Ask HN: How do you improve at marketing when you have a developers head?

4 points by calltrak 3 years ago | 4 comments

I am pretty good at development and I have built several micro saas and such in the past. I do however suck big time at marketing.

I work full time in a fortune 500 company to pay the bills, but my passion is to launch an independent software / service company.

Any pointers and tips from developers out there who are also successful at marketing?

What is the secret?

I am trying to get traction now for my Link In Bio tool https://Bigger.Bio and could do with some guidance.

Cheers!

helph67 3 years ago |

Never forget Pareto! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle You will find it applies to all facets of life, including marketing.

quickthrower2 3 years ago | |

I used it today to 10% clean my fridge (50% in perception of cleanliness) in 60 seconds.

PaulHoule 3 years ago |

I'd say marketing is where people who want to get rich doing little work go to fail.

Back when I was in college I was the publicity director for the college radio station which had a reputation for putting on poorly attended paper. I made at least 10 poster designs and hit the (small) campus with at least 500 photocopies. After doing this a few times a year for a year we had big crowds showing up every time.

If I'd tried to farm this work out to somebody else they would probably make 1 poster design and put up 15 posters and figure that was enough work and it just isn't.

Any kind of marketing is like that, it takes a lot more effort than most people think is reasonable, but it can very much pay off.

quickthrower2 3 years ago | |

Another thing which I am bad at is understanding the concept of a pivot.

The idea is to keep your momentum and change something a bit, not stop and start a new thing.

The stop and start a new thing happens when the old thing is not shiny and new and the old thing is taking effort but making zero or little money. So it gets scrapped.

The trick is to keep at it. For years.

And so I need a psychological / mental foundation for doing that.

Getting fit is very different: when you are fat you lose weight fast, when you are unfit you suddenly go from couch to 5k. But gains get smaller and smaller per effort after that.

With business it seems the gains are tiny or non existent until the “luck” you engineered kicked in. Like buying lottery tickets half price, but you still need to keep playing to win.