Can I just code instead of doing marketing?

You're already thinking like a marketer.

Marketing is not "blogging" and it's not "email". Marketing (when done right) is about thinking about who your target customer is, where they spend time, and how you can get in front of them.

If you are building tools for devs, ask yourself where your target market can be found. Ask yourself what problems they have and how you can demonstrate that you solve those problems.

"just coding" is fine if you want to build a product, and with some word of mouth maybe you'll get users. But it's not a good strategy to build a sustainable business. Marketing and sales will be needed for that, again though that all depends on who your target customer is and what you can do to get in front of them.

"If a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?"

Marketing comes with a lot of baggage, but at the end of the day all marketing is responsible for is telling people about how your product helps them solve a problem so they'll come and use it.

If you can do that at hackathons, great! But, most products need a little bit more help to show up on their customers' radars – even if they're developers.

I've built 5 startup and I'd strongly recommend to find a Marketing co-founder. A good product goes no-where without a good marketing

I think it would depend on if you believe your target market will be at those hackathons and what the impact of not winning would be.

If you are only attending local hackathons, is your target market only the developers who are local to you?

What happens if you don't win with hackathon? If winning is a requirement that might be a risky strategy since it's not completely in your control.

I too am working in the developer tools space, and I'm also not proficient at marketing. Without marketing though my company would not exist today. I went the co-founder route, and teamed up with someone who was good at marketing. This may not be the correct path for you to take but it could be worth considering.

Become a friend of a marketer

Using Hackatons or online contests to get visibility is doing marketing. A good question to ask yourself is if that's a good way to gain visibility with your potential customers, and if that visibility reflects on your product and not just on yourself personally. If the answer to those questions is yes, then that's probably a great way to do marketing for you.

If not, you might be able to find some alternatives where you can reach your target market in a meaningful way, and that you could still enjoy. This is easier when you're part of your own target market, ie a developer who wants to sell to other developers :)

Hey Generatedcode,

good question! If you define marketing the old way, like ads, or like shouting "buy my stuff", this does not work anymore. People got used to that and they ignore it.

However, if you define marketing as "helping people solve their problems" (by going through a transformation and eventually using your product), then everything begins to make sense.

You can see marketing as a systematic process that will show your future customers why your product is so awesome. Marketing will help them understand and develop a positive emotion around it. Eventually, they will see buying it as the most attractive next step.

To break this down and make marketing easier, I wrote a blog post that may help you:

https://2quiet2market.com/blog/spme-marketing-habit-for-solopreneurs-who-have-other-things-to-do-besides-marketing/

Have fun and all the best for useGenerated! 😄
Matthias

P.S.: I even made a marketing system for introverts (like us software devs, for example). You can find it on the same website as the blog post.

If you build an app that goes viral and captures a bunch of attention, that's a form of marketing. I've seen it done with the startup I currently work with.

I also need help with the Marketing process. Any advice?

The same reason I built decentool.com and let it out there for free. When I am outside my working place/ when hanging out with friend or something, I use the tool to create content and publish it online. I make it as easy as possible and as good quality as possible.

If you guys want to use it feel free it is free to use anyway

wow I literally just read something related to this yesterday. So I read about this founder who started an email platform business and in his journey he realised he hates all the biz stuff, and just loves the coding. So... he realised that coding COULD initself be marketing.

As in, if he coded little free complimentary tools then he could use those as marketing.

Of course, in a way you are still marketing, and you have to think beyond just releasing software.. but this particulalr founder seems to have found something that works for them.

Here's the link from the piece I read: https://founderbeats.com/micro-saas-email-smtp-api-emailengine

Even if you launch your product on platforms like Product Hunt some time down the road you would need to market your launch.

Honestly just Hackathons won't get you enough visibility specially if you don't manage to win, I understand the aversion to marketing cause it does seem like extra effort, which it is and honestly you would rather spend more time perfecting the product. But you do need to create some kind of hype around your tool with social media, just like how you asked this question here, you can also build in public which I'm sure a lot of people would be interested in.

Even if you launch your product on platforms like Product Hunt some time down the road you would need to market your launch.

Hackathons and Online Contests are kind of marketing tactics. Even if you are just sharing your progress that's a form of marketing

All you have to do is show what you are coding. Display your work. Let it speak for it self. That is the most effective and simplest marketing and advertising.

