Marketing is *inertial* and your app is HEAVY.

Alternate title: Developer Dummy Discovers Marketing.

After the release of Slingcode I had a small epiphany. This is the first time I have managed to do "marketing" that sorta worked, and it's because I stumbled into it.

The ephiphany I had is simple: picture your project as a big heavy elephant sitting on a skateboard. Each bit of marketing you do (tweet, post, launch) is like giving the elephant one small push.

When you push the elephant once it rolls a small way and then stops. To get any meaningful movement you have to give the elephant more than one push, and you have to do it regularly.

A tweet is a small push. A blog post is a push. A launch is a push. If you want to have an effect, you can't just tweet your project once. You can't code for two years and then post on a subreddit and expect anybody to notice. Even amazing things get ignored on today's noisy internet. I've been on the front page of Hacker News a bunch of times, and let me tell you it's no silver bullet. From what I've heard, the same goes for Product Hunt. When launches work, these are big pushes, but they are still singular, not regular.

This explains the advice we hear from successful founders all the time. Work in the open. Write every day. Launch repeatedly. These are activities which build traction over time rather than being one-offs.

Engineer it

Good news is I think you can engineer this. I'm not talking about a bot posting git commits to Twitter. I'm talking about process engineering. That means coming up with a sustainable repeatable process with an outcome you can achieve regularly.

Instead of "write a 2000 word blog post each week" make it achievable. Think about a small activity you can work into your existing development flow. Something you won't shy away from before you start coding, or after you finish up. Screencast as you code, tweet a screenshot for every new feature, post a three sentence update to dev.to or send out a tweet when you deploy. There are a ton of small things and you might be surprised what catches people's interest.

Feedback loops

There is this idea of "marketing feedback loops" which I never really understood until I accidentally made one. All I did was make sure the slingcode.net email signup was linked from every screencast I record, and then post an email update when I release a new screencast.

So the screencasts point to the newsletter, and the newsletter points to the screencasts.

This forms a loop which somebody can enter from any point (screencast, or newsletter). For whatever reason, this attracts people to the loop and builds both things faster. Maybe people are forwarding the email update, or maybe they're sharing the screencast, but having this loop made a difference.

Then the elephant pulls you

Have you ever jump-started a car with a flat battery? You start pushing the car down a gentle incline and when it's got some good speed you turn the key and it chugs to life. I get the feeling that marketing is like this when it works well and the product is useful.

Recently a maker I follow posted about Slingcode on his mailing list. I didn't realize this, I just saw a confusing spike in the server analytics. I asked myself "why are the numbers increasing when I didn't do anything?" It took me a while to figure out what was going on until I read his post and saw my project in there.

I think if you can get that regular update beat happening, and if your thing is useful to some people, and if you get some marketing feedback loops working, then at some point people are going to start sharing your work independently.

So yeah, the take-aways:

• Build things that are useful (duh).
• Put out regular updates.
• Find marketing loops if you can.

May the elephant's pull be yours forevermore.

Thanks for reading!

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