
Ask HN: Where to Learn Rudimentary Marketing Skills? - sarciszewski
Anyone who works with me tells me they think that I&#x27;m a great programmer, but I don&#x27;t know the first thing about marketing or sales.<p>I&#x27;d like to get from &quot;employed at a dead-end job for a sinking startup making a very humble salary with no benefits or vacation with a 4 hour daily commute&quot; to the vicinity of &quot;self-employed consultant working from home earning $XY,000 per week on client engagements&quot;.<p>Where&#x2F;how can I quickly learn whatever skills I&#x27;m missing? (I might be under the gun soon to come up with an answer, since rumor mill is telling me that my $dayjob is going out of business on the 1st yet $dayjob[&#x27;boss&#x27;] has remained silent about this.)<p>For the record: I&#x27;m technically not quite going 100% solo freelance consultant, a friend of mine (whom, unlike me, does not have a felony conviction for computer hacking that shuts 99% of doors) started an LLC that I intend to work under full time. Our website is https:&#x2F;&#x2F;paragonie.com<p>I&#x27;ve already seen a lot of Double Your Freelancing and read a bunch of &#x27;patio11&#x27;s blog posts.<p>For those interested in knowing, my skillset covers PHP, Java, .NET, JavaScript&#x2F;HTML&#x2F;CSS, and Shell&#x2F;batch scripting, with a specialization in application security.<p>WHAT WE HAVE DONE SO FAR:<p>We&#x27;ve performed two code audits on cryptography applications in the past two months, but I&#x27;m not yet at liberty to post the reports (although the client did agree to publication later this year).<p>We have also started a community initiative to backport PHP 7&#x27;s CSPRNG features into PHP 5 projects: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;paragonie&#x2F;random_compat<p>We also have a new post on our blog (once per week, on average) that consistently resonates with the part of the PHP developer community I can reach and, usually, explains new security concepts from a developer&#x27;s perspective. Based on the feedback I&#x27;ve received, this is generally seen as a high value offering that lots of people benefit from.<p>Is this a good start? Is there something I can do today that will help me reach businesses that <i>need</i> the skills I have to offer?
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yoloswagins
Hey Scott,

This is my perspective, and shouldn't be taken as the be all, end all of
marketing. I'm also not very good at communicating, so I'm sorry that I've
done a bad job.

First, deal with Google. Given your felony conviction, and the shitty college
rag stories about your arrest, you need to mount simple, positive PR campaign.
Create a website S....tA....ski.com, and an about.me page. Maybe a twitter,
@S....tA....ski, and a Discuss account. On these properties, you'll need to
communicate a very fluffy image, where you say nice things about yourself. The
goal being to push the old, no good stories off the front page of google.com

Marketing is about finding an audience, and communicating the value you
provide to them.

From what I've seen of ParIni, it looks like you're hanging your shingle as a
web app developer who's super focused on security. That's great, now you need
to find an audience.

You know much more about your market than I do, but a really great resource
I've found has been forums that contain people who could be your customers.
One mistake I've made is to find forums of people who are more like me, than
my customers. In your case, it could be app-sec developers. The focus should
be on people who own, or need app-sec.

Now that you've found a forum of potential customers, you want to create an
account(use a personal name, not corporate), set up some keyword alerts, and
lurk. For app-sec, keyword alerts could be something like bcrypt, or scrypt,
or heartbleed. You'll know best what keywords to use.

After you've seen how the forum works, understand the lingo, and decorum,
start being a positive contributor. When someone asks a question, write a good
answer. If the forum allows it, answer old, unanswered questions. Be as
helpful as possible, and you will be seen as an expert in this community.

As you gain status, people will mention you when they need someone with your
expertise. Gradually, people will find your posts, and reach out to you asking
for help. These people are now leads, and you did a marketing.

One thing to keep in mind is that you don't go from maligned employee to
$XY,000 per week over night. You're going to want to think of smaller steps,
how do I go from maligned employee to someone giving me a dollar for doing
app-sec.

As for specific resources, read the books, 'Double Your Freelancing Rate', and
'Double Your Freelancing Clients'. Both books really teach some fundamental
skills that are not intuitive. The main thing I got from 'Rate' was how to
practice empathy with my clients.

~~~
drchiu
To add to an already great answer by @yoloswagins, you may want to read the
book "Traction" by Gabriel Weinberg.

It lists 21 ways, or channels, a business can utilize to find customers.

Although the book is primarily targeted for startups, the information therein
is really applicable to any business that wants to grow.

I also suggest growing your brand through developing some sort of Productized
Service. If you don't know what that is, Google it up. Essentially you bundle
your service as a product, which makes it easier for your customers to
purchase from you versus having them ask you for a quote as a consultant.

The benefit is you can then limit the scope of what you offer at a set, fixed
price.

Good luck

~~~
sarciszewski
This is an interesting and specific suggestion. I'll check it out immediately,
thanks. :)