In my experience, you can actually just code with a condition: your target audience is also technical. In this case, you can simply publish your findings/tech knowledge as marketing.

I firmly believe that marketing is necessary in the long run.
But it also depends on what you call marketing.
As @developer_markepear pointed out, having a blog and documenting what you do is a great start.

There is also another option for those who code but don't do marketing.
It is called employment.

Or you can become part of an agency that gives you coding jobs.
But that's probably just another form of employment.

But since we are on Indiehackers...
...employment is not an option because it is not indie enough. 😉

Yours,
KodingKitty

Most likely will not work, not in the long run.

But there are things that are semi-scalable that involve mostly coding.

For example, you could create PRs to open source projects with your tool in there (obv depends on the tool you are building).

You can create "how to do {Job to be done} in {framework}" and basically document how you coded it. Then say you can also use this tool.

You could code a bunch of free open source tools, put them on GH with a readme that links to your paid project.

I write about this stuff on my blog/newsletter if interested > developer markepear.

Hi @Generatedcode,
You've made a great tool and I really like it. Really great job!
I'm working on the idea of code generation as well, but from the UI dashboard and with the same tech stack - NestJs/Prisma (I'm a fan of NestJs and working with from its very beginning and cintributed some of its core features).

For a wile I was hoping to find someone to team up with, someone who has similar ideas and passion, I would say.
For my career I worked a lot with microservices and in every project there was the same issue - at some point in time it became harder to follow all the communication flows between them, having the picture in one place, etc.

So the main idea that came into my mind - is to build a platform that will show all the events and flows (event catalog), all the services (service catalog), but also generate all this.

I'm trying hard to finish an MVP and now a user of the product already can do:

• generate a repo (nx workspace, other repos types in the roadmap)
• generate gateway/service
• generate a Saga - the flow events and services (nice grafical represebtation on the UI and generated code with modules/controllers/services/DTOs, etc. for each service in the flow)
• generate Prisma models/nest molule on the backend (the UI builder is in progress)
• browse Event Catalog (see all sagas, events)
• browse Service Catalog (all services with 8nfo on them)
• I've created a bunch of node packages, such as:
  -- Sagas module, which generates a service on the fly, and when imported by a microservice that takes part in that Saga, the service already has all type-safe methods to send events;
  -- logger (based on pino)
  -- nats (helper sdk for sending events)
  -- context (shares requestId through all events in a saga)
  -- and more!

All this looks a little bit similar to Amplication, but my goal is to create a platform where you can do both - see all your flows between services and generate them, and also do this much simplier (I still struggle with navigation in Amplication, and really don't like much the generated code).

So I would be really glad and happy to propose to you to team up :)
Sorry for such a long message.

P.S.
Refine use my nestjsx/crud lib as a crud connector for NestJs and I like them too :)

Do you have any direct users now as it is? If so, do you know why they are they using this product and can you use their use cases to build a segment and market to them?

If you already have just a few users, it should be possible to find more from the same pool. This is usually the best way forward, at least as a start. If you do have users but they are not engaging, then this is your first problem. Marketing will only intensify the problem if users are not happy with the product itself.

Next, if they are engaging and they'e happy with the product, then analyze them to understand if they are a possible marketing segment. Then you go hunt to where this marketing segment hangs out, think subreddits, medium, twitter or so. Then you market it to them, think blog posts, simple posts or paid advertising. This is obviously a lot more complicated than just so but to boil it down to the basics.

Also as a start, it's good to let people try it out for free. Especially if you are unknown so they can see if it works or not.

Also as a slight note, design can matter a lot. Maybe try to find some design focused and growth focused co-founders? If you have happy users already you have a lot of potential.

I am in the same boat. I just want to code and did that for a long time for my project.
However, problem is that at some moment you want to move from hobby to business. At least me when I wanted to go fulltime. Then you need the marketing...
What works a bit for me is to be on Twitter and share new features/developments. Example

I struggle with this SO much. I just want to code. For my startup #1 I posted on 20+ websites to market my first product and it was so sad/hard haha. On my startup #2 I'm going to pay for Google Ads so I don't have to post so many places!

You can just code on your hobby

You could start a youtube channel or a Twitter/TikTok/Instagram account where you show your progress. If it's good people will be way more engaged in your products rather than simple ads.

