Ask HN: How to divide time code/support/marketing as a generalist? I am struggling to find focus time between code, marketing, product & customer support. What is better - 2 hours of each task every day or one dedicated entire day for each? e.g. Mondays is marketing, Tuesday is code! Any other generalists who have gone through this? What worked for you? 🧐 |
The best part about being a generalist is that you can do what the most important thing is, instead of being frustrated that the person responsible isn't doing it. What I used to do was map out bottlenecks for my business. For example, I'd be able to see that if we had $X more cash, we could push profit margins up, and by doing Y, we could get that much cash. Or that the back end supports up to 100k users, so I can ignore that for a while and maybe even hire someone to do it later.
Customer support often takes highest priority, because it's an effective form of marketing too. But the rest is either getting more customers or building a better solution. Just do whatever gets you 5% more sales next week. Sometimes that might even mean laying off the code for months and just doing sales. Sometimes that means no marketing until you have something worth selling.
Will think about the half day bit and try it out
We already have stable products and happy paying customets, so I try to limit coding to the minimum necessary - it really helps that I'm not the only one working on the products.
For customer support, you can't really put a limit on that since when it needs to be done, it needs to be done. I do try to write documentation on faqs and common tasks, and that helps a lot for new customers.
What time is left I focus on marketing and sales, but only after making sure that getting a new customer is a smooth and easy experience for all involved.
I'll love to hear about other people's experience on the matter, since it's not easy and there are many different ways to make it work.