
Being a Developer Makes You Valuable. Learning How to Market Makes You Dangerous - talsraviv
http://talsraviv.com/2012/07/26/being-a-developer-makes-you-valuable.-learning-how-to-market-makes-you-dangerous/
======
patio11
I really cannot emphasize enough how the intersection of these two fields is
a) extraordinarily rare, b) extraordinarily capable of producing directly
attributable, measurable improvements across an entire business and as a
direct consequence c) very, very richly valued by the market right now.

~~~
lsc
>c) very, very richly valued by the market right now.

Yeah. I think, in fact, it's overvalued by the market right now. Many people
are bidding for ad words as if the google adword is what brought you the
customer.

The thing is, at least in my case, this simply isn't true. Nobody buys a VPS
on the first click; if someone clicks through a google ad for my company,
yeah, google should get some credit, but most of the credit should go to the
blog the customer saw a month ago.

That's the thing; because the adwords are the first hits and are super
convenient for the customer, they pick up a lot of people that would have
clicked on the organic result.

Now, this is okay if they are taking a very small cut, but the way many people
use google adwords? the price is bid up to a very large cut of the profit you
are going to earn from that customer. I mean, yeah, sure, if google really is
bringing me brand new customers that had never heard of me; people I would not
otherwise have a chance with, yeah, I can see paying 90% of the profit. But if
google is bringing me customers that were very likely to come to me anyhow?
eh, I'm not going to want to pay google nearly that much.

I think this is also why facebook is so highly valued; people believe that
facebook has enough tracking data to see that blog that my customer read last
week that actually caused the customer to sign up through the adword this
week. And maybe they do... but it's a dang difficult problem, and I haven't
seen facebook make much progress. Even then, they are going to have a hard
time integrating the people that heard of me because of the checkout-line
advertisements I bought in Mountain View Safeways.

(because of this, my advertising dollars go into cost per impression
advertising, rather than cost per click.)

~~~
patio11
While I do not disagree with what you have to say with regards to Google
getting to claim credit for skimming the cream off of their advertisers' own
brand equity (and then selling that cream to them at impressive prices),
that's sort of orthogonal to the point I was making. Specific to, say,
AdWords, the point I'm making is that people who a) have enough development
capability to ship software products and b) also know AdWords well enough to
get entrusted with a company's budget are as rare as hen's teeth. Because
many, many companies have 6 figure AdWords spends monthly and generate
millions of dollars of revenue as a result of them, someone who is capable of
applying their skills horizontally across a company's AdWords operation (+)
can be very, very useful to have around.

There's approximately four people in the world that can do that. Two of them
like their jobs, one just got funded, and the fourth one can charge whatever
he darn pleases. (This is an exaggeration, but not much of one.)

\+ You might naively assume I'm talking about the AdWords API, but there are
so many things a developer could do to wring extra money out of an AdWords
campaign that it is virtually cheating. A consulting client once bragged to me
that they had a lot of landing pages, and they asked me how many I had. It
turns out that they had 11 and I had, at the time, only 900-something. There
are a _lot_ of marketing departments which think that developing 900 landing
pages would take a team of 20 people the better part of a year. A properly
motivated intermediate Rails developer could bang that out on any given
Monday. (P.S. If you're not going to make the company a million bucks next
Monday, consider banging this out.)

~~~
lsc
>Specific to, say, AdWords, the point I'm making is that people who a) have
enough development capability to ship software products and b) also know
AdWords well enough to get entrusted with a company's budget are as rare as
hen's teeth. Because many, many companies have 6 figure AdWords spends monthly
and generate millions of dollars of revenue as a result of them, someone who
is capable of applying their skills horizontally across a company's AdWords
operation (+) can be very, very useful to have around.

This is something I have very little knowledge of... I have a (perhaps
irrational and unjustified) generally low opinion of marketing people, and
little contact with that world, but I thought that adwords/seo people were
usually mediocre programmers.

> (P.S. If you're not going to make the company a million bucks next Monday,
> consider banging this out.)

so, how come you aren't a millionaire many times over? Clearly you are good at
this sort of thing, you are a reasonable programmer, and on top of that, you
are a good writer, and have a bit of fame. (I am convinced that being able to
write well is one of those skills that, while nearly useless on it's own,
dramatically multiplies the value of any other skills you obtain.)

I mean, I'm not saying you are wrong... just that it's more complicated than
that. Marketing fluff, I mean, selling something for money that is pure
marketing and nothing else is harder than it looks. And actually providing a
service to a large number of users is also harder than it looks.

There is always that choice of "do I spend my time improving the product?" or
"do I spend my time on marketing?" - the more time you spend on the latter,
the harder the former becomes. The more time you spend on the former, the
easier the latter becomes.

This is my current problem; I can't add users much faster than I am without
degrading the service for existing customers. Marketing, right now, is mostly
a 'for fun' thing.

