Bad coders get found out. Bad marketers are EVERYWHERE.
But if you're talking about elite level performance I'd rather an elite marketer than an elite coder. There's more leverage in marketing at the high end.
e.g. - Nailing a companies landing page copy / messaging can take 2 days. And it can be worth millions.
Great point. In certain tech businesses having a real code ninja can be v. high leverage - for many years it was common for new additions to the Google AdWords dev team to make improvements that translated into millions of dollars, but I think those kinds of scenarios don't apply to most indie hackers. Most indie hackers are not solving very difficult technical problems (not saying the products are technically easy, but usually in pretty well-understood areas). In those scenarios having real marketing talent can move the needle a lot more.
Having said that, hiring a crap developer is a great way to light a lot of money on fire :)
After making so many products, I can definitely say it's marketing. Sure some may be easier to BS, but if you are inteviewing marketers correctly you can weed them out.
The real problem isn't which is easier to fake, it is which is easier to do. When it comes down to it marketing is the product, so there is no faking it. Where as with the product development, you can leave features out. Sure hiding features is a skill, but I can tell you after building products like Authress and Standup & Prosper Selling them is way harder than building them.
I was thinking about this a lot lately, and I would definitely say marketing. Note that I am an engineer by profession, so you probably should not be listening to my advice here. :)
I see though, when you are a marketer that can't code and has trouble estimating the cost and duration of developing a product, I can see why the building part might be scarier.
If you are decent at coding and have a vision of what your product will look like and do, then building it is usually very straightforward. You know what to build, how to build it, what tools to use (or you can ask any other engineer for an advice) and even how much time will it take you. Even if you miss the estimate for 10x you will still have the product made at some point (if the feedback from marketing won't tell you that you are building the wrong product ...). Basically, with engineering there is almost always a fairly straight line to completing a project.
With marketing on the other hand, there is no such thing as a straight line (at least for me, would love to hear a different take on that though). You need to find who are you selling to, where can you find them, how to reach them, what messaging to use, how to distribute your efforts and money among different channels, what results are acceptable, what makes an experiment successful, which feedback to take seriously and which not etc. And most importantly, you need to reach customers consistently over a long period of time even though the market keeps changing.
Compared to marketing challenges, the coding part looks very manageable. At least to me. But I guess that is why it is good to have a co-founder so that together you cover both fields.
EDIT: As @volkandkaya nicely says below, it is not as black and white. Above I am mostly talking about the early stages of the company. I suppose when you hit a decent scale and the project grows, the engineering problems might get overwhelming especially if the tech team is lacking experience.
This basically brings us to the conclusion that what is harder: engineering or marketing always depends on the team, industry, bad decisions in the past, your runway, and other circumstances unique to every product. It would be easier to discuss this if we would first select an industry that we want to talk about.
Which kind of makes my post above fairly irrelevant. :)
Think a simple clone of a typical popular SaaS. Marketing.
Think of doing something revolutionary. Marketing will be free.
For indie hacking, most will struggle with marketing and traction, but it's mostly different kind of "hard". Coding is harder, but if you think about it in a way of putting your product on the market, you might struggle more with marketing.
Agreed it entirely depends on the product. If you screw up coding with great marketing, you may lose users for good (think Windows Vista :). You'd have to rebuild your product.
If you screw up marketing and have a solid engineered product, you can just do more marketing later and "pick up" where you left off with better strategy, messaging and campaigns.
I feel the majority of IH's are coders so it doesn't surprise me too much most are saying marketing. I can understand the argument that it isn't always black and white like coding usually is. As a marketer though, this post makes me happy.
As a veteran marketer (20+ years now), I sometimes take solace in coding (front end stuff only) because it's clear cut, there are rights and wrongs, and I can usually solve a problem in real-time. Of course, there is bad code and I'm not doing anything super in-depth, but marketing is SO nuanced with SO many factors and even if you get everything right, it could still fail.
So I am partially biased, but marketing is the more difficult of the two.
That being said, there is a broad conception that marketing is something that can just be "picked up" and that everyone can do (whereas coding seems daunting to non-coders). So there are a LOT of charlatans out there selling quick, easy fixes.
