Marketing for 3 days a week

I have tried marketing month but I got bored and had customer requests for new features.

Do you share the stuff you've made with your customers? With product updates or what-is-new notifications in your app or on the login screen?

What you find boring, is probably the part where you have to make things up, that might interest your potential customers.

Progress reports like https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/ might be better suited for your style.

So dedicate a day or two out of the week for marketing. I have to try that. I really suck at marketing.

What are some good website where i can learn about marketing

How can we enhance it with bots?

we are just getting started with www.istorylive.com

I am not talking about automation but bots

Run ads on google , facebook and instagram. Those type of marketing seem to work for me, you do need a budget for advertising

Discipline is definitely important! I also find that being rigorous about how I test things to be important. Double down on what works and don't repeat marketing efforts that are less successful!

I really enjoy the process of marketing when it's not directly pitching your product or services to the potential lead.

For me, handling marketing involves:

• Informative blog posts with CTAs to our services
• Social media posts that align with the current trend to drive organic traffic to the landing page. LinkedIn works best for me as of now, will see how it goes!
• Answering questions on Quora or Yahoo Answers
• Sending regular value-based emails to our subscribers
• (Sometimes) interacting with people in niche Facebook groups
• Connecting with co-founders and getting feedback for our services

As said by one of the great marketers, "It's not what you sell that matters as much as how you sell it!"

What I feel like, marketing wouldn't get you bored if you enjoy the process of helping others through solutions your product offers.

Hey Volkan,

First things first, great beard! I’m massively jealous.

Second, and to attempt to help you with your marketing challenges - we can think of startups like the sport of boxing.

There are two parts to boxing.

1. Drills, padwork, shadowboxing, heavy bag work etc. to develop your boxing tools (punches, defence, head movement etc.)
2. Fighting a live opponent (whether that be sparring or an actual bout) to test those tools

Lots of people love the first part but hate the second part because, well, getting punched in the face isn’t nice.

The ultimate dream for these people is to be able to build the perfect set of boxing tools in drills and bag work that, when it comes to fighting a live opponent, they can hit their opponent and their opponent can’t hit them.

Can that happen? Sure. But its rare. I can count on one hand the sparring rounds I’ve done without getting hit at least once.

It’s the same in startups.

For many founders with an engineering/product development background, doing marketing is like getting punched in the face. Now there is no reason why this should be the case as that feeling comes from a whole host of faulty beliefs and perceptions, however that’s a topic for another discussion. For now, let’s just sit with the fact that many founders find marketing very difficult to deal with.

So, they focus entirely on product development with the hope that they can get the customers (aka win the fight in boxing terms) without having to do any marketing (aka take punches).

Can this happen?

Sure, you’ve given an example of it already in one of your comments. But, just like instant knock-outs in boxing (or other striking based combat sports), it’s rare. The reality is that you’re gonna have to take some punches to win the fight.

Now, I don’t think you’re one of those who really hates marketing so much it feels like being punched in the face. I gather it’s more of boredom for you but either way the ideal scenario is that you deal with the issue that is causing you to find marketing boring

I wrote an article on here not that long ago talking about how to make marketing more fun (and effective) which may (or may not) help you. Here it is - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-to-find-business-ideas-that-are-fun-and-profitable-16761b7991

However, let’s assume you can’t do that and my article linked above hasn’t helped you.
What to do?

Accept.

It's clear you know that marketing is important to the success of your business but I think deep-down you are hoping that you don't have to do it. You're hoping that anytime soon you're going to land the knockout punch and win the fight without taking any more punches.

As a result you are causing yourself double the amount of 'pain'. First is the boredom of doing the marketing that you feel. But second, as a result of this lack of acceptance, the constant feeling that you are doing something that you shouldn't or don't have to do.

You might not be able to do something about the boredom, but by accepting that you're stuck doing the marketing for the foreseeable future (maybe even forever), you can eliminate the additional and unnecessary pain of wishing it wasn't like this.

I hope that helps at least somewhat.

Best

Chris

New features is a waste of valuable time. Seems your are not into sales?

That's a good schedule imo.

I know people on here do marketing week/build week. I find that pretty restrictive, I usually run out of ideas and feel a bit burned out.

Lately, I've been trying to have a few hours in the day dedicated to building and then some to marketing. It's keeping me focused so far.

I just started creating company updates via Sendgrid and posting the same content on my community page (hosted by Tribe), posting it in my Discord, Facebook page and Linkedin - all with the link from the Community page. Going to send this out Weekly on Monday. Feel like I really needed to develop more with my users. I want to really build out my community on these two channels to get more feedback and engage with them.

Tues-Thursday worked for me.

Aren't you already making a decent MRR with Versoly? If you find the marketing part (and judging by what you wrote 90% will be content marketing) boring, why not try and hire someone to do the content writing for you? Someone from UpWork/IndieHackers/etc.

Marketing in the morning when I feel fresh, the rest after lunch. And every end of the day I check what’s been going on with the posts/content/social media and wrap up.
Good luck!

I also follow similar pattern marketing from Monday to Thursday and on Friday-Saturday full on development work and bug fixing. On weekends customers are least active on internet so I try to avoid sending DM/emails etc on weekends

Wow so I’m not the only one getting bored with marketing. I just started delegating it to my gf, since she’s a big OF creator… my guess is that if she garnered that many followers on there, she could grow our user base. Let’s see how it goes lol