You finally did it, you overcame the great fear of launching your product. You put many hours into it. It is a great product. Paying customers are around the corner!
Wrong!
Even if you are [insert-famous-and-known-person-here] (if you are: hello, send me an email), if you do not tell anyone about your product, no one will know about it. Hence: marketing.
The moment I knew I wanted to build a business and not yet another app, I took marketing seriously. But still, that's easier said than done. Marketing feels unnatural if you are a product person because you want to do what's best for the user. Marketing is tricking people into thinking that your product is the best. Wrong too!
“The moment I knew I wanted to build a business and not yet another app, I took marketing seriously.”
Try to see marketing as a tool to help your (prospect) customers. That does make all the difference, right? How can you help them? For instance: create an article they can learn from, create a handy little tool they can use, or tell them about your product that will save them time.
That last one is marketing/sales too, but by framing it as “helping them save time (or money!)”, it is easier to do. After all, your product does help them save time and money, doesn't it? The list is almost infinite—it all depends on your creativity and will also get easier with time.
“If you want to do an X business out of love for X, strongly consider getting a job doing X instead. Then you get to X all day long!”—Patrick McKenzie, @patio11
But I rather work on my product!
Sure, me too! Nothing wrong with that, but don't expect anyone magically come to you and pays for it. That's why I am here telling you: if you do want to run a business, you have to do 80% marketing and 20% product. If that scares you, you don't really want to run a business, but like the idea of running one. Which again, is totally fine!
Things you do that should be spent on marketing
As a product person, you like to be your product to be perfect. But what good does that do, if no one uses it? I've been more than guilty of doing this. Refactoring code to look cleaner or more reusable, make that that design pixel-perfect, create custom CSS animations, build an internal tool, and so on. Also, forget about the details at this very point. For my first blog, I spent some time adding tags per blog post and having an author overview page, but what good is that if you have not many posts yet and only one person writing posts?
These are all things that are not important (just yet), but if you are in the very early stages, there are 1001 things that are better spent time on. Stop thinking as a developer or designer, and rewire your brain to be a business owner.
“Stop thinking as a developer or designer, and rewire your brain to be a business owner.”
Overcome your fear of marketing or sales
But you are willing to get out of your comfort zone and start doing the necessary evil, called marketing. So how to get started? What worked for me was (and is, still!) to see it as a challenge, see marketing as something I could conquer—the same I did with coding (and design before that). Use the tips from this article and get grinding. See how over time you get better at it and it starts to feel more natural to you.
Easy to start marketing tips
The things I would do to get the word out for any (new) product and that are easy for you to do:
- create articles useful for business owners, leaders managers
- journaling my journey to build a new business (like this post)
- reach out to my network
- cold emails to my ideal customers
- answering questions via the chat widget
- personally keep in touch with current customers
How to create useful content
To create any useful content, you need to know who you write for (that will be your future customers—see below). The best way is to think of small pains they have and give a solution in the form of a blog post. Make it straightforward, precise articles. Don't overcomplicate things. Write in a natural way, just imagine you talking to them.
How to find your ideal customers
This depends on your product. For Startup Costs this means indie makers to small-sized (1 - 20 employees), modern and tech-focused, young and open-minded, and ideally SaaS businesses.
How to reach out to your network
These days your network is more than just your Rolodex (a what?). It consists of your contact list, twitter followers, Facebook groups, Snapchat followers and the people in the Slack teams you belong too. Don't ever start with a hard sell, meaning: “here is my product, please buy”. Instead, start a conversation and drop your product at a later stage.
Cold email outreach
The dreaded tasks of all, but if done right can really make a difference. One day you get praise: “just what we were looking for”. The next all you get is shit: “you suck!”. Yeah, people can be rude when only screens are in between them. What you shouldn't do, is simply hard-sell your product. Again, make it an opportunity to help them. Make it personal. Show that you not simply mass-mailing a huge list. Make a little effort to look up their business: use their name, congratulate on some recently archived goal, show appreciation for some thought-provoking tweet. Make it short, but sweet. Overall be precise. A few sentences at most. A wall of text will guarantee them to trash your message right away.
Also, your job is not done after you send the first email. Quite the opposite. Often time, busy people have busy inboxes. Your email might be opened, might be forgotten or it might not yet be the right time. Follow up. And again. And again. It this does feel like spamming, it's not: you send them personal emails, and if done right, you send them something useful. If you do get a firm “no!”, stop, don't take it personally, and move on to the next prospect.
Afterwords
So do you really need to spend Monday to Thursday on “marketing” and Fridays on “product”? No. Neither do you need to keep to the 80/20 rule for that matter. What's important is that you switch your focus to actually sell your product. Stop putting all your time and effort into your product only and do not make selling your product an afterthought.
