How to do marketing

If you are solopreneur who sucks at marketing, I noticed that most pre-profitable solopreneurs struggle with the same problems.

That’s why I wrote this self-help marketing guide. It’s not a silver bullet to start earning $100,000/mo. But rather a simple framework to get unstuck.

1. Build better products

Your marketing starts the day you pick your product idea. Some products can reach $5,000/mo. Some can’t (or it will take you 5 years and 2 burnouts).

This is what a good product idea looks like:

• It’s simple to build (less than 1 month for the first version)

• You have a major customer insight (you understand something most competitors don’t)

• You understand what marketing channel will get you 80% of traffic in the first 6 months (and you know how to use it right away)

• You are excited about this idea (most products will need 6+ months to take off, so you better be ready for the long run)

But most importantly — you are building a painkiller and not a vitamin.

Painkiller ideas

• Sound boring

• Your customers will face major negative consequences if they don’t solve the problem your product aims to solve (lose money, legal problems, wasted time)

• Mostly B2B (but can be B2C too)

• Your customers use it weekly / daily

• It’s hard to explain this product to your parents

Vitamin ideas

• Sound hype

• Your customers will face minor negative consequences (fewer likes on Twitter, you didn’t get a new habit)

• Mostly B2C

• Your customers use it annually / monthly

• You are embarrassed to mention this product to your parents

If you can take away one lesson from this document — kill your vitamin product and build a painkiller.

Not sure if you have a painkiller or a vitamin?

Use our free Idea Validator. It will return you brutally honest feedback (might make you cry). This is a rare case when the grass is greener on the other side.

Don’t have any product ideas?

• How to get good product ideas (22 mins video)

• Business Ideas Generator (it’s programmed to return painkiller ideas)

Too attached to your product to kill it? Do a one-month pause, then. Build a product to scratch your itch. If it fails, you can always come back to your vitamin piece of crap.

2. Get specific about your strategy

Okay, this will be boring. I hate the idea of “launch and see what sticks.” It’s a dumb dream sold by Indie Hackers who build products for other Indie Hackers.

If your audience is not on Twitter / Product Hunt, it will be a failure 98% of the time. I don’t expect you to generate a 50-page business plan. This is dumb, too. But please spend 10 minutes answering these questions (it’s a bare minimum).

7 questions:

1. What one problem am I solving?

2. What audience segment craves a solution like my product the most?

3. What’s the current go-to solution for this problem?

4. What’s good and bad about it?

5. How is my product better than the current alternatives?

6. What pricing is a no-brainer for my audience and still a good deal for me?

7. How will I get my first 10 customers?

Answer them, and you will avoid 90% of stupid mistakes (“our product is for everyone”, “we don’t have any alternatives”, etc)

If you lean towards the generic answer — stop for a moment.
This is not a coincidence. You just don’t understand your audience well enough.

Do something about it:

• User Persona Generator (if you hate talking to people)

• Value Proposition Generator (if you are too lazy to answer 7 questions)

• How to differentiate your product (28 mins video)

Here's the thing. If you launch a commodity product that isn’t different in any way, your audience will ignore it.

You need to have an angle. And this angle shouldn’t be there just for the sake of it. It should be there because your audience wants it. That’s what marketing strategy is about.

3. Go beyond Twitter and Product Hunt

You won’t go viral on the launch day. The Product Hunt launch traffic will be over in one week.There are no shortcuts. You need to have a proper mix of marketing channels.

This is a very simple framework to get high-quality traffic daily (16 mins video). But here’s what I recommend trying.

Getting first customers

• Audience building on social media, where your audience hangs out

• Twitter for startup founders

• LinkedIn for corporations / agencies

• Instagram / TikTok for B2C

• Tumblr for depressed people with no money

• Email marketing

• If you have an email list, you can pre-launch your product there

• Cold outreach / cold DMs (especially for B2B!)

• Forget about automation, do everything manually

• Offer your product for free in exchange for feedback and testimonial

• Be sincere and don’t spam

• Product Hunt launch

• Still cool (even though the moderation is weird lately)

• Can get you free newsletter shout-outs if you make it to top-5

This is usually enough to validate the idea and get initial traction. Don’t be obsessed with it.

