How do you tackle marketing if you're a non-marketer founder?
As a co-founder, I handle the business side, but my experience lies in business development. All the marketing efforts are done by self-learning.
We reached a point where we need more sustainable actions to earn traction, increase brand awareness, & ultimately grow.
Do we hire someone part-time?
What do indie hackers normally do when there's a tight budget but room for growth?
The third option nobody mentions is you don't have to learn it or hire for it. Some founders now use autonomous marketing agents that handle research, planning, and execution end-to-end, with budget caps and approval gates so you stay in control but the agent does the work. You get the results without the hiring cost or the learning curve.
Hands on is always the best way to learn IMO — just try, fail, and optimize.
While you're at it, get on some newsletters. Getting on a few solid marketing newsletters has been HUGELY helpful for me. It's not a big time investment, but soon you'll be speaking the language and thinking like a marketer. And it might even give you some good tactics to try your hand at (and fail, and optimize again). 😀
Here's a list a solid list of newsletters if you're interested.
Of course, hiring (or bringing on a co-founder) can be a great idea. It just depends on what's more valuable to you right now — your time or the money it would cost to hire someone.
Great list. Thank you!
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I have been reading marketing books (sometimes do listen to marketing podcasts as well) for one hour every morning for the last 64 days and it has helped a lot. During the day I'll also bookmark and read articles here and there.
While learning is a big part of it though, another large part of the experience also comes from doing things hands on. None of us has much clue on how to do things perfectly so just humble trying and experimenting with are super useful.
I'm in the process of trying to learn as well. Have you found any good podcasts on it that you'd recommend?
What books do you recommend the most? So far I've read (and all very recommended):
I started writing an answer here but realized I don't really have enough information. From your post I can tell these two things are true:
If both of these are true, I think the main issue to examine — before exploring options like hiring a "professional marketer" — is the first point above.
Exactly how much effort have you poured into do-it-yourself marketing? Have you read books / listened to podcasts? Joined marketing communities? Booked one-off consultations with experienced marketers or successful founders? Etc.?
(It could be the case that the answer to the above questions is "No," which is perfectly fine. I'm just wondering if the situation is that you "can't" do more by yourself, or that e.g. it's so unfulfilling for you to struggle with marketing that you're just curious if there's another practical option.)
I dabbled with marketing, but I can't say I've given it my all since I'm more focused on business development. Could you recommend materials to get me started?
I am a marketer. I agree with what @GregariousHermit said here. Read to understand marketing, get some hands on experience to understand its power. All this will take tome and money. Hire someone, if you want to shorten this cycle to get results sooner than you would have.
There is no better way to learn than trying it out but it does take time. I was a software engineer and slowly made a transition into being a digital marketer. I could have given more direct advice on marketing strategy or just cleared your questions about marketing in general if I knew more about your product/service. If you need some advice, happy to help. Pls email me at digitalacquisitionstrategy@gmail.com
Thanks, Sid. I will get in touch.
Sounds gr8!
In my opinion, don't hire anyone yet. Start by using gorilla tactics with 0$ ad spend. Often its people who are most creative with a limited budget that beat out those that spend thousands of dollars to promote their project.
That means you can try blog posts, getting involved in Twitter spaces, cold emails, designing your website to fit your audience - all types of things. If you want to do digital marketing, look at what others are doing and whats getting attention and find cheap ways to replicate it.
doing alone is always an option for all things in life.. All it takes is time/money to learn what someone else already knows. As said, hiring someone is just to shorten the cycle and quicken your ability to do more with better focus.
But yeah, learn what is good because then atleast you get an idea of when you are getting good service and when you are not.
My approach:
I am a Software Tester turned founder. Being a subject matter expert in a field is good enough to put content out that makes it interesting for people to read. A single credible post is good enough to drive signups. This is how I drove traffic. I recently put out that our product got approved by Atlassian and was placed in their market place. This drove traffic and sigups.