As a software engineer, I completely agree with your points.
Software deals with the machines, but marketing deals with humans which are far more complex to predict and plan for.
But having the basic knowledge in each field is very helpful in so many levels and will make communication much easier. Like that you mentioned you have your hand on code although you’re a veteran marketer.
So aside from the original question, what are some good resources to get the feet wet in marketing that you would recommend?
Fantastic resource 👌 Best of luck with phlywheel. Also just discovered your YouTube channel and a ton if valuable information is there. Keep up the great work.
After making so many products, I can definitely say it's marketing. Sure some may be easier to BS, but if you are inteviewing marketers correctly you can weed them out.
The real problem isn't which is easier to fake, it is which is easier to do. When it comes down to it marketing is the product, so there is no faking it. Where as with the product development, you can leave features out. Sure hiding features is a skill, but I can tell you after building products like Authress and Standup & Prosper Selling them is way harder than building them.
At the start coding (can't market no product)
Once you have a product, marketing becomes more difficult
Then coding/product (need to hire CTO or become one)
Then marketing again
You see a companies stall because product/coding. I have heard that money solves all but tons of companies die because they can't move fast enough (tons of tech debt etc)
In a podcast I heard that serial founders for their first project will not care about code, then care too much, then care just enough.
If the question is what's harder, building or selling, I'd say it's easy to build than to sell
Selling requires a multi-dimensional understanding of people, people are very complex
Similar to harry's point, on an elite level, I'd rather know how to bring in money than to build
The work required to become a good programmer is becoming less, i.e knowledge gap is reducing, but with people's buying patterns/decision systems getting more complex marketing is getting harder, so for that reason I'd say the latter is more difficult IMO at least
But its always better to know both, you'll be undefeatable
Coding for me is harder! I come from a Digital Marketing background. Once I find my target audience and see where I can find them, I typically plan out my content plan. I focus more so on acquiring users using free marketing tactics.
I am a bad programmer LOL, it took me hours just to figure out a css linerar-gradient tool.
If you aren't skilled at either, they are both difficult. Their difficulty is also compounded by arrogance and a lack of respect for each other.
I have seen companies expire horribly for those reasons or, reach the point of massive turnovers to avoid it. What is particularly terrible is when someone not at the top becomes such a bad gatekeeper that those in the position to make decisions never get the information they need to have avoided whatever it was.
I think it depends on who you are. I am a coder. I find it hard to do marketing things like promoting my product, making a good landing page, selling my product, etc.
From my perspective, it's marketing. I measure growth in 10 year spurts. I've learned a lot of code in the past 10 years that helped me build many successful websites for clients. My specialties are HTML/CSS. Im a generalist with ES6, PHP, Ruby, Node and MySQL. That's a lot to learn in 10 years! I've learned a lot of marketing in the past 10 years as well. Im just not good at it.
I've started a collective 10 years ago. I've went from 2 active members to 6 active members in 10 years. That's after many books, articles and advice on marketing and people. That's after working at a marketing agency for 3 years in my beginning years, working with Fortune 500 companies!
So in my opinion, coding has been easier for me than marketing. I think it depends on what you trust more, taking action with people in mind or data in mind? If you're more people focused, then marketing will come easier. If you're more data focused, then coding will come easier. With that logic in mind, I'm more data focused. And it shows. I love categories. I love analytics. I love code. I love design and architecture. I love economics, physics, psychology.
Marketing is a lot easier than coding. However in terms of value to a business you do not want to get an "average" marketer but I believe you will get by with an "average" coder as long as whatever software you're building isn't extremely complex.
I agree with a lot of arguments that have been stated here before.
One thing that has not been pointed out yet is the time scale difference. While the time span of a coding project can often (though not always) be gauged upfront, marketing successes can be harder to predict. I think this unpredictability of marketing makes the whole process seem harder, as small successes that would normally motivate you to keep going can be scarce in the beginning.
Despite this marketing unpredictability in the beginning of the product cycle, it has to be said that marketing experience and a later cycle stage reduce the unpredictability and make marketing much more precise (drawing this conclusion from experience at one of the biggest marketing spenders in the world).