~~~
patio11
_This is something I have very little knowledge of... I have a (perhaps
irrational and unjustified) generally low opinion of marketing people, and
little contact with that world, but I thought that adwords/seo people were
usually mediocre programmers._

You're mostly right. SWAG numbers: 50% of SEM/SEO professionals are FizzBuzz-
level efficient in Excel, 10% of them know what a pivot table is, 5% of them
know enough scripting to do their jobs. Against that expertise curve, the
least accomplish programmer in e.g. an entire class of YC startups is a
programming god among men. If you can ship products, you're so far ahead of
the curve it isn't even funny.

 _so, how come you aren't a millionaire many times over?_

The things I'm really good at tend to scale with the size of whatever line-of-
business I'm allowed to work on. A 10% improvement in BCC's numbers is worth,
ballpark, $5k a year or so. (Or it was before I doubled conversions recently
-- guess it would be worth $10k a year now? Ask me in December for a better
guess, summer throws things off.) A 10% improvement in $CONSULTING_CLIENT's
$PRODUCT is worth, ballpark, a lot more. The large majority of that upside
will accrue to whomever beneficially owns $CONSULTING_CLIENT.

 _marketing fluff_

You don't need to have a product of your own to sell to monetize an
engineering/marketing skillset if you (or someone in the audience)
hypothetically has it. Many companies already have things to sell, and they
will pay handsomely, in a variety of ways, for your expertise in making that
happen.

 _This is my current problem:_

I'd tell a client in your circumstance to focus on the hardware provisioning
or CS bottleneck or whatever which is apparently making it infeasible to
service VPS customers acquired at scale. In the meanwhile, continue
experimenting with marketing channels. After solving the bottleneck, double
down on whatever marketing channels seemed to work in microscale.

------
cek
One of my favorite sayings: _Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.
Getting people to pay for what you executed on is more everything._

If there are 1000 people who are 'idea people', 100 of them can execute on an
idea; actually build something. 10 can get that thing sold.

Those 10 are the dangerous ones.

Great post.

~~~
kgtm
While I agree that it is a good post, isn't it kinda obvious that if you are
an idea person, can execute on that idea to make a product and also sell it,
you are king of the world? I mean, you have everything except finding a way to
repair your brain and body towards immortality (which I am still not quite
sure if desirable)...

~~~
cek
I agree its obvious. But the reality is a shocking number of people (990 of
1000?) never leave the building.

------
mindcrime
_Being a Developer Makes You Valuable. Learning How to Market Makes You
Dangerous_

I hope this is true! I've been developing for 12+ years, and always had an
_interest_ in marketing, but never really _studied_ marketing. Now, I'm one of
three tech co-founders of a startup that does not yet have a dedicated
marketing person. So, I've finally been diving into really trying to learn and
understand marketing (and sales).

OK, wait, I did take "Marketing 101" at the local community college a couple
of years ago, but that's the only formal education on the topic I've had.

Now, I have a huge stack of sales and marketing books I'm working through. So
far I've mainly focused on the Jack Trout, Al Ries, et al. stuff...
_Positioning_ , _Re-positioning_ , _The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing_ ,
etc., and I've been going through a video series from Chet Holmes (of _The
Ultimate Sales Machine_ fame).

Looks like some good resources in the linked article, so looking forward to
chewing through some of that as well. And here's a pre-emptive "+1" for more
good startup marketing related links on HN!

~~~
throwa
Marketing and sales are about story telling and influencing would be
customers, so that they can see a need for the product you offer. For me, I
have found the list of books below to be very informative. Note, they are not
listed in any particular order. I mostly listen to the audio or mp3 versions,
that way i can just play them as i do other things. Most of them have
actionable steps and are not just high level talk.

a. Spin Selling by Neil Rackham

b. 50 ScientificallyWays to Be Persuasive by Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J.
Martin, Robert B. Cialdini

c. Three Steps to Yes by Gene Bedell; - __Only print, no audio

d. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan
Heath

e. How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie

~~~
mindcrime
Heh, I own 4 of those 5 books (not the Gene Bedell one). All are on my "to
read" list but other than Spin Selling (which I've browsed through a bit), I
haven't read them yet.

