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How You Balance: Promotion vs. Production

Hi Indie Hackers!

Super excited to be in such talented company, super excited to share what I'm working on with my writing at Post Truth (https://posttruth.substack.com)

My question is: when working toward your first 100, then first 1000 users / readers / customers -- how do you balance getting eyes on the work and doing the work? What's the strategy there? Not because it's too much work to do both, but because doing great work with no audience has pretty low returns. You need at least some scale to get people to reshare / redistribute your great work, which attracts more people.

I write about Internet culture as influenced by AI and tech. I'm an AI researcher, writing for people outside of the field as someone in it. Feel free to check it out and let me know what you think -- right now I've published:

  1. A deep dive into the psychology and AI literature behind automated personality prediction
  2. A look into the marketing of AI tools in the beauty industry
  3. A piece on the fundamental value add of social media, how platforms failed to deliver, and how I learned to use social media for meeting great people without feeling gross about it
, Founder of Icon for Post Truth
Post Truth
on April 22, 2023
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    In my case it is a bit different as I work as a programmer and on the side I have to work on marketing too. Currently how am I dealing with it? In short I am still unable to figure it out. I am coding and coding which has resulted in no growth for https://pinggy.io

    But I hope to change it soon. I am trying to focus on marketing now as there is no point of building something when no one is using it.

    In you case, your product itself is a marketing material. You are generating content. So your marketing is spreading your content through different mediums such as social media, newsletters, etc. Perhaps get some articles featured in some newsletters?

    1. 2

      That's definitely a good thought! And good luck with Pinggy, it looks super useful! I think finding sub-communities on the Internet where people who have this problem gather could be great. Who has this problem re: locally hosting prototypes? Maybe web developers and designers, front-end software engineers. So r/webdev could be good.

      My advice there is that it works best to bury the link to your truly useful work in a reply to someone's specific problem. That reply should be original and thoughtful, so that even if they don't click your link it provides some value. That value creates the goodwill that gets people to click through.

      But I think you know this already -- you're here on Indie Hacker, and your comment above is pretty much what I described!

      1. 2

        Appreciate your thoughts. All the best.

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