building is great but most developers don't understand the value of marketing till they ask people to pay for their projects like SaaS etc... I've made some good money in writing in the last 3 years but without marketing it was highly impossible that's why I always encourage to people to start writing be it a tweet, LinkedIn or newsletter etc... and it's again a huge task along with building your products that's why it looks easy from outside but needs more work inside. but before going I've learned from Daniel a lot of things about marketing. Maybe this is useful. Take a look.
A 12 step marketing crash course for non-marketers:
1. If you're trying to sell something, everything you do is marketing.
2. The technical term for trying to sell something is a go-to-market (GTM) strategy.
3. Building a product is part of your GTM strategy.
4. Your combination of skills, knowledge, experience, reputation, assets, connections, etc, create opportunities for you in the market.
5. Once you find an opportunity you'd like to pursue, you should set a payoff expectation. Example: you plan to bring a particular project to market with the expectation of making $100K within 12mo.
6. You should have a viable hypothesis of how that expectation can be realized. Example: to make $100K selling a $100 product, you need 1,000 customers. To get 1,000 customers at 1% conversion you need 100K visits on your landing page. To get 100K visits you need to spend X on ads. And so on.
7. If you can't convince yourself you have a viable and profitable hypothesis, you need to adjust your payoff expectation, or pick another opportunity. You don't have an obligation to pursue every opportunity you encounter.
8. If your payoff expectation is too small for the time and money you're investing to bring your project to market, you should abandon it.
9. If the worst case scenario of your GTM strategy has a chance to put you out of business (by running out of time, money, motivation, etc), you should abandon it. Take risks, but never put yourself at risk.
10. Once you have a project on the market, you have the option (but not the obligation) to improve that project by repeating steps 5-9 on the same project. Every new feature is a new thing you're brining to market.
11. A business with no attention is a business that doesn't exist. You can have the best product in the world, but if nobody knows about it, it's like multiplying by zero — a recipe for failure.
12. Remember: there is no distinction between building and marketing. You build whatever you need to build to realize your payoff expectation. Everything is marketing.