I've heard a lot of good things about _Made To Stick_ though, so I think it's
time to bump that up the list a little.

Thanks for sharing!

------
plinkplonk
But isn't this just stating the obvious? being a Developer + learning
$cool_skill makes you $positive_adjective.

Well duh. Also, the sun rises in the east.

$cool_skill element_of {marketing, design, negotiation, leadership skills,
design, writing ....}

$positive_adjective element_of {dangerous, rockstar, ninja , pirate,
extraordinary, one in a million, cool, killer ... }

mix and match and you have a dozen or so catchy titles.

Throw in links to the top books on the topic and links to some blogs, and most
importantly an ad for an ebook somewhere in the post. Profit.

Repeat a few dozen times. Landing pages for SEO. Hey you are a guru!

Maybe, I am just feeling too cynical abut such 'how to do a startup' porn.
Feel free to ignore me.

OTOH HN generally has good discussions, even when the submission is spammy/low
quality.

~~~
AznHisoka
you're not alone. It's harder than they make it seem.. much harder. As an
example, landing pages for SEO is trivial.. stupid trivial. How to get those
pages to rank for your desired keywords though is challenging, but no growth
hacker wants to do that, or tell u how to do that.

~~~
jwdunne
In some sectors it can be as easy as it looks. It's just when the playing
field is really competitive that it gets a bit tough. Ranking #1 for 'dentist
in irlam' will be levels upon levels easier than ranking for 'dentist in
london' in terms of SEO. Similarly the cost-per-click in paid search will
probably be orders of magnitude apart and optimising your campaigns will be
much harder. Choosing the best keywords for what you'd like to achieve is
tricky and figuring that out only happened after I dived in - it's likely a
lot of what I've learned there is niche specific too.

------
gersh
Plain old marketing is simple. You gotta reach your audience. You gotta figure
out what they look at, and you gotta get their attention. If your audience is
searching Google, you hit them with SEO and Adwords. If they are watching TV,
you gotta get on the shows they are watching. Once you get their attention,
they know about you, and then it is matter of sales if they buy.

For good branding, it helps to have a good name, logo, etc. Although, in the
end it helps if they like your product.

If you're in a crowded space, marketing is going to be harder. Although, I've
never really found marketing to be that complicated. If you are in a crowded
space, it can be harder to market, because your message gets crowded out.

Who is struggling with marketing? Let me know. I don't really think it is that
hard.

------
Alan01252
It's amazing actually how many programmers don't concentrate on marketing at
all. I've recently got a few emails from fellow developers asking if they need
a blog/twitter/google+ account in order to get customers as a freelancer.

The answer is yes, yes you do!

The proof, 3 months in to my freelance career and I'm already getting
customers, via blogging and Google search results. Heck I've even been lucky
enough to get one customer as a direct result of getting front paged on Hacker
News.

I have no idea whether I'm approaching "dangerous" yet. But I know for
certain, I've still got a lot of marketing effort to go, and one hell of a lot
left to learn.

~~~
hntester123
Good comment.

------
mrbrianholland
Agreed.

I own <http://drivingtests101.com/> . It is a free driving test prep website
covering ~400 tests across 11 countries, all states/provinces and vehicle
types. It was not until we spent time on SEO and pushed to get into the media
a few months later before we truly began to realize the fruits of our labor. A
product or service can often lead to no monetization without a push from
marketing, aside from the true viral one-off hits. Do not count on this!

Marketing is key and I would encourage all business owners, not just
developers, to learn this invaluable skill.

Good luck!

------
yesimahuman
I'm trying to dig into Marketing and really figure out how to hack it. I've
found patio11 extremely helpful, and also some of Peldi's posts on the
Balsamiq blog: [http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2008/08/05/startup-
marketi...](http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2008/08/05/startup-marketing-
advice-from-balsamiq-studios/). I will definitely check out some of the
recommendations here.

Does anyone have any other actionable suggestions for reading? I've picked up
a few books but I'm looking to really dig in and get better at selling SaaS
stuff online.

