Did anyone else have their display get corrupted by opening this site, opening Chrome dev tools, and closing chrome dev tools? My screen started putting up random squares of color and other artifacts and I lost keyboard control.
Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
21–30 of 152 posts
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#22Nice. So one of the things that happened to me when I came to the Bay Area was I was working at Intel and I had to talk to a lot of marketing folks (who were talking to 'the public' about Intel's chips). I realized I didn't have a clue what they did. I set out to correct that before I started my own company and looked for a job that would let me work closely with marketing but still be engineering based. I found one…
Another Sun story. I was at the annual Sun employee conference way back in 2002. As engineers, we were raving about Java/Swing & the JDK. After a while, one of the audience members couldn't take it anymore & spoke up loudly - "WTF is Java ? It has never made a dime. We sell boxes. That's what makes money. We should be talking about that!"
He was a marketing guy for the Sparc workstations that was Sun's bread & butter. Atleast for a brief window of time, the Java server-side experience was actually better on a Sparc than anywhere else.
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#23> Are people waiting for the trial to run out (14 day trial) ...?
People who buy your software usually do so during the first few days of a trial. Only a small percentage of those who let the trial go to the end will buy.
Source: My (and fellow [m]ISV's) experience over the years.
/edit: Oh, btw: A search in the mac app store for "github issue tracker" (and other similar terms) won't show your app.
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#24Congrats on your launch!
Be careful about your plan to "…keep pushing out updates to the app to fill out the feature requests existing users have". It's easy to fall back to strengths – adding fun features, responding to tangible requests from existing customers. But clearly your priority should be getting the word out.
Maybe commit to yourself: no new features unless you're certain they will close new sales?
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#25One small tip - your page links to the app page, but doesn't otherwise say anything about what it does, just calling it "this thing". That diary page is marketing too, include a summary of what it does there!
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#26Downloaded, installed, tried. Created a new task and drag'n'dropped it inside the another one. Couldn't drag it out again. Closed the app. Seems very nice though, I'll give it another try after a while.
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#27Don't forget to update us with the results of getting to Hacker News Front Page!
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#28One small tip - your page links to the app page, but doesn't otherwise say anything about what it does, just calling it "this thing". That diary page is marketing too, include a summary of what it does there!
And it talks in the end about how users can't provide feedback, but the blog entry doesn't let you comment or even give a way to email, just a link to his twitter account.
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#29This is really awesome. I'm almost at the beta point with my own side project, and I'm realizing it's time to do some marketing (virtual pet game for FireFoxOS/browsers - goal is to be interesting to smart people). I'm realizing I simply don't know how to do this marketing thing (yeah, emails, landing page, etc, but those only work when people get there.)
Re: Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing
#30What I would like to read is why the OP put his time into building a task app. Not because the world doesn't need another one (I'm not being sarcastic here...)...but if you don't have much talent or time for marketing, then something must have been guiding you, right? I would think that without any other external guidance, it's the programmer himself who finds the product useful and uses it everyday as he develops it…
Yes. I work on contract iOS jobs and I need to track my time to invoice my clients. It sucks using my web browser to start and stop the timer. I also wanted quick access to all my tasks, past and present without going through a slower web UI. Also the app comes in handy when I need to jot down a quick note or remember something. Maybe I should incorporate some of that ^ on the site.
Forgo the maybe and do it. We use a redmine clone at my current employer and opening a tab or a billion is still rough. I've always preferred clients. If I could live in visual studio like I wanted when I started, there's a decent open source one for that. Also tortoisemine helps with respect to linking checkins but I'm still on a text file keeping track until I get around to putting stuff in. Its never exciting or useful.
There does seem to be a saturation of apps on my platform: windows phone to where just another makes no sense. Mostly devs make it for themselves and since we're all unique, these things are like snowflakes too.