How do you split your time between development and marketing?
Solo founders, how do you split your time between development and marketing?
For me, it is always 100% in development for a month, and 100% in marketing the next month. And, feeling bad for not doing enough on either side and moving too slow.
How do you manage your time as a solo founder?
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I follow this: https://codingweekmarketingweek.com
1 week of coding followed by 1 week of marketing.
That is very interesting, thanks for sharing!
I'd love to know the answers here as well. Personally, I am experimenting with focusing solely on marketing during the validation phase!
Yeah, it is normal to jump back and forth between development and marketing from time to time!
It depends on stage of the project.
Right now at focusity.space we only talk to customers, do research and validate. When this phase will be over, we'll start coding. Probably we'll spend 90% coding and 10% doing marketing.
With product-market fit, I think you should spend 90% doing marketing to get revenue to hire some marketing specialist
That's true. The general advice that I get also depend on the current stage it is an endless back-and-forth effort.
This is the tough part! There is a stage for everything, but it's true sometimes you regret not being focused on one at a time! What a challenge!!!
Ouch!! So much to do, so little time.
I try to do my development in week-long (ish) sprints. After the sprint is done, I do two-day sprint of marketing where I knock out bigger tasks (e.g. articles, strategy, outreach). That tends to work pretty well for me. But I do bock out about 30 minutes on the development days to stay active on twitter, etc.
Blocking time in this way allows me to do deep work, which is super important to me. I can't allow my attention to be split in the millions of ways that a solo founder's attention gets split — I would get nothing done.
So true, "can't allow my attention to be split in the millions of ways"!
Yeah, I have also tried to do that recently to contribute a little time every day to stay active on Twitter and LinkedIn.
Sometimes it is better to find a specialist or some kind of partner. If you are more into development, find someone to do the marketing. Or vice versa. And work together, but everyone will have their own pool of work. That way you don't have to be torn between quite different sphere of work.
Can't agree more. But it can be very tough to finding the right person and it is really hard to force this process.
This is an interesting question. I am good at marketing instead of development. But my boss do well in both.
Your boss is a super man :)
We just hired a marketer) As the promotion cannot stand idle and wait for development and fixing bugs
True true. Hiring the right person is also quite a challenge. Otherwise, you'll have to split your time into managing that one person.
IMO I don't think you can do both successfully without a team and automation. There simply isn't enough time and once you start gaining traction the marketing needs to be ongoing otherwise you will lose the traction that you've built. Definitely team for the win for me!
I do 1 hour of marketing every morning and the rest of the day dedicated to development. I like it because I make progress on both of them versus one taking a pause while the other progresses.
Nice strategy.
I always take one or two hours per day to focus on marketing. Also I try to follow the Audience First Approach which allows me to combine fun with marketing by sharing what I am working on with the peeps
I tried switching between marketing & building on alternate weeks for my product famewall & in that case it seemed to work well since once the launch was done, I only pushed features slowly
But for my new product mailboat, I do both marketing & coding spread out in a single day. This actually prevents me from burning out as I have to wire my creative brain (for marketing) & focused brain (for building) at different times of the day