Marketing Strategy Generator made:

• $1249 on the first day

• $18,709 in the first 2 months

• $60,000+ in the first 6 months

The real fun starts after the launch. Here are some channels I know worked well for Solopreneurs

• Build free tools to win in SEO (we do it for FounderPal)

• Buy Facebook Ads (especially to retarget people who visited your website)

• Sponsor product directories (like Futurepedia or There Is An AI For That)

• Launch a free newsletter that nurtures your audience weekly

• Do programmatic SEO (not with shit AI articles, but data-driven pages)

• Influencer marketing (once you get a nice budget) on TikTok / YouTube / Twitter / Instagram

• Affiliate marketing (once you get stable conversion and a significant number of customers)

• SEO with long-tail blog posts that are close to purchasing intent (don’t waste time writing “how to analyze your target audience”)

And here are some channels that I think are not the best for Solopreneurs

• Newsletter sponsorships (too expensive and most of the clicks are bots)

• Referral programs for users (very hard to make it work)

• Google ads (more expensive than Facebook Ads and more irrelevant clicks)

• Twitter ads (the worst targeting you will see in your life)

• Audience building on Reddit (you will get banned 8 out of 10 times. On a side note, answering long-tail questions on Reddit can work)

• Beta list and other half-dead product directors from 2016

Note — there is not silver-bullet marketing channel.

Some people will get 0 results with cold emails. Some people will have a $50,000/mo business that thrives on emails. You need to find out what works for your business.

4. Fix your landing page

Are you a developer? 80% chance your landing page is shit. I know life is unfair. Let’s fix it. Here are proven tips to improve it.

• Implement this landing page structure (we follow it in every product)

• Your landing page is not about your product. It’s about what your customers will get from using your product

• Replace “we” and “our” with “you” and “your”

• Showcase good product visuals that make people want to try your product

• Record a Loom-style product video with your comments

• Write a Founder message explaining “why” you build this product

• Add more social proof so people believe what you say

• Follow this copy structure “Emotional heading with a promise” + “Straightforward description explaining how the promise will delivered”

• Use only 3-4 colors on your landing page

• Limit any listicles (features / integrations) to 3-5 points — people won’t remember more

• Make the next action simple and desirable

• Remove “subscribe to get our updates” from the bottom of your landing page

• Stop being arrogant in your marketing copy (your tool is not the best in the market, relax)

• Don’t make your landing page wide — it’s hard to read

• Remove all animations (it’s not a PowerPoint lesson in the 6th grade)

• Don’t be desperate on your landing page (EARLY BIRD OFFER PLEASE SIGN UP I BEG YOU)

• Remove purchase parity pricing and money-back guarantee (they attract crap customers)

• More landing page tips here.

Good landing page = Good conversion rate = Happy Founder

By the way, this free tool gets you 30 unique Headings 1 for your landing page.

Oh yes. Do you want to double your landing page conversion rate? Jump on the call with 30 people who haven’t seen it. Ask them to share the screen and comment on what they see.

You will suffer. This will be the worst 15 minutes of your life. But you will also learn a lot.

5. Try more things

Solopreneurship is not easy. Nothing will work on the first try. Marketing channels will stop working. Your audience will ignore you. I can’t stress this enough — just try different things.

Product Hunt launch failed? Okay, do some cold emails.

No response? Conduct some interviews.

Found a pain point? Build a free tool for it.

Iterate-iterate-iterate.

Please, don’t expect your micro-SaaS to earn $5000/mo after 2 weeks of publishing blog posts. It’s a long run.

Some months will be a plateau. Until you find out what’s working. Sometimes you might even need to start again. Maybe the product you’ve launched is good enough to earn $500/mo. But not $5000/mo.

This is the part of the journey.

• Do boring stuff

• Ask for feedback

• Ship good things

• Iterate

• Be consistent

Good luck!

Simple how-to’s

How to write marketing copy?

