A service idea for devs to help them market
I posted this on Kern.al as an idea, if you have a user profile there AND you think this is something that should be a thing give it an upvote over there. I really want to see what that crowd thinks about it.
https://kern.al/idea/decision-tree-for-developers-needing-a-path-to-marketing
Here it is:
Time and again well-meaning developers and Indie Hackers go from MVP to early launch to instant stagnation. The skill sets they possess to get something built don't carry over to their new second job - marketing their baby. While the internet is awash in the minutiae of specific channel marketing techniques and best practices, what's missing is a fundamental roadmap generator that takes basic questions about the developer's new "baby" and lays out a logical step-by-step approach.
Examples would be a mobile social app or a B2B expense tracker, two vastly different apps and markets. If there was a basic decision matrix, a set of checkboxes, etc. a dev could interact with that resulted in a basic marketing recipe for their kind of app it would prevent a massive amount of wheel spinning and attempts to cover all bases, some of which might be better left ignored.
Codifying what a CMO would almost instantly see as the correct road map for a given app and making it granular enough to produce actionable results in the form of a chronological, weighted, roadmap would be the desired outcome.
If your the marketing person that can instantly formulate a battle plan for any app based on its audience, its price points, industry, complexity, uniqueness, and all the other variables that populate your marketing brain like old friends we just need to turn you into an AI or a decision matrix that says "do these three things, in this order and then when X starts to happen start doing these two additional things, but don't waste your time on Z until you start Y"
Will it produce a bespoke roadmap? Doubtful, but simply narrowing the possibilities based on some basic inputs and logic will prevent the loss of precious marketing time, money, and effort for Devs.
Sounds interesting but one thing about marketing that I have found during my consultancy time is that the truly hardest part of it all is the actual hustle part.
Time and time again I have put together easy, peasy strategies with clear steps and actions to take, only for it to be pushed away due to other requirements and needs.
Writing a solid article takes hours, promoting and engaging across channels takes hours, sales takes hours, building a quality landing page with the right content and language takes hours. The worst of it all is that you could be doing this all for a few weeks/months with barely any movement on the needle.
Whilst I applaud this attempt at simplifying the process, you will find that people inevitably don't want to do the hustle or get bored when they write X posts and share them with Y and nothing happens.
Unless you are willing to hustle on areas where you may not be entirely expert at, roadmaps and checklists are inevitably also difficult to gain any benefit from.