There is a very successful startup called qdrant, where they have most traffic coming from github.

Honestly Speaking. If you are building a DevTool product you have to do the marketing on your own, assuming that you are the founder of the firm.
One more important thing that you should notice is you need to find the Product and Market Fit in this process.

I've found that alot of the scary parts about marketing as a dev is that you aren't sure what to say and who to say it to.

The process I follow is to first know what I'm gonna say. I write down the answers to these questions specifically about the thing im building:

• What is the big problem in the world to solve?
• Why is it a problem?
• Who specifically, is experiencing this problem?
• What’s at stake?
• What’s been tried, but has failed?
• What’s our role in this? - Mission
• Why are we specifically the right people to do this?
• How do we approach the problem:
• on a rational level?
• on emotional level?
• on a cultural level?
• What does the world look like when we’re done? - Vision

Once you do this you'll kind of have a picture of the story you are telling and who you should be telling it to. This is really just step 1 but it really helps narrow down your thoughts when you are forced to answer the specific questions.

Hope this is helpful!

As a developer, it's natural to focus primarily on coding and feel less confident about marketing.

If you have a killer product that developers will love then "just coding" could work.

However I would argue 99% of ideas do not achieve this. You need to talk to potential customers as their feedback is valuable to refining your product.

I try to split my time about evenly between coding and reaching out to potential customers.

Good luck!

Marketing is the same important as development

No. As an entrepreneurial scientist, marketing is defined as everything the company does in order to secure consumer preference. (Note, different Professors prefer different definitions.)

That has a key implication, namely: PRODUCT is part of marketing!

This matters because if you listen to most people that think they understand marketing and are creating content about it, you'll quickly realize they equate marketing to distribution.

The reason that's bad is because it gives the illusion that you can make a product in isolation in your "lab" and then simply go out and magically find your customers.

Before you write a line of code, you need to answer two insanely important questions:

1. Who is this for EXACTLY?
2. What expensive problem does this solve?

Now here's where it gets tricky.

Some people in this forum are so GOATed that they, without realizing it, have completely internalized this.

They spend hours and hours in their clubhouse (online places your audience bitches and moans), and are completely a part of the community.

Those people will then talk about how "marketing" is irrelevant.

But that's not true. They simple don't realize what they're doing subconsciously.

That's why, when others copy their approach, they fail to get the same results.

Any marketing teacher worth their salt will always start with market research.

Qualitative (e.g. netnography) for small companies like us.

Quantitative (e.g. conjoint analysis) for big established brands.

Hope that helps. If you like this kind of evidence-based marketing stuff, I ship a newsletter Monday through Friday where I teach solopreneurs marketing.

Don't worry, there are tons of marketers out there and you just need to hire someone that's it.

You need a marketing co-founder mate.

Great question!

well nope.. Let me tell you why.
The coding part is the last skill you need in building a business. Maybe you don’t want a business and it’s ok for you to work for someone else either as a freelancer or full time job.
To build a business you need to be a business man. Finding the idea, validating the idea, cold calls emails and DMs, marketing, sales, on boarding, pitching, investment meeting etc ..
Recruiting maybe ? Anyway, the last thing you need is coding.
You are selling a new concept to solve a problem. You are not selling code.

I learned this the hard way, and i think it’s good that you are learning this right now.

If you want to build your business than be a businessman! If you want to just code than work for someone else’s business.

Hi @Generatedcode,

Develop open source projects or libraries that add real value to other developers.

An example would be daisy ui (It would be time for me to post links, dear mods 🙋‍♂️).

You can raise money directly through GitHub or platforms like OpenCollective.

Personally, I think it's entirely possible to make money and maybe even make a living from coding alone.

You should consider marketing not only as a tool to attract customers, but also to validate ideas. It's much easier to place a Facebook ad than to hope for the community's reaction if your project or library is really used 🤔

That sounds harder in the long run, just hoping to get visibility - the internet is a noisy place! Even interacting on IndieHackers or Twitter is a form of marketing, it's all about getting heard by the right people.

There is marketing you can do that doesn't involve interacting with people on social media platforms i.e. SEO but this is really for only when you've validated your product.

Alternatively partner with someone who is good at marketing but they don't have technical expertise, drop some messages in some Slack channels or Discord groups or find one even on IndieHackers