~~~
justinmares
Every single blog post under the SaaS tag on this site -
<http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas/>

~~~
yesimahuman
Thanks! I'm starting my journey of learning marketing, and going to be writing
about it if you're interested ([http://blog.codiqa.com/2012/07/step1-admit-
you-have-a-market...](http://blog.codiqa.com/2012/07/step1-admit-you-have-a-
marketing-problem/))

------
tuhin
I would really extend this to the following qualities that people in the field
of building products should try, to the best of their abilities, to be good
at. They might not become the best at each one, but enough to become potent
and in the very least better than they were before trying:

-Understand technology. What it takes to build, scale, maintain and fix things. What are the affordances and benefits of one approach over the other.

-Understand design. Not just pretty pixels (in fact that is the least important part, IMHO). But the WHY. How it affects people, what the goals are, why the current system is broken or why it does not exist.

\- Understand Marketing. How do you convince others that your product (idea or
finished) is THE one they should vouch for. Why should they invest time and
money into it. How can you make them believe that you know what you are doing
and better than any bad experiences they have had with products of that kind.
Selling/Marketing is not evil. It is a necessary (evil). Many humble and smart
people fail to understand that.

I totally understand it is very hard for one person to be great or even good
at all three. But hey most don't even try, so you are already better then them
the first day you try.

------
at-fates-hands
The best part about being a developer and interested in marketing is you have
all kids of opportunity to learn and tinker.

You can build a mobile app, submit to the app stores and see how it sells.
Track your sales, dive into the numbers and find out what works and what
doesn't. Does a good design help? What key words help your app get found? What
about your UI? Do people love it? Hate it? Why?

You can build a static website and attach Google Analytics and see where your
traffic comes from, how is your SEO working? What mobile users are on your
site? What pages are they viewing? What's your conversion rate?

Build an e-commerce website and see what sells. Does the position of the items
matter? What colors are people buying? What are your buyers preferences? Are
your price points too high? Too low?

There's so many cool things you can learn when you start to get interested in
marketing. If you're hacker, you can have a lot of fun and learn a ton of
stuff just by creating simple things and seeing how the public/users react and
use it. It really is completely fascinating.

~~~
AznHisoka
I think you're talking about conversion optimization rather than pure
marketing.

Tracking numbers for a mobile app is fruitless if you don't have a way to get
tons of people to use it in the first place. A/B testing design, colors etc of
a mobile app is only useful once you users.

Similarly, for an e-commerce site, it doesn't make sense to A/B test different
things like price if you got a measly number of visitors.

Now, how is one supposed to get all those visitors/customers/users in the
first place, so we can then tinker/test the various variables? That is
marketing, and a lot of it isn't "hacker" oriented. It's actually messy, and
geared more towards people who are sales oriented, even some of SEO. SEO is
actually one of the few remaining hacker-friendly methods of marketing.

------
paraschopra
I started as a developer, coded the first version of Visual Website Optimizer
myself, but quickly discovered the importance of marketing. I agree to the
OP's assessment that marketing is every bit as juicy as coding. Discovering a
channel, executing a successful marketing campaign and crunching out hard ROI
from it, seeing 10 customers because of it is as exciting (if not more) as
learning the wonderful node.js and implementing a chat server on your own.

That said, I'd say after a certain scale, it becomes incredibly hard to do
both: a) coding; and b) marketing. There's so much to do in both fields that
you cannot do justice to both _at the same time_. So you have to eventually
build a team and decide between coding or marketing (but the great part is
that by that time you can afford to do this).

------
jamesmcn
Speaking as a developer, I think I can see the analogy between dev and
marketing. But from a learning perspective, software development has a big
advantage. You can build everything from a hello world app to your own toy OS
without being negatively impacted by existing software out there.

As a marketer, it seems like you always have to be on the cutting edge. What
worked in the 1980s is unlikely to work in 2012. Even what was cool in 2008 is
unlikely to be effective today. The next problem is that marketing is, by its
nature, a public activity. Doing it badly is embarrassing and likely limits
your ability to even give it a second try.

~~~
patio11
I'd tend to disagree: everything old is new again. Sears Roebuck beat me to
A/B testing by, what, _eighty years_?

~~~
rgraham
There is nothing new under the sun, but people are forgetful.

------
ph0rque
This is a topic near and dear to my heart; I am a developer who tried to take
up marketing but gave up.

