What's New: The engineering-as-marketing approach

(from the latest issue of the Indie Hackers newsletter)

Marketing is a huge challenge for many tech founders:

• If you enjoy building, give engineering-as-marketing a try. This means building a valuable product for your target audience for free, which promotes and drives traffic to your paid product.
• With its massive audience, AppSumo is probably the most famous deals marketplace on the web. But is it worth it? This list of pros and cons can help you decide.
• Founder Mitch Edwards launched a Kickstarter campaign for his previous project, a malware detection tool, and failed to hit even 10% of his goal. Here are the lessons he learned, and what he would do differently next time!

Want to share something with over 90,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

🛠 Engineering-as-Marketing for Founders

by Cameron Henneke

Like many of us in the Indie Hackers community, marketing is not an activity that I inherently enjoy. I much prefer building something cool over talking about it. When I first launched GQueues back in 2009, the old “build it and they will come” approach actually worked. That was before the productivity space became saturated with very well-funded, venture-backed startups (and now public companies).

Over the last several years, I’ve experimented with a variety of marketing approaches. Here's what worked!

What I've tried

The channels:

• Content marketing.
• Referral program.
• Google Ads.
• Hacking Quora to increase search engine ranking.
• Webinars.

Some failed miserably (I’m looking at you Google Ads), while others had a moderate impact (hacking Quora). For others, I’m still waiting to see the results (content marketing). All of these, though, have been painful for me to pursue as a builder.

So, when I heard about engineering-as-marketing, I instantly knew that it was something I wanted to try.

Strategy

In short, engineering-as-marketing is building a valuable product for your target audience and giving it away for free, which promotes and drives traffic to your paid product.

You're building a free product that serves as an advertising platform where you can show ads indefinitely to your ideal customer, for free, with no competition. When framed that way, it seems like the smartest marketing strategy ever!

What I like most about this approach, though, is that you get to build a new product, which is an activity that I truly enjoy.

Criteria

As a first step, I listed the criteria to help me figure out what to build. I decided that the product should:

• Target my ideal customer.
• Include built-in virality so that it would spread easily.
• Cost very little to provide in terms of server resources.
• Solve a real problem for my ideal customers.
• Require minimal support for people to use.
• Only take a few weeks to build.
• Be fun!

With everything going on in the world, I wanted to build something that added a little bit more joy into people’s lives. Solving a real problem that actually helps people is not only essential to a product’s success, but also gives me the motivation that I need to persevere in the development process.

Product

After much brainstorming, I decided to build a Chrome extension that allows people to play games with their teams directly inside a Google Meet call. In terms of my criteria, it checked all the boxes:

• Targets teams using Google Workspace (our ideal customer).
• Is always used by multiple people, which leads to sharing.
• Runs on Firebase with minimal expenses.
• Enables team-building for remote workers.
• Is super easy to use.
• Can be written entirely in JavaScript over a few weeks.
• Will be fun to play!

Now, eight weeks later, I’m launching Hijinx on the Chrome Web Store:

For me, the best part is that I got to spend the last two months designing and coding a new product instead of writing blog posts, configuring ads, or hosting webinars! My general mood was elevated so much from implementing this strategy.

Results

Of course, what really matters is if this approach actually ends up driving traffic to GQueues and increases our number of paid subscribers. You’ll notice that the bottom of Hijinx is essentially an advertisement for GQueues. My hope is that people will be impressed with Hijinx and become curious about how GQueues might help their team, too.

One could argue that, with the second product, I now have two marketing challenges instead of just one! And that may very well turn out to be the case. But here is my initial plan and thinking:

1. I sent an email newsletter to all existing GQueues users telling them about Hijinx. This obviously won’t drive any new traffic to GQueues, but I’m hoping it will jumpstart people using Hijinx. And, because Hijinx is always played with a group of people, hopefully it will spread from these initial players to non-GQueues users.

2. I am going to email all people in my personal and professional network to let them know about this app that I built to make remote meetings better. If I were promoting my paid product, I would feel a little sheepish doing this. But since Hijinx is free, and will make their lives better, I feel much better about it. This message now comes from a place of giving instead of taking.

3. I will post everywhere online that people might be looking for ways to do virtual team-building, including bloggers, tangential products, forums, Quora, etc.

4. I might try ads on Facebook, Instagram, or Google, but only for a short period of time and small amount of money, just to seed that initial set of users. I’m still on the fence about this since I wasted so much money on ads in the past with GQueues.

5. I may eventually try to launch it on Product Hunt after some initial traction.

In essence, my main hypothesis is that it will be easier to promote and spread a free, inherently fun product with built-in virality. My paid product, GQueues, is super valuable to people, but I wouldn’t consider collaborative task management inherently fun!

Have you tried the engineering-as-marketing approach? Share below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Volv newsletter by Priyanka Vazirani

🔓 New EU rules will likely damage WhatsApp encryption.

👀 WeWork founder Adam Neumann is back as a VC.

💰 China is minting new billionaires faster than the US.

💻 Toronto is poised to be the next Silicon Valley.

🎶 TikTok is testing a "watch history" feature.

Check out Volv for more 9-second news digests.

🤷‍♂️ Is AppSumo Worth It?

by Orlie

Two years ago, I helped a friend launch his SaaS on the most famous deals marketplace on the web: AppSumo. Here are the pros and cons of the platform (in my opinion)!

How it works

AppSumo specializes in lifetime deals (LTDs), and only ~20% of total applicants are selected to be featured. This makes the bar for being selected quite high. You cannot direct list on AppSumo. The platform helps you to list. This is great, because it means that you get a good onboarding experience. AppSumo truly takes the time to make sure that the deal is ready before launching it on the platform. This includes product testing, copywriting, in-depth hype review, product description, and pricing. Once you're accepted, AppSumo does a great job at making sure you will succeed!