It’s not that hard if you know what to write. First, always start with an emotion. People don’t buy 4 features of the to-do app. They buy what can be achieved with a to-do app.

So, you open with a promise: Ship products faster, Increase your conversion, Feel calm, etc. Don’t overpromise and don’t call yourself the best. Just say what your product can deliver.

Then, you want to decrease the BS with a rational self-explanatory description. You promise to ship faster? Okay. What does your product do to make that happen?

It’s a NextJS boilerplate for SaaS. It has ready-to-use auth, Stripe integration, and landing page components.Great. Emotional promise + Rational explanation.

And you do that every time you write your marketing.

Mix it with stories (about yourself or your customers), testimonials, and specific numbers, and you get interesting-to-read text.

What to avoid?

• Being too focused on yourself (people want to read about THEMSELVES)

• Using superlatives (we are the fastest / the best / the most popular)

• Having bullet lists of features with 5+ points (impossible to remember)

• Using too complicated words (Streamline) and too marketish (Supercharge)

Good marketing copy = simple. Don’t overcomplicate it with tricks and secrets.

Focus on understanding your audience and your product. Then, writing a good copy will be a breeze.

How to get feedback from the first users?

A proven way to get feedback.

1. Open a social media where your audience hangs out (Twitter / LinkedIn / Facebook)

2. Search for your keyword (marketing / taxes / yoga)

3. Find 200 people who posted about it recently

4. Send them a message inviting them to test your product for free

5. Keep your DM short and genuine

6. Get feedback & offer your product for free (3 months / forever)

7. Get testimonials from those users who liked your product the most

Congrats, now you have your first traction.

You have social proof for the landing page and feedback to improve the product. Need more?

Tweet about your product asking #buildinpublic to roast your product. A lot of people will join.

How to do SEO?

That’s a big topic. But ultimately it consists of 3 sub-questions

• What content does your audience search on Google? (50%)

• How can you get more websites to link to your website? (40%)

• How can you make your website more fast & accessible? (10%)

1. It can be blog posts (How to do marketing?), free tools (marketing ideas generator), and marketing pages (Marketing platform for agency owners).

Usually, you will need all of them. But if you are just getting started — try free tools first.

It’s easy to build, relatively easy to rank, and definitely easier to use as a promotion of your paid products.

How to find good keywords for tools / blog posts / marketing pages? Do keyword research.

In short, you need to find keywords that your audience ALREADY uses to find interesting content.

If everyone searches for “marketing strategy generator” and not “marketing ideas generator”, you need to build a tool for the former. I use Keywords Everywhere and SEO Stuff to find good keywords. They are very cheap compared to Ahrefs / Semrush.

Focus on keywords that are relevant to your product, have existing demand, and not very high competition.

2. Content is nothing without links.

Google needs to know your content is good. And the easiest way to figure it out — do other websites link to your content? It’s a very reasonable approach if you think about it.

That’s why everyone is obsessed with backlinks. Again, there is a lot of content about getting them (80% is BS).

What you can really do tomorrow:

1. Launch on product directories to get the initial Domain Authority (your trust score) bump

2. Build free tools that are so good media want to give you a link (for example, top 10 new AI tools for marketers in 2024”)

3. Find a way to get embedded on your customers’ websites (hard, but possible for some SaaS)

You can also buy backlinks — but I’ve never done it.

3. Optimizing websites.

Developers on Twitter are obsessed with getting all 100s on PageSpeed report. I’ve never done a single optimization for FounderPal. Good way to procrastinate your marketing week though.

How to do email marketing?

1. Build a free tool that collects emails

• Don’t gatekeep with email (let users try it without limitations)

• Ask for an email in exchange for additional value (generating 10 more ideas)

2. Write a sequence for those who left an email

• Give one more freebie

• Promote your paid product (if it has a free demo / trial, focus on it)

3. Write a sequence for those who signed up for your product

• Help with the onboarding

• Tell the story of why you’ve built the product

• Showcase testimonials from happy customers

• Give limited discounts to re-activate users

4. Write a sequence for those who purchased

• Send them a thank you

• Ask for feature ideas

• Upsell your other products

5. Send a weekly / monthly newsletter to all emails

• Share your insights

• Add links to 1-2 pieces of content from other creators

• Remind what features you shipped to the product

We use ConvertKit for email marketing. It’s pricey but super powerful.