Tips and improvements
Got any tips or improvements? Have anything that worked really well for you. Do let me know. I am happy to chat about it.
I got advice like this at the beginning when I started working on my app. After a few years in business and selling 10s of thousands of copies (it's a side project, currently at $4-5k / month and the sales are still going up), I am not sure that I completely agree with the gist of this article. My angle is that the core of marketing is the product itself - if you get it right and help with some real pain, it starts spreading itself.
My approach is to talk to customers and instead of investing my time and energy into marketing, to spend time on improving the product. I have noticed that after any meaningful update of the product, it starts spreading faster.
I follow the 80/20 ratio but inversely and also outsource some of the marketing, e.g. content creation, website redesign, etc.
On the other hand, I cannot tell for sure whether I couldn't have sold many more copies, had I done more marketing instead of the feature work :-)
By talking to your existing customers, you're already doing marketing ;-) After sales and/or technical support, is a part of marketing in the sense that how well you do it, or that you do it at all affects how your customers perceive you and will thus influence their decision to recommend your product or service to other people.
A recurring theme in most of Courtland's podcasts is how important it is to actually talk to a living, breathing customer - via video chat or phone call, as opposed to email or chatbot or those call centers. It's critical that we talk directly to customers more often as you'll get direct feedback about what your customers want and/or need.
I don't believe there's a "perfect" ratio or rule of thumb with regard to the amount of time spent between product development and marketing. You pretty much allocate your time based on what you learn from marketing and product development and prioritize the important tasks and allocate your time per day accordingly.
Interestingly, I have not spoken to any customer directly except for support emails. The only exception was an influential blogger - he asked me to add a feature and thanks to that then recommended my app.
To get honest feedback, just read the anonymous reviews in the AppStore and take them seriously - these are the pain points. As Bill Gates once said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning”.
Researching that pain and understanding + solving it is what amy hoy & alex hillman call "sales safari" - quite different from just talking to your customers which can lead you down the wrong path for the following reasons:
https://stackingthebricks.com/bootstrapping-series-5-customer-interviews/
great approach
By any chance can you give some more detail into the marketing jobs you outsourced?
Sure. As I didn’t know what to do at all (I'm a dev) and how to do or outsource marketing, I decided to pay for a marketing strategy first. I hired someone experienced on Upwork and paid 1k (you could probably get it much cheaper) for a ~ 30-page document analyzing my current situation, including competitors, user personas, possible channels, etc. The key is to pick a marketer who understands the domain/topic!
This gave me a list of tasks that I could outsource individually to less skilled marketers. As the app started making a bit of money, I picked some tasks - e.g. creating some content for my website and paid to get them done.
I have also contacted some high profile bloggers/influencers identified in the strategy and got some mentions on their blogs.
There are some more tasks that I’m going to pay for now, like spreading the word on Reddit, YT, Quora, …
I also did some initial ASO optimization myself using SensorTower (the free offering) - changed my app title to be more unique, updated the keywords, … This helped in the matter of a few months.
I have experimented with FB campaigns but it didn't pay, the app sells for under a fiver and I couldn't achieve a profitable conversion rate. I can imagine if you sell something over $10, it might make a difference as the audience targetting is great.
Recently, I have paid for a professional app preview video, which has increased the sales measurably.
I do it as I go and as the app makes some money. But seriously, the biggest increases in sales were after feature updates.
Lots of good info!
I've been hesitant to spend a ton on marketing after spending for a freelance developer. The main reason is that the app only sells for under $2 and I could very easily spend a ton of money that doesn't see a return. It's encouraging to hear a successful story from an app that sells for a low price. I'll have to look into hiring a marketing strategist.
Which tactic gave you the most bang for your buck?
Do you mind if I ask the name of your app?
Re the marketing strategy, I only paid for it once the app had made a few thousand bucks after the first 2-3 years; I don't invest money that the app hasn't made. Thinking of it, I cannot directly attribute any return to it yet so that's probably not a safe investment for start. I just wanted to approach it in a structured manner, not to randomly hire some facebook campaign managers and whatnot.
There is no single thing that has made a big difference, it's been always step by step, continuous effort. One thing that helped me at the beginning was when I contacted one influential blogger, he gave me some feedback and I implemented new features based on that. He then blogged about it and started spreading the word.
Sorry, I don't want to disclose the app yet. I have 2-3 competitors that (IMHO) make some mistakes in what they focus on and sell much less than me. I don't want to give them hints ;-) It's a tool/utility app with a high entry barrier; it is difficult to do, which means fewer competitors. It took me 1.5 years to launch the first version working 10-15 hours/week and it worked embarrassingly badly when I look back. Once I improved it, the sales started going up.
