how to balance coding and marketing work?
Hi! I'm a developer/ solo founder working on an idea putting games into slack/discord etc.
I'm struggling with when to end the "build playable demo" first phase, and shifting to things like user acquisition and marketing.
Where should I draw the line? or is it always just a cycle?
One thing about what I'm working on is that it's multi-player so I need a critical mass of users to come in at the same time. It makes it a bit harder to gather people together. We've done a few group playtest sessions and people seem to like it, but there's just so many glaring problems I want to fix before throwing the doors open.
Maybe I should do "marketing monday" etc. and put aside a chunk of time for that.
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Pick some balance to start with and change it over time.
So at the start of a project 10% /90% code marketing
Soon graduate to 30/70 one it's usable
And maybe get up to 50/50
While it does let decide that lets say you do a full week, 2 or even a month of just marketing.
If you must have a mass at once, work on preping it all for a big multi channel launch.. prep content and people in different channels...
You might want to have a cycle of launch, Dev and relaunch..
There are gdc talks on YouTube.
One of the games got really good results from putting in consistency.
Small release every 3 month, big one every 6.
Small patches didn't help growth, only stuff that could be talked about and consistent timelines
More play time correlates to more revenue
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uy0Dfr-mnUY
This is the bigger interesting one
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmuy9fyNUjY
You got a great idea in hand, just followed you and keep it up...
I'm having a hard time doing that actually, but in general, here's what I do:
I think the intra-day switching cost sounds too high. Batches for "marketing mode" seem to be more attractive. Or maybe that's just another way to put it off!
promise the future to early users: sign up now and join a hundred people group when we launch!
gather their emails while you build the app. keep them updated about the progress.
beat their expectations when you launch the product.
It's always just a loop.
I found a balance for myself: I made a small feature, told everyone at once, got feedback, and continue doing it.
This way you will always keep people attentive and then they will think:
Yeah, cool, this guy's doing something.
that sounds good, I can also put a release cycle together for myself then. Target a release at date X and be ready to switch out of dev mode for a few days.