I hope someone might read this and keeps up the spirit, product marketing is not a sprint it's a marathon.
My answer is marketing but that's certainly my personal experience right now. I have sixteen years of coding experience, twelve professionally, and effectively zero in marketing. I even have experience in presales engineering but this is still a whole new world to me, it's the first time not having at least qualified leads already available for me!
When it comes to marketing I'm back to square one and fumbling around in the dark trying to find the unknown unknowns. It's an exciting experience at least!
Hopefully, it's pretty typical challenges. Identify the right target users, determine where those users are and get in front of them, have the right messaging and value proposition to capture those users as leads, deliver on that value proposition to convert those leads to customers, and continue to deliver value to retain those customers.
I suppose where I am right now is trying to find what works for each of those steps to really build out a functional customer acquisition strategy.
My service NullBox (https://nullbox.co) is an email privacy service that allows you to protect the privacy of your existing inbox by creating disposable email addresses that forward to your current email. This allows you to avoid giving out your real email address. If a service you use is compromised and you start receiving spam or phishing emails to one of your disposable email addresses you can easily delete that address and prevent any more of those emails from even hitting your inbox. It also serves as a canary in the coal mine so to speak. If you only use that disposable email when signing up to one website you can easily know if that website has been compromised or selling your personal data.
Right now I have one unaffiliated paying customer, who actually found out about NullBox here on Indie Hackers. At the moment I have 27 users total, most of which are free trial users acquired in the last two weeks.
There's two main "enough is enough" scenarios I'm trying to target right now. One is people who had their account information leaked in a high profile data breach and are looking for a way to protect themselves online. The other is people who have a certain degree of their safety tied to being able to maintain their privacy online. For that later use case that could be someone with an abusive ex trying to stalk them online finding their social media accounts by their email address or say journalists and their sources.
One potential niche I've identified is cryptocurrency users.
Right now I have a few main activities in progress to try to get users into to the top of my funnel:
This past week I started running a Google AdWords campaign experiment.
I'm trying to build backlinks and domain authority submitting to various startup/SaaS directories.
I've started searching for backlinks to my competitors to find blog posts and articles about them and then reaching out to the authors inviting them to check out my service and asking them to consider writing about it either by updating the original article/post or in a new feature.
I think my biggest challenge overall is just a matter of getting some inertia going on my marketing flywheel but I definitely don't have a lot of experience to lean on for getting there.
I want to hear some more features from your product. The ones I use are monetizing using ads which is quite okay as far as I am getting my work done freely.
Have you thought about any more USPs or adding more features to get you paying customers?
I appreciate the challenge, those are great questions!
So services like the one you linked only offer short-lived email addresses and they actually store your emails on their servers. That can be great when you first just want an email to sign up for a service, but they don't work in the long run. If you actually want to keep using a service you signed up for you need to be able to access that email address still a year down the line if you have to reset your password for example.
With NullBox you can have an unlimited number of disposable email addresses that last forever and the content of your emails is never stored on the NullBox server. It's more like email aggregation in your current inbox.
NullBox also supports two different use cases of PGP. You can associate your existing PGP public key to your private email address and then any emails sent to your disposable email addresses are automatically encrypted before forwarding. This allows you to easily enforce PGP encryption without relying on the sender and managing the distribution of your public key.
The other PGP use case is allowing you to create unique PGP key pairs per disposable email address. This simplifies the management of PGP keys for each disposable email address and any encrypted emails received by those email addresses are decrypted with the private key before forwarding.
When paired together it allows you to have unique key pairs for all of your disposable email addresses but manage a single key pair for your actual email address.
Around the corner, I'm going to be adding support for using your own domain with the disposable email addresses and add a feature for reporting and viewing potentially compromised senders (the canary in the coal mine mentioned earlier) so you can find out about data breaches that affect you before they hit the news.
Purely from the technical point in how much you need to learn to be able to get paid in either field, marketing as a field is definitely easier. It is like management: the theory is simple, but execution is difficult.
Once you know the technical aspects and theory of both, programming is easier because you will get predictable results.
