Marketing is scary for a solo developer • Hacker News Board

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#61

Post by MarcellusDrum » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

hluska wrote: post #45

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…

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,…

I'm a developer, and I can't find anything disrespectful in OP's comment. I don't know anything about marketing to determine if what they are saying is true, but they are giving their opinion based on their experience, which I find valuable and worth considering.

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#62

Post by city41 » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 1:15 PM UTC

I also feel like marketing has gotten much much harder in recent years due to extreme saturation of products. Take games for example, there were 11,000 released on Steam this year alone. I've noticed over the past couple years a lot of subreddits I frequent have been overtaken by people promoting their products. Even if you have something really great, it seems like you're sharing it with audiences who are now really worn out from it all.

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#63

Post by tymm » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 1:16 PM UTC

ushakov wrote: post #47

tymm wrote: 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?

Because I just want to finish that one feature before sharing it ;) Jokes aside, I just don't like the idea of spamming communities. I probably should do it more often though.

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#64

Post by mauvehaus » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 1:16 PM UTC

It's any solo business, really, and it's more than just marketing. I hate doing bookkeeping as well. Wrenching on machinery runs the gamut from fun but unprofitable to "sweet hell, how does an induction motor work, and why won't this one start?!". Photography is a lot less fun when you're doing it for promoting your work. Editing photos is a skill neither I nor my wife has. We've been outsourcing that work.

Hell, my nontechnical wife does our website (on squarespace), because as a recovering programmer, I'd fall prey to the instinct to keep tweaking stuff instead of hitting publish.

But doing all that shit is ultimately worth it if you love what you do and also eating :-)

I'm trying to look at the marketing part as being an educator, not to other people in my trade, but to the public who know about as much about it as I do about bookkeeping and photoshop.

Now don't go looking for my blog on my website and tell me off about it not being there. I know. I'm just as bad about publishing as the author of TFA :-)

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#65

Post by dt3ft » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

ushakov wrote: post #47

tymm wrote: 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?

Because it gets downvoted to hell :)

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#66

Post by exdsq » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

mellavora wrote: post #60

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 this post deserves a friendlier response. magicroot seems intent on offering helpful advice. Nowhere does (s)he say "hire me" or that they have the only answer; in fact the opposite. They are suggesting that just as a unit test is an important aspect of determining functionality, it may be helpful to have a metric of how much excitement a certain feature may engender. I'm not going to judge the quality of tha…

I think it's just the insecurities of developers realizing they don't understand an important subject because it's separate to their work. Magicroots advice is great. Suggesting devs should be siloed from marketing in the context of a solo developer building products is insane.

Signed, an insecure developer with bad marketing skills

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#67

Post by cblconfederate » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 1:21 PM UTC

ushakov wrote: post #16

TekMol wrote: post #11

Instead of publishing a blog post, I add another feature to my product. Instead of sending a tweet, I tweak CSS on my site. Same here. But I do consider that marketing. The product is the marketing. The better the free product everyone can use, the more the existing users will use it and like it and talk about it. "Build it and they will come" works nicely for me. I do absolutely nothing but coding. Yet a handful of…

Revolut for example does not advertise They built a great product and offer customers money to refer to others (e-mail me if you want a code)

they dont advertise now, but how to get initial traction is the chicken-and-egg problem

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#68

Post by mbreese » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 1:23 PM UTC

hluska wrote: post #56

enriquto wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

That’s the marketing mindset. Marketers are not builders and they are incapable of understanding why we build things. Sometimes we build something to solve a problem that we have. Sometimes we build something because we want to learn. Other times, we build things because we’re bored. We don’t need a product placement meeting before we type git -m commit “First commit” and if we did, the bast majority of cool things w…

But — the original post is about a developer who clearly is treating their project as a product. So, the top comment completely makes sense in that context.

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#69

Post by tymm » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

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.

Sorry to hear that. Did you try other platforms on which you didn't get suspended?

Did you have to tune your Google ads campaign before it worked or did it work for you from the first try?

Re: Marketing is scary for a solo developer

#70

Post by enriquto » Mon, Dec 13, 2021, 1:24 PM UTC

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.

> conversions that google didn't see due to ad blockers.

This is funny. It seems that having an ad blocker is a strong indicator for people that are very interested in technical stuff (and are at least technically literate enough to install it). This sounds like a prime spot for placing certain ads. Since ad-blocking is detectable, we coders are actually opting-in to this kind of labeling. I don't know what to make of that.