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Ask HN:Coding vs Marketing

2 points by trailrunner ↗ HN
Hi, it's been a little while since I launched my startApp and I am lost somewhere in the the App store, quite naturally, since no marketing has been done. Being ultra-lean, and having to do the dirty work myself (press releases, contact bloggers etc), I have the following problem. Every time I want to start, I end up in Xcode programming my next feature. I suppose coding is irresistible and postponing the dirty job is the easy solution. "Having the Best product is the best marketing" is also a poor excuse I use. But we all know I am wrong. So how do you solve this problem? How to you fight this urge to code and keep producing things, instead of market them?

5 comments

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Travis
Rather than trying to fight the urge, you should try to understand why you have the urge in the first place. What is it about coding that makes you prefer doing it? And then, how can you mimic those conditions for all the "other stuff"?

In order to motivate myself to do the marketing type work, I had to connect a better feedback loop between that type of work, and my ultimate yardstick of success: revenue.

I did the same type of marketing you did for a while, and it was frustrating. You don't really know how/if/when your efforts are paying off. It feels like you're just grinding without any evident payoff.

So I pivoted a bit on my marketing project. I (we) completely changed our business model so that we see a clear progression from our marketing efforts to revenue. Basically, we started looking at page views instead of signing revenue sharing contracts, after a bit of a product pivot. This gave us lots of smaller feedback -- when you go a few weeks between checks coming in, things get tense... but when you're focused on page views, you have more frequent incremental improvement). We started looking at our logs more closely, and identified which sites had the better payoff for the least work.

In short, we did a few things differently, but it was just as important that we reframe the metric of success in our minds. Having that positive feedback loop is extremely important to morale. That's one thing I don't read much about on HN -- the importance of tying in the correct metrics to positive feedback loops, in order to keep your motivation up.

trailrunner
Thanks for the advise. The cause - effect relationship makes sense to an engineering mind. I do suspect though, that my problem is more of a psychological nature, and specifically it's the fear of the unknown and failure. Xcode is such a cozy little place :)
Travis
It may be a cliche, but it's really important to start small. One of our first goals was to make $1 in a single day from ad revenue. Then we set other goals that were similarly modest -- nothing that would take more than 1-2 weeks to reach.

We have built a lot of momentum this way. Regardless of how small the objective is, meeting goals (especially when they're clearly tied to revenue) is a a momentum builder.

Baby steps

trailrunner
yep, baby steps is a good strategy in general, so I am familiar with the process. With baby steps I really came a very long way, in my App development.
[dead] RobIsIT
1) Can you find a non-coder who believes in your product? These folks are best thought of as "evangelist" more then a traditional marketing person. If you can find someone like this and partner with them, you can continue to focus on coding while this person helps you market the software. This doesn't have to be expensive - if you can find someone who truly believes in your product and would appreciate a percentage of future sales - it would be a win/win.

2) If you can't find an evangelist, is there a way for you to build a community around your product? A support forum, ugen content, Q&A site, something that engages people can be an excellent way to either find an evangelist or empower a group of people to become evangelists for you.

3) If you're just looking for straight up ways to motivate yourself to stay in marketing mode, consider using Jerry Seinfeld's method of productivity. He simply had a calendar hanging on his wall - every time he wrote a certain number of jokes, he would put an X through the day on the calendar. He found that he didn't want to "break the chain" and found it a bit easier to stay motivated. Setting aside a little bit of time every day to do something outside of the "fun stuff" and using a tangible feedback system like X's on a calendar really works.

I hope that this helps!