos. For most products, "marketing" comes later, at least the kind you would find in a course on marketing. This is not the kind of marketing you want to do. You want to post about it on social media, other places your users would be, quality content helps people discover the things around it.

Also consider time management apps are a dime a dozen, a hyper-crowded space. What are you trying to get out of this project?

These books are probably dated by now but they're a good place to start:

"Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion" by Robert B. Cialdini

"Persuasion Engineering" by Richard Bandler

I'd be happy to introduce you to an engineer I know who is building a very interesting product that is starting to gain some traction. He lacks computer science knowledge/skills to build the backend he needs and would happily share 50% of his startup with someone like you.

“Traction” book is possibly the best book on the subject that is more or less recent and relevant to a wide range of businesses. It’s also very practical