The Modern Developer: Marketing 101

“If you build it, they will come.”

So you launched a project and no users turned up? Welcome to the club! The above quote is a big lie. But that insight does not really help your project, so you will probably look into how others made it big. And all of a sudden, you realize just how deep the marketing rabbit-hole is. But where to start? A short search returns dozens of different categories/schools/streams with huge “Associations” behind them.

Many developers I know want to build their own company and I recently embarked on the journey myself. So here are my learnings for the next person to save some time. Feel free go venture on your own at any stage.

First stop: Advertising

Nothing is easier than putting up ads for your application, so I tried this first. After having ads running on Google and Facebook, I realized there are barely any clicks, let alone sign-ups resulting from those. I had two options now: Pump in more money or optimize the conversion of ads, landing page, signup etc., aka The Funnel. The latter is helpful in any case and for the Ads side, the free book on Scientific Advertising does a decent job describing how to measure/evaluate the effectiveness of marketing campaigns. But even after improving the funnel, Ads were not a very promising prospect at that stage.

As someone bootstrapping the company, increasing the marketing budget by a crazy amount was out of the question, either. So I had to look elsewhere.

Second stop: Dissect

The deeper I went, the more models appeared. An early and insightful one was Paid, Owned and Earned Content. I had tried Paid Content in the form of ads and it had not worked out, so there were two other options. I loved the thought of Earned Content, but this is usually the result of good brand behavior over time, so I could not kickstart that either.

Consequentially, I had to look deeper into Owned Content.

Third stop: Content Marketing

When looking at other companies, most had blogs, vlogs, podcasts or mailing lists (my least favorite). I also found a common term for them: Content Marketing. The Content Marketer’s dream is to build an audience through a channel (usually on a topic he genuinely enjoys) and later trying to find products/services to build around that audience. The type of thing most Webinar/Ebook people currently do, but I had a product already and was searching for an audience.

Nevertheless, the advice for building an audience was good, so I went ahead and started to write (William Zinsser can tell you how to improve your writing). I pumped my works into all the channels I had: Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, LinkedIn, HackerNews. And then, I waited.

Fourth stop: Results!

If you have tens of thousands of people reading your content now, you do not need me any more. I was in the low thousands, which meant more people had spent time reading it than it took me to create the content, at least. When I pointed ads to my Owned Content, the conversion improved greatly. So now I just had to rinse and repeat to build an audience.

The only problem being that I quickly ran out of suitable topics to write about.

Fifth stop: Leverage

For people at that stage, the Blogosphere has loads of different articles: Countless on “Writers block is a myth”, some on starting with Inbound Marketing (although it had little value with the small user numbers I had), many on improving your application further and a few on find ways off the beaten path.

When looking more carefully, I had seen the last one already during my research: The Buffer Academy was a free site for Social Media resources curated by Buffer, a Social Media startup. By offering complimentary services to their main product for free, they were able to put their name out there. Then there was another article on “Side Project Marketing”. The big benefit? People are not as numb towards it compared to traditional advertisement or Content Marketing strategies.

Where am I now?

For me, there’s no happy ending yet. I’m actually writing this to help me grasp the information a little better and overcome my current writer’s block. I see big potentials in Content Marketing as well as Side Project Marketing for my own project, but am not sure how exactly to use it, yet.

I wish I had known all this before diving into this full-time, but I am optimistic about my future. If this was helpful for anyone else, this post achieved its goal.

If you are curious about my project or have some feedback, here it is: Reecontact.