I now understand why we, developers find Marketing difficult!

Coding has mostly 1 right answer. Business and marketing have no right answers.

It's great to see that you're acknowledging the importance of marketing and taking the time to learn more about it. As a fellow developer, I can definitely relate to the struggles of understanding marketing.

Developers often seek immediate results from their efforts, whereas marketing is a slow and iterative process that requires unlimited patience. However, it's important to recognize that marketing plays a crucial role in a startup's success.

Understanding the significance of marketing can help bridge the gap between development and marketing, ultimately benefiting the product. So keep up the good work and good luck!

Yes! As a non-technical person that comes from the marketing side of things, yes to all of this. Marketing is basically recipe testing. There’s actually ½ a dozen flavor profiles that can come out of the combo of ingredients + cooking methods (content + channels), it just depends on who you want to feed this specific meal to. :) I think developers (all builders, really) typically have basic knowledge about where the folks who are going to use their thing are hanging out and what they need to hear to say ‘yes,’ as others have pointed out. There’s definitely some baseline marketing to-dos that will get you started. But longer term strategy is a lot of testing and refining. Even if you go at it as a soloprenur/tiny team, marketing as a discipline is still important/needs airtime and brain space.

I hear you man !!
A very common problem and something that I am trying to solve with my products promotee.co and marketee.io, I sucked at marketing too and now I realize that it needs some mind/thought processes changed for it to work for us.

I find the comparison you made between coding languages and marketing channels to be very interesting. Just as there are different coding languages for different types of projects, there are different marketing channels that work best for different target audiences and business goals.

As a non-developer, I cannot definitely relate to your experience of needing to learn marketing in order to grow your product. But, I think it's great that you took the initiative to educate yourself and dive into a book like Traction by Gabriel Weinberg.
All the best!

Good post, Mehdi! It exactly sums up the problems. Last September, I started with the same feeling: Maketing is hard for a solopreneur, especially for introverted ones like me and similar indie hackers.

I decided to tackle the "marketing for introverts" problem by creating an app for it: 2quiet2market.com. It helps non-marketers develop a healthy marketing habit. First, it allows you to break marketing down into small steps, then it helps you run those steps continuously. Try the free plan and see if it helps you.

Yesterday, I published a new explainer video about how the SPME marketing habit that I practice. Watch it on YouTube if you're interested.

I think marketing is not always a precise science. In today's world, it often involves a process of trial and error, where marketers try different approaches like content, ad copy, and design to see what works best. I do agree that marketing is a slow process that requires patience and a commitment to testing and refining your strategies until you find what works for you.

Short and concise. Thank you for this post. This makes a lot of sense. I am a developer and I'm just learning about using the micro SaaS model instead of the classic startup. My priorities have now changed overnight and I'm going to focus on getting customers first through marketing. Before writing a single line of code.

This post solidifies that notion even further. It's great to hear this from another developer and now I know what to expect I'll do my damn best not to get frustrated if growth and signups is initially slow.

Also the way you explained the different channels, very helpful. Lots to learn and I've just ordered the audio book of Traction, thanks for the recommendation :)

I completely relate to your struggles with marketing as a developer. It can be challenging to shift gears from the technical aspects of building a product to the more creative and strategic aspects of marketing it effectively. However, as you mentioned, marketing is a crucial component of any successful business. One thing that has helped me is to approach marketing as a problem to solve, using data and analytics to guide my decisions and experiments. It's also helpful to focus on providing value to your target audience rather than just promoting your product - this can build trust and relationships that lead to long-term success. Thanks for sharing your experience and insights - it's always helpful to know that others are facing similar challenges!

I'd recommend going through intercoms blogs, it simplifies a lot of marketing concepts.

Marketing is tough (unless you have enough $$ to spend)

Developing a product is challenging, but once you learn a language and tooling, you can quickly get an MVP launched. The expected outcome is evident in development once you release a feature or bug. While on the other hand, marketing is complex, unpredictable, time-consuming, and constantly changing. The strategy that worked for a competitor may not work for you, and you may try ten different things before finding a channel that works for your product. Traction by Gabriel Weinberg has some great advice on marketing channels to try and a bullseye strategy to test them.

The three steps of the Bullseye Framework are:

Brainstorm: Generate a comprehensive list of potential marketing channels and tactics that could be used to gain traction.

Test: Conduct small experiments to test the viability of the most promising channels identified during the brainstorming phase.