As others have stated, it really depends. If you already are a prolific dev than I'm sure the marketing side of things would be more difficult and vice versa.
I think both are important, but I would focus on the code first. Just to get something out. Then you can research marketing, copywriting, landing pages best practices, and try to improve that aspect.
It's important to still share your story (marketing in a sense) while you code to both get your product out there but also to attract early users.
Neither, it's understanding the market and fine tune your product to reach product market fit, at which point marketing happens basically for free, and coding becomes relatively more trivial (and you could afford to bring in devs anyway if needed)
Marketing for sure. In today's age, anyone can code a project to get traction (and that's all you need to start off). There are no-code platforms available to help people to build their first app (mobile/web).
Most answers might be along the lines of whatever the person is not. A coder is going to say marketing and a marketer says coding.
I find it most difficult to balance the two. As a maker I just learn what to code when I need to, but always..... I always run into existential blockages. Something that i just can't figure out, even if I read through the docs, ask google, ask for help. I probably skipped a step and can't figure it out.
Marketing is tough because almost all the time it feels wrong. It feels like I'm bothering people. If someone really needed this product, wouldn't they just figure out a solution? why the heck do they need my thing?
There are so many avenues and types of marketing to "choose" from .... does this sound familiar?
"There's so many frameworks and programming languages"
What proves to me that the balance is hardest is that there are more employees than entrepreneurs. There are more full time employees in the world than indiehackers.
Marketing, without a doubt. Even if someone is not a tech person, there are so many fantastic developers all around the world you can hire. On the flipside, to get the word out and find the right way to attract customers is something you need to figure out over time. You might know your target audience but you can´t be 100% certain that they will react to your product in a way.
Yes! I can relate to 80% of what you said. Coding never ends. Even if I want to make a quick MVP to test and launch my product in a short time framer I always try to write good code. It pretty much became a habit for me to lean towards perfectionism when it comes to coding. But I am trying to keep the balance between perfectionism and imperfectionism.
"Pour some dollars on advertisement services and you are done." - when it comes to this I wouldn't say that just pouring money on adv. will bring you customers. I've run FB Ads. From my experience I had to test, test and test.
Yes, there are lots of templatized solutions where I am a benefactor myself. Needless to say plugins and WP. But I still had to text a friend yesterday for a simple button styling that I couldn't find a simple guide on Google for its HTML. Simple yet, it's damaging reputation if you don't fix alignments on a page.
Same goes to marketing, specifically Technical Marketing if I may put it as such. Digital or Campaign Performance marketing is more technical than just pouring money in. I made tens of micro-decisions in the span of an hours daily from on-going split tests. There are times you are required to outsmart the machine/algorithm simply because it may not be ready to understand context as well yet.
So I wouldn't say which is more difficult, but without either, it will be more challenging.
I am a marketer not a coder, hence it's easy to say Coding is more difficult, but no.
But simply to go along with the question, and to put into better context, Perhaps "What's more difficult: Coding or Copywriting"
Marketing is a big spectrum of subsets. Coding is a building action in Tech, and Martech is supposed to empower marketing.
Yes. Btw, I have a CS Degree with me. But I did immediately turned to marketing. I always had this question in my mind whether coding is difficult or marketing.
But again it depends on each other skill sets & person to person.
Marketing is considerably easier to bullshit at.
Bad coders get found out. Bad marketers are EVERYWHERE.
But if you're talking about elite level performance I'd rather an elite marketer than an elite coder. There's more leverage in marketing at the high end.
e.g. - Nailing a companies landing page copy / messaging can take 2 days. And it can be worth millions.
Great point. In certain tech businesses having a real code ninja can be v. high leverage - for many years it was common for new additions to the Google AdWords dev team to make improvements that translated into millions of dollars, but I think those kinds of scenarios don't apply to most indie hackers. Most indie hackers are not solving very difficult technical problems (not saying the products are technically easy, but usually in pretty well-understood areas). In those scenarios having real marketing talent can move the needle a lot more.
Having said that, hiring a crap developer is a great way to light a lot of money on fire :)
After making so many products, I can definitely say it's marketing. Sure some may be easier to BS, but if you are inteviewing marketers correctly you can weed them out.
