Live data from Hacker News

Side Project Marketing Checklist

sideprojectchecklist.com

21–30 of 70 posts

Re: Side Project Marketing Checklist

#21
post #9
post #5

> [ ] Record/post video of you reading the post on YouTube. Lol, really? I don't see the benefit of doing that. It's way faster to read text than to watch a video.

It does help with SEO, if you give a link back to your site :)

and it wastes your time since you could be doing somethIng more productive instead or rehashing the same thing.

Re: Side Project Marketing Checklist

#22
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree, its not common in UK/Ireland so if someone does it, I reckon 90% of people just polietly try to hangup quickly

And the remaining 10% will give a tirade of verbal abuse before hanging up - cold calling in the UK is not welcome.

cold calling is not welcome anywhere.

Re: Side Project Marketing Checklist

#23
post #13

That list explain perfectly why I don't want to work on "marketing stuff" anymore. So much opportunity to waste time and money on trivial things. A blog ? A "sneeze page" ? What's the point if you don't have anything interesting to write ? A/B testing landing page and newsletter ? Is that difficult to get honest feedback from people who care ?

> A/B testing landing page and newsletter ? Is that difficult to get honest feedback from people who care ?

Individual feedback doesn't replace large-scale A/B testing. If you're getting feedback from people who care (possibly implying they know you personally), it's also possible that they could deliver biased or unrepresentative feedback.

Re: Side Project Marketing Checklist

#26
post #13

That list explain perfectly why I don't want to work on "marketing stuff" anymore. So much opportunity to waste time and money on trivial things. A blog ? A "sneeze page" ? What's the point if you don't have anything interesting to write ? A/B testing landing page and newsletter ? Is that difficult to get honest feedback from people who care ?

> A/B testing landing page and newsletter ? Is that difficult to get honest feedback from people who care ? Individual feedback doesn't replace large-scale A/B testing. If you're getting feedback from people who care (possibly implying they know you personally), it's also possible that they could deliver biased or unrepresentative feedback.

I think people understand the theory, but do most people have enough traffic on a side project to have viable A/B tests?

Re: Side Project Marketing Checklist

#27
post #13

That list explain perfectly why I don't want to work on "marketing stuff" anymore. So much opportunity to waste time and money on trivial things. A blog ? A "sneeze page" ? What's the point if you don't have anything interesting to write ? A/B testing landing page and newsletter ? Is that difficult to get honest feedback from people who care ?

> A/B testing landing page and newsletter ? Is that difficult to get honest feedback from people who care ? Individual feedback doesn't replace large-scale A/B testing. If you're getting feedback from people who care (possibly implying they know you personally), it's also possible that they could deliver biased or unrepresentative feedback.

For large scale A/B testing you need a certain amount of visitors first to get the necessary statistical significance, otherwise its feedback is unrepresentative as well. A lot of side projects probably don't have enough visitors for that.

Re: Side Project Marketing Checklist

#28
post #13

That list explain perfectly why I don't want to work on "marketing stuff" anymore. So much opportunity to waste time and money on trivial things. A blog ? A "sneeze page" ? What's the point if you don't have anything interesting to write ? A/B testing landing page and newsletter ? Is that difficult to get honest feedback from people who care ?

I feel this list is intended for full-on, VC-yearning startups. My admittedly limited experience is that if you're going for more of a small business product, you could eliminate about 75% of this list. The rest is just "industry hacking".

What's the 25% left?

Re: Side Project Marketing Checklist

#29
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel this list is intended for full-on, VC-yearning startups. My admittedly limited experience is that if you're going for more of a small business product, you could eliminate about 75% of this list. The rest is just "industry hacking".

What's the 25% left?

Depends on your product, I guess? For me, it's usually: make a splash page, make sure your assets (app icon, screenshots, trailers) are eye-catching and professional, write about different aspects of your product on your blog, condense your pitch down to a paragraph at most, e-mail every publication you can think of (and follow up), post in lots of topical forums and comment sections (esp. HN and subreddits), submit your product to publications that give out awards, try as much as possible to catch the eye of Apple's promo team if you're in the app business... but, caveat emptor, I'm also not great at it yet. It's a hard job.

Re: Side Project Marketing Checklist

#30
post #8

An online marketing veteran here! This list is really good. I can actually help people execute these to-dos on the list for their side projects :)

As a "online marketing veteran", you don't have anything critical of this list to add, or anything constructive? Did you even read the list, or are you just trying to drum up customers to your services and get some SEO action?

At the very least say something useful if you're going to do that. This is worse than those bots that spam comments on blog posts with "great content" and a link back to their spam site.

edit: I see you copied and pasted your post from the same article elsewhere. You're basically a spammer.

Post reply on HN