My Lack of Attention

My Lack of Attention
champonthis.de

I get it. But this is the kind of advertising that's OK in my book. Exposing people who are clearly interested (rather than maybe interested based on, for example, previous shopping habits) to something they have not heard of. And of course you don't want to steal attention, but you can do it in a polite way, demonstrating respect to the other product. Maybe you have to be a little shameless in those situations if you want your products (not you) to get attention.

It was the one time that a project of mine generated a bit of buzz on HN. But I hadn’t posted it myself, someone else did. But they posted a link to a fork, which no changes of their own, claiming that someone else had posted it. The fork got 30 ish stars and follows, and nobody in the HN thread pointed out that they were starring a fork with no changes.

This really sucked, since I would have liked to develop an open source project that had users, but this was my project and now I had to negotiate with some other guy I didn’t know who had probably just taken the credit for my work. It didn’t work out.

Anyone else had this happen to them? What’s a constructive way to deal with that?

"if you build it, they will come". Never has one cliche been so exactly wrong.

Programmers, myself included, believe(d) that the code is the product. That the code will speak for itself. That being "better" (for some definition of better) is enough. If I build it, they will come.

The truth though, the code is about 10% of the effort to make a successful product. It is much more work, and frankly harder work, to to the marketing to get the product in front of the customer. It is then much more work to turn that into a sale (if your work is commercial.)

For decades I've heard programmers lament that they do all the hard work, they deserve the lion's share, all those guys do is sell it.

So here's the thing. Your code does not just "get attention". You earn that by investing time, and money but mostly time, in getting that attention.

That means going to where your target market is. Showing them you can add value to the group (I spent a lot of time answering unrelated questions.) showing how your offering can add value to the group. You do not "get" attention, you have to _earn_ it.

So, if you want your product to get more attention, then by extension you need to personally get more attention. You need to find your target group, be useful, be helpful, engage with them, built trust.

So you've made a tool for people without a smart-phone. OK, not a market I would have chosen[1], but that's not relevant. The thing you need to figure out is how to reach those people. Since they are not online, you will need to reach them offline. You need to go to where they are, not expect them to find you.

[1] choosing a market first, one you have a strategy to reach, then making a product is usually better than the other way around. Not least because joining a community, and adding value there for s while, before making a product, builds trust. It also helps you build a product they will find useful, not just something you randomly thought of.

This is life; through failure we learn more, through persistence we achieve.