The real problem isn't which is easier to fake, it is which is easier to do. When it comes down to it marketing is the product, so there is no faking it. Where as with the product development, you can leave features out. Sure hiding features is a skill, but I can tell you after building products like Authress and Standup & Prosper Selling them is way harder than building them.
This is a great breakdown coming from a VERY talented marketer!
Good points Harry
Cheers
Best!
I'm not sure how true that is, I've seen so many bad at both. I can't compare.
I was thinking about this a lot lately, and I would definitely say marketing. Note that I am an engineer by profession, so you probably should not be listening to my advice here. :)
I see though, when you are a marketer that can't code and has trouble estimating the cost and duration of developing a product, I can see why the building part might be scarier.
If you are decent at coding and have a vision of what your product will look like and do, then building it is usually very straightforward. You know what to build, how to build it, what tools to use (or you can ask any other engineer for an advice) and even how much time will it take you. Even if you miss the estimate for 10x you will still have the product made at some point (if the feedback from marketing won't tell you that you are building the wrong product ...). Basically, with engineering there is almost always a fairly straight line to completing a project.
With marketing on the other hand, there is no such thing as a straight line (at least for me, would love to hear a different take on that though). You need to find who are you selling to, where can you find them, how to reach them, what messaging to use, how to distribute your efforts and money among different channels, what results are acceptable, what makes an experiment successful, which feedback to take seriously and which not etc. And most importantly, you need to reach customers consistently over a long period of time even though the market keeps changing.
Compared to marketing challenges, the coding part looks very manageable. At least to me. But I guess that is why it is good to have a co-founder so that together you cover both fields.
EDIT: As @volkandkaya nicely says below, it is not as black and white. Above I am mostly talking about the early stages of the company. I suppose when you hit a decent scale and the project grows, the engineering problems might get overwhelming especially if the tech team is lacking experience.
Don't even need to reach scale, I'm following a few tech products with a few developers.
They can't release new features as they have so many bugs (founding team is designers) and i guess technical debt.
I see.
This basically brings us to the conclusion that what is harder: engineering or marketing always depends on the team, industry, bad decisions in the past, your runway, and other circumstances unique to every product. It would be easier to discuss this if we would first select an industry that we want to talk about.
Which kind of makes my post above fairly irrelevant. :)
Depends entirely on the product.
Think a simple clone of a typical popular SaaS. Marketing.
Think of doing something revolutionary. Marketing will be free.
For indie hacking, most will struggle with marketing and traction, but it's mostly different kind of "hard". Coding is harder, but if you think about it in a way of putting your product on the market, you might struggle more with marketing.
Agreed it entirely depends on the product. If you screw up coding with great marketing, you may lose users for good (think Windows Vista :). You'd have to rebuild your product.
If you screw up marketing and have a solid engineered product, you can just do more marketing later and "pick up" where you left off with better strategy, messaging and campaigns.
I feel the majority of IH's are coders so it doesn't surprise me too much most are saying marketing. I can understand the argument that it isn't always black and white like coding usually is. As a marketer though, this post makes me happy.
Me too. As a Marketer, It makes me happy that I am doing something which is difficult.
As a veteran marketer (20+ years now), I sometimes take solace in coding (front end stuff only) because it's clear cut, there are rights and wrongs, and I can usually solve a problem in real-time. Of course, there is bad code and I'm not doing anything super in-depth, but marketing is SO nuanced with SO many factors and even if you get everything right, it could still fail.
So I am partially biased, but marketing is the more difficult of the two.
That being said, there is a broad conception that marketing is something that can just be "picked up" and that everyone can do (whereas coding seems daunting to non-coders). So there are a LOT of charlatans out there selling quick, easy fixes.
As a software engineer, I completely agree with your points.
Software deals with the machines, but marketing deals with humans which are far more complex to predict and plan for.
But having the basic knowledge in each field is very helpful in so many levels and will make communication much easier. Like that you mentioned you have your hand on code although you’re a veteran marketer.
So aside from the original question, what are some good resources to get the feet wet in marketing that you would recommend?