How to do paid ads?

Make sure that you need ads. Facebook Ads / Google Ads = regular people.

These are not your typical early adopters. They need polished landing pages, a lot of social proof, and multiple touchpoints.

If you are just getting started, you don't need to do ads. You will just waste your time and money. Focus on sharpening your positioning and improving your marketing funnel.

Absolutely sure you need more website visitors? Get ready to experiment with every headline and creative in ads.

I know that Nico is a Facebook Ads god. That’s it.

FAQ

Is it okay to build tools for Indie Hackers?

Sure, if you are okay with your target audience being broke.

Also, Indie Hackers are the small market that tends to build internal tools for themselves.

Perfect for being stuck at $300/mo.

Do people still read emails these days?

Yes, they do. Just as they search on Google and click on Facebook Ads.

You are not your customer. You are building the tool (a rare pattern for an average person)

Market to regular people, not to yourself.

Can I skip audience building?

Sure. It’s not mandatory.

Audience building just helps to grow faster

• Your Product Hunt launches get more upvotes

• Your HackerNews posts get early comments

• Your landing page gets free feedback

Leverage is important for Solopreneurs.

Especially when you compete with VC-backed businesses that have budgets and teams.

That’s why I recommend everyone to do audience building. Just don’t rely 100% on it.

What my marketing should look like?

Here’s a simple framework.

Every week, you either:

• Sharpen your positioning

• Talk to customers

• Analyze competitors

• Polish marketing copy

• Build in-demand features

• Get more website visitors

• Post new content

• Build free tools

• Buy ads

• Send emails

• Get new partnerships

• Increase your conversion rate

• Fix your landing page

• Write emails

• Get testimonials

• Experiment with pricing

Pick one goal for your week. It will be easier to come up with relevant tasks. If you are unsure how to approach your marketing problem — try our free Marketing Problem Solver tool.

Is content marketing still a thing?

Marketing = content + links to your product. Ads are content. Emails are content. Tweets are content. SEO tools are content.

You need to be good at getting attention and providing free value. That’s what content marketing is about.

Should I do SEO before getting my first customer?

Usually, no. SEO takes months to kick in.

But you want to get the idea validation sooner (days, ideally). There are better ways to do it. Also, if you pivot your product (which happens a lot), most of your SEO efforts will go to zero.

SEO is awesome (I do a lot of SEO). But it’s better after getting the first customers.

Should I do paid ads before getting my first customer?

Usually, no. Ads are awesome, but they are 100% dependent on the quality of your marketing funnel.

If you are unsure about your landing page, ads will just burn your money. First, get a stable marketing funnel. Second, calculate how much you can spend per customer. Then, do ads.

Can I just build a good product that will market itself?

You should build a good product. But it’s not enough.

Every niche has hundreds of “good products” that compete for the same customer with a limited budget. You still need to get website visitors and convert them to purchase. That’s on marketing.

So, just do both.

Should I charge one-time payments or subscriptions?

Here’s a very detailed and nuanced essay about one-time payments.

I read that your “X” advice is wrong. Have anything to say?

Everyone is right. And everyone is wrong. I share my experience and the experiences of Founders I know personally. If something is working for you, I am happy for you.

This document is a starting point for Solopreneurs who can’t make anything work. Simplifications are necessary here.

Paid tools to grow faster

Please. Don’t buy any of these things TO START. You can start for $0 today. Consider getting them when you understand you have a problem that needs to be solved.

Complete Marketing Bundle — actionable marketing resources to stop being confused

AI Wrapper in 5 days — video course about building free AI tools to promote your product

Landing Page Roasting — get a 20-minute review of your website (extremely honest and actionable)

Marketing Strategy Generator — marketing platform to ditch 6 months of trial and error

Smooz — a post-purchase platform for Creators who want to turn customers into their biggest fans

I also shitpost on Twitter for free.