As non marketing founders, we need to look at taking the company to the point where we can get a jedi marketing person on board. That's the person I am searching for (although I know I am an year away from affording one such)
I've always had the same problem. Marketing never came natural to me so it is a challenge. I've found that the common growth tactics that everyone talks about such as SEO and building in public are great techniques, but there is more to learn in the less traditional approaches. For example, someone creates a challenge on Twitter that drives traffic to their website. Another person changes the copy on their landing page to say something that drives up the reader's curiosity so they have to signup to find out more. These techniques cannot be standardized and applied across all businesses. It's more of a mindset. The best way to achieve this mindset is to start taking notes of great marketing you see every day and reflect on it.
Once you start to think this way, you can combine the more common techniques with this creative thinking and then force yourself to consistently be spending time on marketing. Most people spend way too little time. It should actually consume a majority of your time from day 1.
I'm currently building a tool to help with this. It's a project management app for marketing tasks and strategy. I'm building this for myself but other founders and small teams in the growth stages of their startup have interest as well.
Thanks for the advice. I am interested in checking out your tool.
MarketingPad.io
Goal is to launch to beta users by February 15th.
You hit the ceiling with getting new customers because you hit the ceiling of understanding what you're doing.
Your heading says: "Consolidate your data, automate your workflows, and collaborate with your team. With the power of no-code, substitute spreadsheets with your very own software." - this is a lot of things, all hard to visualize.
On your Twitter account you shared products you love. Hunter.io - find person's email from any company. Hemingway app - write better articles. I was on your page for 3 minutes and I can't understand 1 key reason I have to use your product, as with Hunter and Hemingway.
You may consider running traffic, but from my experience it will burn your cash at this stage. To bring your hustle to the next level you got to understand your own product better. I made a document called Startup Traction Plan, where you answer a quiz to find the next steps on growing your startup. I promise you'll have more clarity if you spend 30 min to complete it - https://dshatalin.gumroad.com/l/tractionplan
I agree, there's a lot to be done when it comes to the message we're conveying. That's on my top list of problems to solve.
As for Twitter, I'm using it to enrich people with the knowledge I'm gaining, not only advertise for my company. Like for instance, the tools I mentioned like Hemingway and hunter, I found useful and wanted to share with people and so on.
There are a few options available to you and what you decide is likely impacted by how difficult you've found marketing and what resources you have available.
There is a cost to spending your own time on marketing - which is that it's not being spent on other parts of your business. And I am saying this as a marketer.
Yes, as everyone has said, you should try and understand marketing fundamentals.
However three things that could work for you right now, are
Finally, please take a look at my site first100users.com which has 100 actionable tips.
I'm a product designer and developer, not a marketer.
As such, I market by sharing updates of the design and development process on Twitter. I find this much faster, easier and more relatable than attempting to be a marketer and doing a substandard job. I've found this approach works really well for smaller projects where updates alone can serve as marketing material.
You have two options:
A) Invest/burn a lot of time AND money to build own knowhow + learn from mistakes.
B) Invest in marketing expertise to save TIME and MONEY + learn from mistakes.
My recommendation: Take the shortcut and hire an experienced marketing manager or consultant. Don't forget to plan + provide resources like salary and advertising budget.
And yes, I'm a marketing consultant.
Well said. Thanks!
Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares learned from their own experiences, building a successful company is hard. For every startup that grows to the point where it can go public or be profitably acquired, hundreds of others sputter and die. Read the book "Traction"
I heard good things about this book. I will get started on it. Thanks.
If your product has a good demand and offers unique competitive advantages, I think you should be able to hire some marketing help to generate results. But from my experience, among all professions, marketers have the lowest level of delivery success. So you should know enough about the marketing needs for your business first.
Hey mate, let me know if you need a hand. I run a boutique digital agency focusing on maximising marketing $ for start ups.
Shoot me a note would be more than happy to help out.