Appreciate it.
This is going to sound self-serving, but we're launching https://my.phlywheel.com today (rundown of features here: https://www.phlywheel.com/membership_b/). We're focused on a combination of microlearning, coaching, and on-demand courses. :)
Fantastic resource 👌 Best of luck with phlywheel. Also just discovered your YouTube channel and a ton if valuable information is there. Keep up the great work.
Great! Let me know if it helps!
After making so many products, I can definitely say it's marketing. Sure some may be easier to BS, but if you are inteviewing marketers correctly you can weed them out.
The real problem isn't which is easier to fake, it is which is easier to do. When it comes down to it marketing is the product, so there is no faking it. Where as with the product development, you can leave features out. Sure hiding features is a skill, but I can tell you after building products like Authress and Standup & Prosper Selling them is way harder than building them.
both are hard. The only measure for both - sales and revenue. Marketing is good only when it is helping generate revenue, the same for coding.
I cannot compare the 2. One is an apple, one is an orange.
Depends on the stage.
At the start coding (can't market no product)
Once you have a product, marketing becomes more difficult
Then coding/product (need to hire CTO or become one)
Then marketing again
You see a companies stall because product/coding. I have heard that money solves all but tons of companies die because they can't move fast enough (tons of tech debt etc)
In a podcast I heard that serial founders for their first project will not care about code, then care too much, then care just enough.
If the question is what's harder, building or selling, I'd say it's easy to build than to sell
Selling requires a multi-dimensional understanding of people, people are very complex
Similar to harry's point, on an elite level, I'd rather know how to bring in money than to build
The work required to become a good programmer is becoming less, i.e knowledge gap is reducing, but with people's buying patterns/decision systems getting more complex marketing is getting harder, so for that reason I'd say the latter is more difficult IMO at least
But its always better to know both, you'll be undefeatable
Coding for me is harder! I come from a Digital Marketing background. Once I find my target audience and see where I can find them, I typically plan out my content plan. I focus more so on acquiring users using free marketing tactics.
I am a bad programmer LOL, it took me hours just to figure out a css linerar-gradient tool.
I would say selling! Convincing someone to pay for your work is the most difficult task.
If you aren't skilled at either, they are both difficult. Their difficulty is also compounded by arrogance and a lack of respect for each other.
I have seen companies expire horribly for those reasons or, reach the point of massive turnovers to avoid it. What is particularly terrible is when someone not at the top becomes such a bad gatekeeper that those in the position to make decisions never get the information they need to have avoided whatever it was.
I think it depends on who you are. I am a coder. I find it hard to do marketing things like promoting my product, making a good landing page, selling my product, etc.
marketing
As anything, the hardest is the one you have the least experience in.
From my perspective, it's marketing. I measure growth in 10 year spurts. I've learned a lot of code in the past 10 years that helped me build many successful websites for clients. My specialties are HTML/CSS. Im a generalist with ES6, PHP, Ruby, Node and MySQL. That's a lot to learn in 10 years! I've learned a lot of marketing in the past 10 years as well. Im just not good at it.
I've started a collective 10 years ago. I've went from 2 active members to 6 active members in 10 years. That's after many books, articles and advice on marketing and people. That's after working at a marketing agency for 3 years in my beginning years, working with Fortune 500 companies!
So in my opinion, coding has been easier for me than marketing. I think it depends on what you trust more, taking action with people in mind or data in mind? If you're more people focused, then marketing will come easier. If you're more data focused, then coding will come easier. With that logic in mind, I'm more data focused. And it shows. I love categories. I love analytics. I love code. I love design and architecture. I love economics, physics, psychology.
I think marketing is the hardest, but I'm also a developer making tools for developers 😜
Marketing is a lot easier than coding. However in terms of value to a business you do not want to get an "average" marketer but I believe you will get by with an "average" coder as long as whatever software you're building isn't extremely complex.
I agree with a lot of arguments that have been stated here before.
One thing that has not been pointed out yet is the time scale difference. While the time span of a coding project can often (though not always) be gauged upfront, marketing successes can be harder to predict. I think this unpredictability of marketing makes the whole process seem harder, as small successes that would normally motivate you to keep going can be scarce in the beginning.
