invested in SEO course & regretting life decisions
by Leo KwanThis past weekend, I invested in the clickminded digital marketing bundle, and I am learning so much about content marketing and SEM/SEO strategies.
It's kind of sad as a software developer because I'm basically just banging my head and wondering why I did not invest my time and focus on these responsibilities earlier.
I told my girlfriend yesterday that if I could do it all over again, I would not have spent 15k to learn how to code and build iOS apps. That is, I wouldn't have tried learning to code right away (it's hard to quantify how important a technical perspective is when you have it).
Instead, (this might get some boos), I would invest my upfront time into social media, digital content marketing, SEO strategies, and — and wait for it — a self-hosted wordpress site. I should have leveraged my closer network of coaches and fitness professionals when I was still in the field, not years later after cannon-balling into tech.
It's now been 4 years, and almost 2020 (hah, how ironic). If anyone is reading this and can relate in her/his own respective field, I'd love to hear it. The struggle is real, and I know IH pumps out a lot of success stories and milestones— but this update is a sad, yet honest one.
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I am coming from the opposite end. I used to be heavily into SEO/Digital Marketing but as much as the course selling gurus try to make it sound complicated....
There is a reason why every business email I've ever had was spammed to death with all manner of folks selling all manner of SEO services. Its about as difficult to pick up as html which is why everyone is claiming to be an expert at it.
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even running 100 meters isn't hard. Everybody can do it in a matter of seconds. Try winning the Olympics. It's a bit harder.
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Thanks for sharing. I'm not saying I disagree, but I'd suggest getting a little deeper into the marketing world before writing off all the technical stuff you've learned. In my experience, you can hit that exact same wall with marketing where everything you try ends up being less effective than you originally expected.
To generalize this, I think learning something (especially on your own) follows this trend: at first you're learning really fast. It's exciting, and you extrapolate out that if you can just keep learning at this pace, you'll be able to do all kinds of amazing things soon.
But there's this huge slow ramp-up that you didn't see at the beginning. Your learning slows down. There are all kinds of little things you didn't realize you'd need to learn. Instead of feeling like you're weeks away from being able to accomplish your goals, you feel years away. Sounds like this happened a bit for you with coding. Well it happened to me with marketing.
I hope that doesn't sound overly depressing, I just mean that building the skills to do something hard (like starting a business) takes time, and it's totally fine if the path isn't a smooth curve up and to the right. It's a journey.
Anyway, I agree that if your goal is to start a business, it doesn't make sense to focus entirely on product at first, but focusing on marketing also isn't an easy path. They both take a lot of work and a lot of luck.
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hey Tyler, thank you for sharing your experience and insight from the marketing side. I think you may be right that I'm writing off my technical experience too quickly. I still believe that if I could do everything over again, I would trade my long nights and weekends programming with content creation and marketing. I certainly don't think this case holds true in other technical domains. For example, I notice you co-founded a CRM for small businesses; I definitely think there is a technical upfront cost to build out the MVP.
SuperFit, on the other hand, is a workout app for people looking to improve in sports. In my years learning to code and building the mobile app as a side project (while juggling a full time job), I feel like I could have been creating content, connecting with the basketball & soccer community, and building an online following on platforms like YouTube, Instagram and Facebook Groups.
Of course, this route is not simple either. There is obviously competition on these platforms toe with other fitness professionals and coaches doing what I proposed. At some point, a native mobile or web app could differentiate me from competitors. I'm just saying I should not have focused my entire effort on building custom software first.
But, I know others on IH are solving needs similar to SuperFit, so it could just be me. I was never, and still am not very good at juggling multiple streams of work. When I coded, I put all my time into coding. I paid for Intercom, but rarely engaged with users proactively and never started a drip messaging strategy for the $50/month the service cost me. Instead, I sat in my chair for hours, days, weeks debugging and building in XCode + VSCode, and figuring out how to properly run e2e controller tests, or "best practices" for view- model communication and app architecture. Yes, important for a dev, but I never realized until now that those types of tickets incrementally added up to take away my entire Saturdays and Sundays— before having to go back to work at my full time dev job on Monday. (Guess what I would do after work that Monday).
I got into a terrible cycle of just coding to code, and look, to anyone else reading this who might have gone through something similar, I ask you — just take some time off and re-evaluate what your time is going into. When I look at my landing page and see my mobile app that's published in the app store, or my second product for coaches that's built on Angular, hitting REST APIs "that I wrote" on Heroku— yeah, I feel a great sense of accomplishment. But trading away what admittedly added to 2 years of night time and weekend side hustling and hacking..., please reconsider this approach if your product does not demand for it.
For the sake of my business in helping people learn to play sports & getting fit, I really think a build-first mentality for an indie hacker was a fatal error. Anyways, thank you for your insights Tyler, and I'll definitely sit on some of the things you mentioned.
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Sorry, seems like you got swept up in the "all you need is product" advice vs focus on distribution / go to market. I'd place slightly more emphasis on the latter but product is still important.
The tech skills are still good too as it will aid you on truly understanding and not having to depend on a consultant or outsourced developer.
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One of my friends is working in this domain. He has an experience of 2 years. I guess that this is a lot of time for SEO. I wanted to see what does it mean and, why not, to try myself in this marketing. So my friend has sent me a blog about SEO Expert https://www.seotorontospecialists.com/seo-services. There I have read more about SEO marketing, who they increase the traffic for the webs and some rules that they have to follow. I'm not sure that I liked it but I would like to try this work. This is my advice to you too. You cannot see how it works exactly and if you like it until you will not try it.
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I agree - marketing a product like this is quite hard, however I've had lots of success with https://trackmylift.app thus far!
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This comment was deleted 5 years ago.
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Thanks for the reply, I took your suggestion to heart and reconsidered my landing page H1 message!
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