The AppSumo engine generates unique codes that the LTD buyers can redeem in your app, so there's a tiny bit of engineering to do. AppSumo customers leave reviews of your product on the platform.

List of pros

1. You get customers for your SaaS with minimal effort on your part, since AppSumo has a huge audience of probably over 1M eyeballs.
2. You make a nice chunk of money even after paying platform fees, without having to do much in the areas of marketing and sales.
3. The people actively using your product might actually only be around ~10% over the course of a year, meaning that you have 90% of people paying for something that they might only be using once or twice a year. So, 90% of these people will not bother you for customer support or ask for product updates.
4. Word-of-mouth from successful users could bring in new sales opportunities.

List of cons

1. You give up ~70% of your revenue.
2. AppSumo might rank better than your official site does on Google, so your branding is going to come in second place after AppSumo's page.
3. If your product isn't intuitive, but your marketing is, you're going to have a lot of new users in your customer support inbox.
4. It might really hurt you in the long run. AppSumo makes it feel simple to launch a product, and this may result in you not talking to your customers enough, improving your skills in sales or marketing, or making your product better.
5. The cost of infrastructure might become suddenly more expensive if your product gets used a lot by your LTD buyers.
6. LTD buyers can ask for a refund for 90 days, so you don't truly see a payout until 90 days after the LTD offer expires.

Is AppSumo worth it?

Depending on the size of your company, being featured on AppSumo could be a major benefit. If you execute well, and learn from the influx of feedback that you will get, it could be an amazing opportunity. Just be aware of the drawbacks.

Also, if you apply and don't hear back, don't just languish. They will usually contact you when the timing is good (for them), so keep improving your product!

Have you used AppSumo? Share your experience below!

Discuss this story.

👥 10M Users, Zero Funding

by Aytekin Tank

Building a great team:

Grow slowly to protect your culture.

Massive hiring sprees lead to mass confusion. If you hire a whole team of people all at once, you can’t spend time with them or get to know them. Even if your business is already established, adding too many people in one shot prevents current employees from sharing your systems and best practices. Going slowly is the best way to avoid cultural breakdown.

Discuss this story.

📝 Lessons From Mitch Edwards' Failed Kickstarter Campaign

by Mitch Edwards

Hi indie hackers! I'm Mitch Edwards, and I’m working part-time on my cybersecurity startup, Malparse. It’s been an absolute blast and a huge learning experience, even though it’s still in its infancy. Some of my greatest lessons, though, have not come from my current startup, but from my project in 2020, SketchyReq.

The idea

SketchyReq was never going to be a unicorn. It solved a fairly niche problem for a fairly small population of users: Fetching malware hosted on sketchy domains, without the bad guys finding out who did it. The system design was almost as simple as the idea. That said, it was my first SaaS project, so I'd taken on a lot.

After months of careful planning and long nights of development, I had something that I could at least demo. So, I released the demo and got some great feedback.

The dream

All of a sudden, I had a new dream: join the honorable ranks of full-time indie hackers. I wasn’t particularly unhappy in my job, but I’ve always wanted to be more independent. As I grew more enamored with the Indie Hackers community, I began to consider a Kickstarter campaign.

Fast forward a couple of months, and my Kickstarter launched. It was mainly carried on the winds of organic marketing on social media and Product Hunt; I barely put time or effort into it. I got an influx of initial funding from friends and family, so I really thought I’d hit my goal. I had done it all right: Validating my idea, initial marketing, and making a demo, so the only thing that could happen was success, right?

The flop

Soon, the incoming pledges dried up. The Kickstarter didn’t get a single dollar for months at a time, I couldn’t drive people to it to save my life. Also, my launch failed on Product Hunt. I kept my head up throughout the end days of the campaign, but the feeling was crushing. I even got ghosted by my first would-be angel investor!

By the end of the campaign, I had raised less than 10% of my completely arbitrary $13K goal. I spent the next month, not wallowing in my sorrows, but engaging in honest introspection on what had happened. I’ve returned to that introspection several times over the last two years, and I’ve held onto what I learned from the failure.

The lessons

Here's what I learned from my failed Kickstarter campaign:

• Don’t launch a Kickstarter campaign just for marketing: I had no idea why I wanted to do a Kickstarter, or why I set a funding goal of $13K. I just wanted to drum up some money to offset hosting and development costs, and for it to be a source of marketing.

• Have a plan: What are you going to do with the money? What are people paying for? When is the project going to be released? Launching a Kickstarter campaign without a plan is a quick way to end up with an underfunded project, and maybe even some disappointed customers.

• Failure isn’t an ending: A failed Kickstarter campaign isn’t the same as a failed founder. It’s one metric, for one app, with one singular outcome. You can try again later on Kickstarter, look for a new source of revenue, or just bootstrap it!

• Put some effort into marketing: A Kickstarter campaign is your landing page, not your sole source of marketing. I put close to zero effort into marketing for SketchyReq, outside of social media posts and a halfway done Product Hunt profile.

• Be cautiously ambitious: Chasing funding is perfectly fine. We all want to eat, and most of us want to do a bit more than that. Keep your ambitions reasonable, make reasonable funding goals, and understand the limitations of your own market.

In closing, I don't have anything against Kickstarter. It's a great idea, a good platform, and has given a lot of money to many worthy projects. If I need a financial lift one day that I'd rather get from Kickstarter than, say, VC, I'm not at all against it. But next time, I plan to do it with a plan and goal in mind!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to Cameron Henneke, Priyanka Vazirani, Orlie, Aytekin Tank, and Mitch Edwards for contributing posts. —Channing