Despite this marketing unpredictability in the beginning of the product cycle, it has to be said that marketing experience and a later cycle stage reduce the unpredictability and make marketing much more precise (drawing this conclusion from experience at one of the biggest marketing spenders in the world).
I hope someone might read this and keeps up the spirit, product marketing is not a sprint it's a marathon.
marketing
Coding is technically difficult, so it's probably "more difficult". But marketing is far more important.
For an IH, learning marketing and sales is the single-most important step towards starting a successful company.
I talk about this in this IH post: 5 Lessons Learned from Launching my First SaaS
My answer is marketing but that's certainly my personal experience right now. I have sixteen years of coding experience, twelve professionally, and effectively zero in marketing. I even have experience in presales engineering but this is still a whole new world to me, it's the first time not having at least qualified leads already available for me!
When it comes to marketing I'm back to square one and fumbling around in the dark trying to find the unknown unknowns. It's an exciting experience at least!
Do share your problems, I will try to help you in some or the other way, hopefully ( Talking about the marketing part)
Hopefully, it's pretty typical challenges. Identify the right target users, determine where those users are and get in front of them, have the right messaging and value proposition to capture those users as leads, deliver on that value proposition to convert those leads to customers, and continue to deliver value to retain those customers.
I suppose where I am right now is trying to find what works for each of those steps to really build out a functional customer acquisition strategy.
My service NullBox (https://nullbox.co) is an email privacy service that allows you to protect the privacy of your existing inbox by creating disposable email addresses that forward to your current email. This allows you to avoid giving out your real email address. If a service you use is compromised and you start receiving spam or phishing emails to one of your disposable email addresses you can easily delete that address and prevent any more of those emails from even hitting your inbox. It also serves as a canary in the coal mine so to speak. If you only use that disposable email when signing up to one website you can easily know if that website has been compromised or selling your personal data.
Right now I have one unaffiliated paying customer, who actually found out about NullBox here on Indie Hackers. At the moment I have 27 users total, most of which are free trial users acquired in the last two weeks.
There's two main "enough is enough" scenarios I'm trying to target right now. One is people who had their account information leaked in a high profile data breach and are looking for a way to protect themselves online. The other is people who have a certain degree of their safety tied to being able to maintain their privacy online. For that later use case that could be someone with an abusive ex trying to stalk them online finding their social media accounts by their email address or say journalists and their sources.
One potential niche I've identified is cryptocurrency users.
Right now I have a few main activities in progress to try to get users into to the top of my funnel:
I think my biggest challenge overall is just a matter of getting some inertia going on my marketing flywheel but I definitely don't have a lot of experience to lean on for getting there.
I can see the USP of your product is forwarding the emails to your current email address.
That's about it?
I use disposable email addresses that are very much free & I don't know why I should use your product.
Not being rude or anything but can you convince me to buy your product?
I currently use this -> https://temp-mail.org/en/
It gets me an email very instantly.
I want to hear some more features from your product. The ones I use are monetizing using ads which is quite okay as far as I am getting my work done freely.
Have you thought about any more USPs or adding more features to get you paying customers?
I appreciate the challenge, those are great questions!
So services like the one you linked only offer short-lived email addresses and they actually store your emails on their servers. That can be great when you first just want an email to sign up for a service, but they don't work in the long run. If you actually want to keep using a service you signed up for you need to be able to access that email address still a year down the line if you have to reset your password for example.
With NullBox you can have an unlimited number of disposable email addresses that last forever and the content of your emails is never stored on the NullBox server. It's more like email aggregation in your current inbox.
NullBox also supports two different use cases of PGP. You can associate your existing PGP public key to your private email address and then any emails sent to your disposable email addresses are automatically encrypted before forwarding. This allows you to easily enforce PGP encryption without relying on the sender and managing the distribution of your public key.
The other PGP use case is allowing you to create unique PGP key pairs per disposable email address. This simplifies the management of PGP keys for each disposable email address and any encrypted emails received by those email addresses are decrypted with the private key before forwarding.