Focus: Once the most effective channels are identified, focus on optimizing those channels to maximize traction and achieve explosive customer growth.

It's important to use data to help you find the marketing channels that will work for your product. For my product T.LY, I've learned that SEO is essential. For the past few months, I have been focusing on improving where T.LY ranks for terms like URL Shortener. I have seen significant organic traffic growth by focusing on content for the blog, backlinks, and improving the site's marketing pages.

Thanks for sharing your insights on why developers find marketing difficult. As a fellow developer, I can relate to the challenges of shifting from technical problem-solving to marketing and customer acquisition. It's important to recognize that marketing is a skill that can be learned and improved upon, just like coding. It's all about finding the right balance between your strengths and weaknesses and seeking out resources and tools to help you develop those marketing skills. Keep up the great work!

I will share our story and plan on how we have grown our SaaS product, Churnfree, and reduced customer churn rate.

We created a plan from scratch, including SEO, paid advertisement, email marketing, and social media marketing. It's important to have a strong plan in place and execute it without waiting for perfection if you want to achieve growth.

This is hard and awesome meanwhile!

If I'm not mistaken Traction was written 10 years back and since then marketing has changed a lot especially for SaaS.

The marketing channels are still valid but ways to make them work have changed. For example building-in-public, no-code, Ai driven content, programmatic SEO etc. which worked magic for many bootstrapped saas are not covered in that book.

Thanks for sharing, and interesting product! I saw someone similar out there just raise 11m focused in this space ;D.

How did you think about your marketing actions in the early days? Did you ever think about your messaging or 'brand'?

Love this post! Thanks for sharing! I am in the process of working on building out some new products/services, and I'm thinking about our marketing & sales practices like building a house. You have this basic architectural structure (the high level strategy and philosophy), and inside you can add in floors (processes) and furniture (tactics).

The reason I decided to use this analogy when talking to my team was that there are just SO MANY potential processes and tactics that can be considered and implemented when it comes to marketing. You will go crazy if you have too many granular implementations, expecting each thing to be the "killer" feature that unlocks growth.

We're thinking about the foundation of our marketing funnel as payment processing (invoicing, buying out of the box). Let's say we have 6 products/services RN, we want to set up the systems in a way where we can measure sales volume, MRR, etc. per product/solution on a weekly basis and have discussions about which product/solution is most efficient. But in order to do that, we need to set up underlying processes and tactics that are measurable (marketing attribution) in order to understand the cost to acquire a customer (CAC) and factor it into sales.

This is where marketing can be fun/creative but also drive you crazy IMO. You are filling in the house with all kinds of furniture and you can mix and match things while testing how well they work together. While your setup will never be optimized at the beginning, you need to have ways to actually measure and understand which processes and tactics are having the biggest impact on the bottom line ROI. You can also think about marketing as building "vectors" to your payment processing, where the origin of the vector is whatever audience and addressable industry you're testing.

If I had to go back in time, I think the most important thing I would tell myself as a marketer would be to really understand attribution and make sure I build out a UTM strategy to really understand what channels and campaigns are working the best and actually gather that data from the very beginning of go-to-market.

Sorry for that rant haha! Looking forward to hearing what others have to say on this black box that is marketing

That is a very nice way of putting it, Mehdi. As a fellow developer who has just launched a website I also find marketing very hard.

I suppose I am just used to getting instant feedback on the work I do and I just need to get used to the fact that results will come slower.

Thank you for sharing!

As a developer, I find coding to be straightforward and logical since there is always a solution to every problem. However, marketing is a complex field with many variables and interactions, often lacking clear-cut answers. People and situations constantly change, making it difficult to apply solutions that have worked in the past to new scenarios.

As a developer, understanding the challenges of marketing can be a valuable insight. Marketing requires a different skill set and mindset compared to development. While developers focus on creating and optimizing products, marketing involves understanding customer needs, creating compelling messaging, and using various channels to reach and engage with the target audience. It can be challenging for developers to switch gears and think from a marketing perspective, especially when it involves communicating the value of their work to a broader audience. However, recognizing the importance of marketing and its impact on the success of a product or service is a crucial step towards mastering this skill and achieving greater visibility and recognition for your work.

I'm a marketer but I learned how to code, and I still think that marketing is harder than program

As a technical co-founder I always struggled with marketing, I can relate to your post. Best and easiest way to solve this is to find cofounder who is good in marketing so that we can relax and focus product peacefully 🙂

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