So this post's call to action is to read/listen/watch various resources; in
sum they are probably dozens of hours of learning. With a little searching,
I'm sure the actual material available stretches into hundreds of hours.

So my question, similar to the one I posted almost a year ago [0], is: what is
the best available material out there, where I can learn 80% of marketing in
20% of the material?

0\. <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2967010>

~~~
mindcrime
_With a little searching, I'm sure the actual material available stretches
into hundreds of hours._

I'm sure it's far more than that. Especially if "a little searching" includes
bittorrent trackers. Not that I advocate this sort of thing, but there's one
tracker I know of, that specializes in business related topics, with a healthy
dose of sales and marketing material. There is so much material (books,
videos, reports, articles, podcasts, etc.) to watch, listen to, read, etc.
that you could probably spend tens of thousands of hours on it.

 _, is: what is the best available material out there, where I can learn 80%
of marketing in 20% of the material?_

OK, I'm not marketing guru, just another "developer trying to take up
marketing." But based on a lot of reading, watching, asking questions, etc., I
get the sense that material from Chet Holmes, Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham is
usually regarded as pretty good. I'm watching some Chet Holmes videos now, and
finding a ton of value in them, FWIW. YMMV, of course.

Also, the works of Jack Trout, Al Ries, Steve Rifkin, et al, are usually
regarded as pretty important. Trout and crew basically created positioning
theory.

And then there's a whole separate world of material for people who are
interested in the spammy(er), get rich quick, "Internet Marketing" stuff. I
haven't studied any of his marketing materials, but Eben Pagan seems to be one
of the more popular guys in that world. Whether or not his material would be
of use to the typical HN reader is left as an exercise for the reader. Or, if
somebody here is familiar with his work and could chime in, I'd be really
curious to hear your take.

~~~
spitfire
So what are these trackers? What material should you look for?

It's no good saying "There's this cool little news site all the smart people
hang out on (HN)" without telling us how to find it.

~~~
mindcrime
_So what are these trackers?_

I didn't name it explicitly because I don't really know if pg has any policy
of frowning on encouraging piracy here at HN (and most of the content on the
tracker I'm thinking of is pirated).

But if you're really curious, my email is in my profile. Just sayin...

------
patrickambron
I've always thought the person running the development team should understand
marketing, and the person running the marketing efforts knows how to develop.
The two are so intertwined, but at the same time, it's important to separate
the effort. Just like in engineering, the devil is in the details not the
conceptual idea. You want a marketing person who knows how to get everything
just right, to get in front of customers, sign people up, etc

------
loeschg
Feel free to call me a n00b or uncultured, but I don't get your anti-spam
measures to subscribe to your posts via email.

 _Prove humanity by completing the lyric: "Blame..."_ huh?

~~~
cickpass_broken
for the "uncultured": Blame Canada!
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOzG7bBylRo>

~~~
loeschg
Thanks for that. Maybe he doesn't want uncultured people subscribing via
email. If so, it's working :)

------
jawr
Although having great marketing skills is invaluable, I have come to the
conclusion that having a deeper understanding of design is crucial to modern
developers; it seems to me that more and more developers are cropping up and
the demand has shifted from them to people with great design capabilities.

I guess the morale of the story is to learn everything you can!

------
tlogan
So true. Reading books about marketing is good but they are too 'vague'. From
my experience, executing marketing / selling is much harder (and more fun)
than you think and the only way to learn it. Just get out of the building and
start embarrassing yourself (literally).

------
toeknee123
Definitely agree here. I have a Marketing background but have been learning
how to develop the past 3-4 months.

Marketing = Principles/Thoughts Software Development = technical/tangible
skill

Marketing = Ideas; Software Development = Execution of those marketing ideas.

------
atomical
I'd like to hear more about non-web marketing like direct mail. I would think
small businesses would be more receptive to that. After all, they might not
realize they need your tool until you put an advertisement in front of them.

~~~
corry
In my experience, non-tech B2B audiences respond very well to 'traditional'
marketing - postcard mailings, magazine ads, etc.

IMO there are 2 aspects to doing this well:

(1) USE IT AS PART OF AN INCREMENTAL CAMPAIGN. Use the traditional stuff as
the first element to get them involved with you. Sending them a well-designed,
relevant postcard invitation = you have their attention (whereas they are
'banner ad blind' and 'email blind'). Use that attention to push them to the
next step (which isn't the sale - it's just another incremental commitment
like attending a webinar, or downloading a whitepaper, or using an online
calculator to spec something out, etc).