When paired together it allows you to have unique key pairs for all of your disposable email addresses but manage a single key pair for your actual email address.
Around the corner, I'm going to be adding support for using your own domain with the disposable email addresses and add a feature for reporting and viewing potentially compromised senders (the canary in the coal mine mentioned earlier) so you can find out about data breaches that affect you before they hit the news.
Interesting.
Purely from the technical point in how much you need to learn to be able to get paid in either field, marketing as a field is definitely easier. It is like management: the theory is simple, but execution is difficult.
Once you know the technical aspects and theory of both, programming is easier because you will get predictable results.
As others have stated, it really depends. If you already are a prolific dev than I'm sure the marketing side of things would be more difficult and vice versa.
I think both are important, but I would focus on the code first. Just to get something out. Then you can research marketing, copywriting, landing pages best practices, and try to improve that aspect.
It's important to still share your story (marketing in a sense) while you code to both get your product out there but also to attract early users.
Depends on your background I suppose. For me, a developer, I find marketing extremely difficult and coding very easy
Man, you are not alone )
Neither, it's understanding the market and fine tune your product to reach product market fit, at which point marketing happens basically for free, and coding becomes relatively more trivial (and you could afford to bring in devs anyway if needed)
Marketing for sure. In today's age, anyone can code a project to get traction (and that's all you need to start off). There are no-code platforms available to help people to build their first app (mobile/web).
Most answers might be along the lines of whatever the person is not. A coder is going to say marketing and a marketer says coding.
I find it most difficult to balance the two. As a maker I just learn what to code when I need to, but always..... I always run into existential blockages. Something that i just can't figure out, even if I read through the docs, ask google, ask for help. I probably skipped a step and can't figure it out.
Marketing is tough because almost all the time it feels wrong. It feels like I'm bothering people. If someone really needed this product, wouldn't they just figure out a solution? why the heck do they need my thing?
There are so many avenues and types of marketing to "choose" from .... does this sound familiar?
"There's so many frameworks and programming languages"
What proves to me that the balance is hardest is that there are more employees than entrepreneurs. There are more full time employees in the world than indiehackers.
Marketing, without a doubt. Even if someone is not a tech person, there are so many fantastic developers all around the world you can hire. On the flipside, to get the word out and find the right way to attract customers is something you need to figure out over time. You might know your target audience but you can´t be 100% certain that they will react to your product in a way.
absolutely true!
As a developer, I think marketing is more difficult. I still struggling with marketing my project.
I do think that as well. Because there are tons of things & skills one needs to grasp in order to get customers.
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Yes! I can relate to 80% of what you said. Coding never ends. Even if I want to make a quick MVP to test and launch my product in a short time framer I always try to write good code. It pretty much became a habit for me to lean towards perfectionism when it comes to coding. But I am trying to keep the balance between perfectionism and imperfectionism.
"Pour some dollars on advertisement services and you are done." - when it comes to this I wouldn't say that just pouring money on adv. will bring you customers. I've run FB Ads. From my experience I had to test, test and test.
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Yes, there are lots of templatized solutions where I am a benefactor myself. Needless to say plugins and WP. But I still had to text a friend yesterday for a simple button styling that I couldn't find a simple guide on Google for its HTML. Simple yet, it's damaging reputation if you don't fix alignments on a page.
Same goes to marketing, specifically Technical Marketing if I may put it as such. Digital or Campaign Performance marketing is more technical than just pouring money in. I made tens of micro-decisions in the span of an hours daily from on-going split tests. There are times you are required to outsmart the machine/algorithm simply because it may not be ready to understand context as well yet.
So I wouldn't say which is more difficult, but without either, it will be more challenging.
I am a marketer not a coder, hence it's easy to say Coding is more difficult, but no.
But simply to go along with the question, and to put into better context, Perhaps "What's more difficult: Coding or Copywriting"
Marketing is a big spectrum of subsets. Coding is a building action in Tech, and Martech is supposed to empower marketing.
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Yes. Btw, I have a CS Degree with me. But I did immediately turned to marketing. I always had this question in my mind whether coding is difficult or marketing.
But again it depends on each other skill sets & person to person.
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