...a pill against developer’s disease?
With this post, I’m taking my daily pill against developer’s disease.
Since having published the beta of flowtapes.com two months ago, I mainly need to work on marketing and customer acquisition right now.
But I just couldn’t help it. I just couldn’t avoid shipping another release yesterday.
It’s an awesome release, adding some kick-ass features I’ve been carrying around in the backlog for a while. Namely, adding auto-zoom-jump-cuts, adding post-processing voice audio quality enhancement, and better B-Roll images. But with 0 (in words: zerroo) paying customers I should have not done this. I should have instead spent my time on getting people aware of this product. Getting people to use this tool first, in order to get user feedback in, and ONLY THEN build further features based on that.
Bad indiehacker.
Since I had this relapse (again), I really need to keep taking my pills from now on. And post content pieces on the internet instead of touching any code.
As expressed eloquently by Rob Walling in "The SaaS Playbook":
First, developers are gonna develop. If your sole focus is on the product, you will want to solve every business problem by developing.
Is your revenue plateauing?
Are your churn numbers high?
Are you not closing sales?
The solution is to code more features . . . right? Actually, building more features probably isn’t the answer to those problems.
But if writing code is comfortable for you and marketing is not, you’ll have a natural tendency to over-build the product instead of getting to the real source of the problem.
And while speaking about it, take this as a friendly reminder to not forget taking your pills as well 🙃
40 open-source gems to replace your SaaS subscriptions 🔥 🚀
After 19,314 lines of code, i'm shutting down my project
Need feedback for my product.
We are live on Product Hunt
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Looks like a prescription for awareness! All the best with using the ‘pill’ mate ;)
You're right, we focus too much on making the product better although there are other areas that needs more attention.
Hahaha I can relate!
Great share on the common temptation to over-develop instead of focusing on the customer!
It's an easy trap to fall into but important to restrain coding urges and prioritize marketing and user feedback. Consistent effort pays off!
How to do marketing? Google Ads?
There's a good book on this called $100M Leads by Alex Hormozi. He puts the options you have in a 2x2 box resulting in 4 basic options:
1 to 1, warm: contacting people you know directly (e.g. send a WhatsApp)
1 to many, warm: posting content on the internet (e.g. making YouTube videos)
1 to 1, cold: contacting people you don't know directly (e.g. cold emails)
1 to many, cold: paid ads (e.g. buy a Google ad)
Yea paid ads are not the easiest thing.. Good start is always to really niche down, and focus on a specific (and small) group that you can target very explicitly
How would you find customers for a photo filters app?
sorry bit late lol... But do you know who your ideal customer is? Is there a place online where you can find those people?
It's always super hard to find the starting point, so it's good if there is a very defined group of people you can identify to be your first customers, and focus on that one. Like for my tool, which could be video editing for holiday videos, for online courses, for youtube, whatever... I really focus on beginning youtubers for the beginning, so i can channel my efforts in one direction, and put every bit of energy i have into first get those people to use my app. Rather go 100% down on one specific group, than 20% on five but then not getting anywhere
Ok. Thanks.
It does! but it takes quite some deliberate effort to keep one's fingers away from touching code... do you have any tricks for that?
We all should learn the importance of prioritising user interaction and marketing campaigns over code optimisation.
Yes! and now we're waiting for a link from you, to your daily pill
Can I have couple pills please? I have the same problem here :-)
One you find on the start page of IH, in the upper right corner... It says "submit" on it ;))
What are you working on when avoiding marketing like a pro?
This is right on the money. A hard pill to swallow. I probably need 2 at a go. Thanks for sharing.