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11 Comments

How much time do you spend marketing vs building?

Right now I’m at a 5:2 ratio of building the product vs marketing my product codernotes.io, but I’m worried that I’m not spending enough time on marketing leading up to the beta. How do you spend your time?

Especially interested in solo founders.

  1. 1

    Being a techie, I have to be careful with this. If I am not, I end up 100% development. Currently, I am 100% marketing :-)

  2. 1

    60% marketing 40% product improvement

    Most product feedback comes from marketing effort so far

  3. 1

    100% development. I checked with https://trends.google.com/trends/ beforehand that people search for the exact product that I want to sell them and I built a landing page a year ago with those keywords. Since then, I get sales almost exclusively from organic search traffic, but I struggle to keep up with support and feature updates.

    1. 1

      How has google trends validation worked for yoU? Have you been able to capitalize and generate a profit?

      1. 1

        Yes, worked nicely.

        I saw that terms like "Spatial Surround Sound", "Gaming Surround Sound Card", or "Surround Headphones" were trending. To me, that looked like e-sports gamers were looking to buy sound cards with Spatial Surround Sound for Headphones, because that's what gives you an edge in competitive gaming.

        Spatial = you can hear which direction the enemy is firing from.

        Through Google, I also found some reviews where gaming magazines were talking about the pros and cons of the Surround Sound delivered with hardware products, so I knew there was interest and that people wanted spatial support.

        I then bought spatialsoundcard.com and named the product "Spatial Sound Card - Gaming Edition". The tagline is "Upgrade your Headphones to 5.1 Surround Sound". FYI, this was a branch-off out of our professional audio plugin called "Spatial Audio Designer". The tech was invented by our non-technical founder and he aptly named it "Headphone Surround 3D".

        So basically, our product, tagline, and tech names are exactly the Google keywords. Naturally, we rank highly for them :)

        After the first 100 or so sales, I noticed that the name started popping up on the forum of my favorite gaming magazine, so I sent them an email and they wrote a short article about us.

        After roughly 1000 sales, we got approached by a major German publisher who wanted to feature us on the cover of their gaming magazine.

        But the problem is that finding C++ Windows kernel driver programmers is challenging, so I need to do compatibility patches by myself. You'll see that there's dedicated threads on Steam where people complain to each other about my app's current shortcomings.

  4. 1

    I'm probably 1:1 right now. But as my product becomes more functional, I'll shift further into marketing. That is the beauty of software, once you solved the problem, you need to switch into distributing the solution!

    Basically, solve problems to get and retain customers. Otherwise, market.

  5. 1

    I've been on both sides. my first business taught me so much, but also left a gaping hole of wasted time and $$ because I was so worried about having the "perfect setup" that I neglected learning how to even sell myself or market. The best tip from my experience would be to get a working MVP of whatever the more "core" thing you are providing out while leaving the design and flow for AFTER you get people to try and use/buy it. You'll find that clients/customers will always have input for you to consider regarding the experience. But if it has any value, you will build relationships by updating them (with changes that they gave you) which keeps your momentum going. Just make sure you ask for feed back and research anything that gives similar solutions. Good luck.

    1. 1

      Thanks! I am basically at this point, with the alpha of CoderNotes just having been released to a few friends

      1. 1

        Another thought, treat advice given like a "grain of salt" for the most part. Every situation and outcome is different. While you should attempt any method that you believe could work, if it fails, just be prepared to learn from it and move onto a different approach. GL

  6. 1

    At least half the time. Especially if you’re a technical guy. Building things feel more natural and productive but if you’re not spending equally as much time selling it, success will be harder to reach.

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