Marketing Before Building | How I’m doing it differently this time

As a developer, marketing is one of those things that has never been top of mind during my past projects. It’s always been, “That’s an awesome idea! Let’s build it!”, rather than “That’s an awesome idea! Let’s see if anyone would even use this!”. And unfortunately, this mentality has backfired every time thus far.

I’ve asked myself, “how do I get out of this cycle of building these ideas and inevitably, no one uses them?” I know the idea of ‘build an audience’ or ‘sell before building’ has been beaten into our heads many times as Indie Hackers, but it has taken countless attempts and several years to truly understand the implications of it.

So what am I changing this time? Well, for the first time I’m launching my product before I have built anything more than a landing page. Outside of just a landing page, I have begun to create video content around the business idea. I think that this will need to be the main focus in order to get customers in the short term and the long term.

What am I building?

Well, I’ve gone so far away from building that I haven’t even named the business or designed a logo (which is typically my first step). The business is a job board targeted at a niche very close to me, JavaScript Developers. The idea behind this is nothing groundbreaking and I think that’s a good thing. I plan to focus on solving the problem better than anyone in the niche rather than attempting to shoehorn a solution to a problem that may not exist (that only took a few years of my life to figure out).

What does it do?

The goal is to make searching for a JavaScript Developer Job as easy as possible. No one likes to scroll through job sites reading job posts that don’t apply to you (if you do, you should see somebody about that). And filters on sites like Indeed simply don’t cut it. My solution, as of now, will be to provide a regular email with a list of job posts tailored specifically to the user. Jobs will be sourced in the early days by many different sources, and the idea is to take on the task of searching for the users as it can be a pain to look through so many different places for a job.

Where can I see it?
The domain as of now is JavaScriptJobs.carrd.co, a creative name I know. If you are a developer and looking for a JavaScript job, I would love to help you. And if you have any specific pain points or feedback, I’d be happy to chat.