How do you balance building with marketing?
I am stuck in that cycle where I have to temporary suspend marketing to work on improving the murlist.com on nearly weekly basis. I am working on this alone so handle development, sales and marketing myself.
Unsurprisingly, whenever I stop marketing there is significant decrease in traffic and sales. I am sure I am doing this wrong and would love to know how others approach this.
I enjoy coding more than I do marketing, hence scared I will fall into the "building hell".
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I feel you on this. Building is so much easier for. I have done a number of things:
For me, doing marketing activity in the morning is the best time as I feel more engaged in it so maybe look at when it feels more natural too.
Great points! Do you work full-time on Leavetrack or you have a regular job too? Because it still sounds like a lot :)
Part-time. Still work full time for a large HR company but that gives me an insight into interesting issues in the HR space. My company is on the edge of what can be done in recruiting - think job application to job offer via situational and psychometric assessments and live interview in 2 hours.
I can imagine how stressful it is being in a full-time role and a solo builder.
Due to my time zone, I market at 11pm to 3am. F'ing GMT +8. I have to demo call while the world is awake.
I have a target of one blog post per week, I guess I have to increase that.
I can't remember who it was (it was linked here about a week ago) but I was reading about a company and how in a year they did 150 "content pieces" in a year so I figured 3 a week was a solid goal. Some of my updates are literally short on updates to the app or a summary of interesting news in the HR space.
That is solid. Thank you!
I separate based on days in the week. So two days of building, two distribution, two customer chats and one content production. But that's because I have a full time job. Otherwise Id make sure Im talking to customers every day and doing a bit of building and marketing every day as well. Consistency is key with both building and distribution.
That's a good point right there. I will look into it.
Afaik @jakevoytko spent some time thinking about this question. Maybe he has some insights. :)
Thanks for the pointer!
In this case, since there's revenue coming in the door but growth is throttled on multiple jobs, I wonder if one of the jobs can be contracted out. Can you get an offshore developer to build features while you market? Can you find a marketing contractor that can follow a playbook? You have a successful product that is throttled on the marketing time invested, so I'd personally cover the marketing myself and contract out the engineering.
Another idea is finding a cofounder so you can split responsibilities.
Use sales calls to create marketing. Take 30 minutes after a sales call to write down a short blog post about something that came up in the call. Either something you said that you could write. Best is if they have a question, you answer it in a blog post, and send it to them. Then you have a blog post that answers a real question, and an answer for that person.
I'd also suggest charging more. It's a common trope. I find that higher profit margins help create marketing flywheels. You'll have more to spend on automated ads or at least ads that run while you sleep instead of relying on content marketing or any marketing that draws your full attention.
FB and Google Ads need days to automatically adjust themselves. And they'll need your intervention at times but not your full attention except for many a half a day to start them and a few minutes to review aggregate numbers.
Thank you, the argument behind the price is to remove barrier to entry for early adopters.
In your experience, do you think cost impacts sales as much as I fear? Some users request lifetime deals but I just turn that down. What's your thoughts on this?
Has a user explicitly said "I will pay X" for your product, you price it at that and they buy it?
If so, you should raise your prices and give any requests for discount a discount code.
I don't think early adopters are stopping from buying based on price. We think it happens but it doesn't.
@Patio11 from 2006: "Charge more" https://www.kalzumeus.com/2006/08/14/you-can-probably-stand-to-charge-more/
@Yongfook in 2020: "Charge more"
Thank you very much. I will do just that and measure the outcome.
Hey, I feel you guys, thank you for sharing. I am building a saas on my own too. I remember my first private beta, it was very frustrating since I had to totally stop to build the product in order to fix all bugs that happened. I guessed it will be the same challenge, as soon that I will enter in public beta !
One thing that I did is divide my days in two. Mornings are for coding, afternoons and evenings for marketing and sales.
But besides that, this is just prioritizing what's needed, what's urgent. Right now you feel you have to juggle your time when you are solo, when you grow you'll have to juggle money and it's not that different.
The goal is to get users, paying users. What's stopping that now? Is it the product or the marketing? Work on the one that's stopping it. Just because there's a ticket in the issue tracker to be done, some code to write, that doesn't mean that you have to do it. Compare that with the topmost issue on your marketing project manager tool, which one is more important? which one is stopping you from growing, making money?
That's solid. Have you experimented with dividing by days instead?
Curious to learn how that compares with diving by morning and evening for you.
Yes, during periods of code or marketing crunch, I tend to do one or the other, but generally those are not dividing up a week, but instead work full time on X until milestone achieved.
The products I did in the past had more sales than marketing, so there wasn't much to do at 5am in the morning sales-wise, while I could code.
+1, looking to hear how others in the community are balancing the two. Currently facing the same prioritization problem for my SaaS Adflow.
This is such a tricky thing to balance! Doing the 'do' while also handling all the other aspects of growing a business can be super daunting. Have you ever looked into blocking your time out for certain types of tasks during hours of certain types of energy / momentum? This explains it pretty well https://smallbusinessify.com/how-to-identify-your-peak-productivity-hours-and-use-it-to-get-things-done/
I'm struggling with the same thing right now. Currently I'm trying to bounce back and forth between a month of focus work on engineering/customer success or marketing/sales. Context switching has been hard for me, but I'm still looking for the right groove.
I've accepted that as one person, I can't expect to be great at both at the same time. I chose to split it up monthly so I can work on getting new customers one month and the next month focus on making sure they are having a great experience with the brand and product.
So far it's been helpful for me, especially because it gives me time to read books, listen to podcasts, etc to learn new skills but also to work on applying them right away with my complete focus.
Are you working on building the product because you love doing it or because there is real demand for lots of features (prospects have told you they won't sign up because there's no feature X or customers churn because Y is missing)?
What is your marketing process? Is this something you could automate?
I haven't looked into automating yet. I assume, there are some that can't be automated like personal reach outs.
Have had any success with automating marketing yet? Can you share a few tips?
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