As a developer who is heavily involved in our marketing department; I really don't think it's hard at all.

Marketing is about a few things:

- Who is your customer?

- Why should they buy your product?

- Find them and tell them.

The problem with marketing is it can get really expensive really fast and if you're limited in capital then that becomes a problem.

But it couldn't be simpler. There's no complicated problems to solve like with programming. It's a single task; find your target audience and tell them about what you have to offer.

If you don't have convincing reasons why people should buy your product, then that's a product problem, not a marketing one.

Also, marketers DO have a tools. If you think they don't that's probably one reason why marketing is so hard for you. All of your advertising should be using tracking which lets you see conversion rates, average income per click, income per view, etc. and help you make future advertising decisions.

EDIT:

I should clarify that I think Marketing can be/should be a full time job and if you can afford it, it's good to have a person (or team) dedicated to it. But I don't think it requires the same kind of problem solving that programming does.

As someone who does marketing and writes code, I've seen that programmers think there's secrets to marketing that they don't know (hence the programmer who says he "is clueless about marketing")

The reality is that a marketer who seems to have everything together is putting on a great show. Marketing broken down into its simplest form is just running tests, measuring them, and finding out what works and what doesn't.

Each business is different, and marketers deal with irrational humans instead of computers. If you're a marketer and think you know everything, it's a bad combination.

Marketing is harder than programming?

To a programmer yes.

If programmers and marketers were to swap jobs, my guess is that programers would get closer to achieving the marketers job than the other way around.

+100 karma points for contacting the author of the original post and helping him out - and then writing this. We need plenty more people like you around here :-)

>In some ways marketing is harder than programming. Writing a program, you can see your errors and find the root problem with stack traces.

That doesn't make programming easier, because expections are way higher for programming. Code correctness is orders of magnitudes higher than "marketing correctness". Marketing models are extremely fuzzy when compared to the average software.

In other words, if someone did invent a "stack trace for marketing", then the expected level of correctness for marketing would increase by a huge amount.

As another developer preparing to "launch" a product, this is rather encouraging.

Would be nice if you could share what suggestions you gave Basil regarding his site (with his permission). Might be enlightening to many, even if it's only relevant to his product.

As one more hacker who works in marketing, my suggestion is to start as soon as possible to spend some time building relationships with the influencers you'll want to talk about your launch and then your new releases etc.

Unless you're funded by some well-connected VC, you're going to need those relationships.

The most difficult part of being a marketer is finding out what actually works. There is all sorts of advice out there from people that give you tips and recommendations, and 99% of them have no idea what they're talking about. In that way it can be a lot like programming; you can either pay some kid $10/hour to slog it out and figure it out as he goes, or you can pay a premium for someone who can say, "oh yeah you do this and this and this," and he's done.

It's a lot easier to pretend to be a marketer than it is to pretend to be a programmer, because you can sell something that doesn't work all day and people will still unknowingly buy it. Some people, I fear, discount what great marketers can do because they never actually learn the difference.

One of the reasons marketing and finding a good marketer is hard, is because you don't know why (or if) it's not working. Imagine if every time you coded something up you never actually got to run a program and see what the results were. Marketing can feel the same way; you build something, and it is probably failing somewhere, but until you finally put it together right you don't really know where. Are you advertising or marketing in the wrong places? Does your landing page suck? Maybe your product actually sucks and no one cares? You just have to test and test and test to try to create some semblance of data.

Then when you do actually do it people say, "Oh, that's it? That wasn't hard." Like when a great designer creates a very simple logo that communicates the essence of the brand in a beautiful way, and someone says, "Well that only took you five minutes." It's not about the five minutes it took me to create that; it's about the years of work I put in to learn how to create that. It takes a hell of a lot of work to get to simple.

I had some serious cognitive dissonance when I started giving out some of my hacks in "The hacker's guide to user acquisition" (first chapter - http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-the-first-1...), the only reason I'm spilling some of my hard-earned secrets is because I see too many good products die because whoever built it never got it out to the right people.

I'm not sure how programmers can differentiate between a marketer that knows what they're talking about and one that doesn't; that's as difficult as a marketer discerning who is a gifted programmer and who isn't.

So, knowing what actually works is hard. Is marketing harder than programming? Not for me, it took me a week to figure out how to get my first rails server live and on Github. But just like any other field, there is a long, long learning curve if you're going to do it well.

I made a ask HN similar to this yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6692952

It really is difficult especially because everyone wants to found their idea, so its especially hard to find a good marketer to pair with you if youre a good programmer. Otherwise no matter how good you are at it to some extent your using your time inefficiently since a marketer will be better. For the relationship to be truly successful you have to both be driven and care about the product and in most cases that wont happen unless the idea is joint.

A couple statements to highlight:

"because I see too many good products die because whoever built it never got it out to the right people."

- yes. Great ideas DESERVE to be found!

"difficult as a marketer discerning who is a gifted programmer and who isn't"

The street goes both ways. I would say that it's easy to fool a marketer into thinking you're a rockstar programmer.

"there is a long, long learning curve if you're going to do it well."

Well said. I still personally think it's more difficult -- maybe not conceptually, but it's terribly labor intensive and unpredictable.

So much truth here, thank you for sharing it. As a marketer inside technical companies, daily scrums are hard for me, as are hackathons, because what marketers do is execute, a little every day. Day after day it looks like you do tiny things, and that's exactly what it is. Testing, measuring, iterating. lather, rinse, repeat. For a lifetime. And that, as you referred to in your design analogy, doesn't count the endless hours of getting inside your customers' heads, qualitatively and quantitatively. Like leadership, it's part science, and part art. Very hard for purely quantitative people to grok.

Dude. When's the next chapter coming? I've been waiting for like a month now!? :-)