Not sure if I'm a good fit for this website; it's not exactly hacking what I do, more like a lot of work.
Great article - thanks for sharing. This part really resonated with me:
It's certainly been helpful to adopt this slight mindset shift for my project (www.tribefive.me for reference). By thinking about how I can add value for other people, it makes it easier to come up with blog articles to write, or think of better ways to engage with potential customers, etc.
One tip to add: if you are just getting started on marketing...start small at first, but be very consistent about doing it.
For instance, send out just ONE cold email per day. Setting the bar low will make it very easy for you to "win" each day. Doesn't matter if its 9am or at 11:50pm...you can always achieve your daily goal.
And then as you build up momentum...you can step it up to 5 or 10 or even more outreaches per day.
Cheers!
Jonathan
Great tip. Being consistent is so important. It gets really tiring in the early stages to continue doing any marketing if any number (traffic, users, etc) is super low.
Yeah, you are totally right. The problem with marketing is that you don't get feedback right away compared to when you are coding (ie. you'll see errors real time when you do something wrong).
That means...you could be doing a bunch of email outreaches and results won't trickle in until a day / week later.
To get over that obstacle, I keep this quote front and center: "Don't judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant."
For anyone reading this article that feels marketing is not something they understand, I highly recommend that you follow HubSpot (http://blog.hubspot.com) to understand the value of 'inbound marketing'.
I also recommend that you get @mijustin 'Marketing for Developers' (https://devmarketing.xyz/). Don't just buy the book, get the online course and watch the videos. It's a great investment in how to take your product to market as a developer. Justin is also a fellow IH, so you give a bit of love back to the community... which is also good.
Thanks for the kind words @SilverStr!
Oh yeah, I learned lots from Justin over the years. ✊
Hey you earned it bud.
Keep forging along. Can't wait to hear more about the transistor.fm journey.
80% marketing is bullshit, unless you are selling bullshit or unicorn farts. A real product should be, maybe, 70% product 30% marketing. (on time and budget)
For a majority it's true, but in my case.... I haven't done much marketing(like 2 hours/week?) and I reached a 5 figures MRR in less than a year. The marketing was done by:
Probably it's just luck for me, but if you have a great product which serves a big need for a niche, the product pretty much sells itself.
I'd say 2 hours of focused marketing per week is a pretty significant amount of marketing for a solopreneur. ;)
What's your product? You should add it to your IH bio.
I had never heard of this 80/20 rule until I started frequenting IndieHackers. I always found myself trying to work on my project but always getting caught with marketing, demoing and selling to existing clients.
So, without knowing it, I ended up programming only on Fridays and sometimes Thursdays... so I validate the notion.
The "80-20" rule is a take on the Pareto principle (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pareto_principle)
In fact, it is, because it is important to promote the product well, and for this, of course, marketing is used. Previously, of course, it was not as developed as it is now. Especially digital marketing has become the most popular and effective. Everyone is looking to create an online business since the digital era has arrived. A couple of years ago, I encountered this myself when I created my online business. For good promotion, I needed to increase the traffic of my site and I decided to understand this issue better. The information at https://growmeo.com/ppc-management-pricing/ helped me a lot in which I learned almost everything I needed to attract traffic to my site. Now I have a stable and high profit
Wow! Thank you for this great post.
I am currently working on passportlist.co and will be grateful to get your feedback!
Ah. Reminds me of one of my professors who used to say, "Without marketing there is no product just a piece of code." One of his go to examples was Steve Jobs-Wozniak. If Jobs never marketed/introduced what Wozniak created then no one would have known about macintosh.
Great article and I can relate it very well. In fact, I saw most of the founders/makers of great products, actually spend the majority of their times on marketing.
Resonates so much with me. As a developer the biggest mistake I have ever made is ignoring marketing altogether.
Great article, thank you for putting this together.
The part that really resonated with me was to treat marketing as another mountain you are trying to scale. Like coding and product development, marketing is a skill that can be learned with effort, persistence, and being genuine.
Helped me tremendously. I don't want (nor couldn't) be that person that says 'I am not made for that'. I've learned how to design 20 years ago, branding 10 years ago and web development 6 years ago. I started with marketing about 2 years ago.
100% agree. Thanks for sharing.
This is very true. Even with an amazing product most of my time is spent on marketing, sales, demos, recruiting, etc.
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Is it still there? Thought I edited that (bad copy/paste from original blog) 🙀
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Happy to give some direction—just shoot an email! 🙂