Incremental commitment is the name of the game in B2B sales and marketing, and
traditional marketing can be a great start to the chain.

(2) LINK OFFLINE STUFF TO ONLINE STUFF. As you can see even from my examples
above, it's important to get them into online channels as soon as possible
(where they can be tracked and interacted with more efficiently). You want to
have tons of relevant content you can offer them, lots of places for them to
explore the problem/solution, etc.

The real joy (and pain) of B2B marketing is that you have to do the
'strategic' campaign planning well while also nailing the 'tactical' messaging
/ design / etc execution.

------
h2s
How to market on HN:

    
    
        - Write an interesting blog post and post it to HN
        - Include a link to something you're selling
          somewhere near the end of the post
    

There are so many people doing this it's unreal.

~~~
nachteilig
Certainly one of the stranger aspects of this site. It's almost a sort of
meta-game.

------
rshlo
The aim of a founder is not to be the best marketer or developer. It's goal
should be knowing just enough to hire the best people in every field and lead
the team. This what makes a great founder.

~~~
patrickambron
You're describing a great CEO, not necessarily a great StartUp founder. In the
beginning the founder's job is not to hire people (you're not ready for that
yet). It's to execute and demonstrate some sort of traction--the traction you
can use to hire great people. Ideas are a dime a dozen. If you want to hire
great people, you need to show that idea can be executed before you can hire
"the best people in every field"

------
chadhietala
I support this message as a Marketing/Finance major turned software engineer.

------
frankphilips
I'd like to call these marketers Growth Hackers. They're a different breed of
hackers, and they're just as important as the engineers. A successful startup
should have at least ONE growth hacker in the team for it to be successful.

~~~
unimpressive
Dear god, please stop abusing that word.

If we don't it will lose all meaning, in some ways it already has.

~~~
frankphilips
Seems to me like you're making comments just for the sake of making comments.
Dear god, stop abusing that privilege. First of all, don't tell someone to
stop abusing "that word" without mentioning what word you're talking about.
Second, if you're making a point, be prepared to back it up. What is "losing
all meaning"? In what ways has it already? What the heck are you talking about
anyway?? How is your comment benefiting the original poster at all?

~~~
unimpressive
>Seems to me like you're making comments just for the sake of making comments.

I'm not. But since it came off that way I will apologize. First for lashing
out at you, and second for not being more specific.

The word "Hacker" is being applied to everything and everyone, and it's
annoying. As an example, a search for "Hacker" in my RSS feed produces the
following headlines (Among others, but I list these as egregious examples.):

 _Mobile hackers: The future scares us, change it at Everyme_

 _The Distribution Hacker’s Mission: Create an Unfair Advantage_

 _ShowHN: Hacker Tourist - opinionated ecommerce for photographers_

 _Reinvent Retail. Growth Hacker at YC Mobile Startup._

 _Ask HN Teachers and Edu Hackers : How do you prepare educational materials?_

When you start talking about "Hacker photographers" and "Growth hackers" and
"Distribution hackers" I have to ask, do you mean "People who are hackers who
happen to know marketing/photography/whatever a distribution hacker is
supposed to do/etc too." or are we just applying this term to everything so
that everyone can feel like they're part of some elite club?

And that's not even getting into the whole "Well you can't just say you're a
hacker and expect everyone to go with it." argument.

EDIT: Which, in certain views on that latter point, the word "Hacker" _is_
about an elite club, which only makes the appending of the word to everything
just feel like some sort of envy.

(Full disclosure: I do not consider myself a hacker.)

~~~
frankphilips
When I mean "hacker", I mean someone who enjoys the intellectual challenge of
creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations. This can be in the field
of software, marketing, photography, or any other field. This doesn't mean
that they're part of any "elite club", and it definitely doesn't have to be
something that annoys you so much. It's just a term used, that's all!

------
klbarry
Note: I am not a developer. My experience is in e-commerce marketing and my
degree (est. May 2013) is in Statistics.

I've loved the field of human persuasion for years, and I think I can add
something that I have written in the past to this conversation. I essentially
made a list of marketing "truths", based on my research and experience, and
have tested it against others. What remains of the list is what no one has
been able to refute, so I think it's decently close to a list of universal
irrefutable "rules of marketing."

The Truths of Marketing

1) Ethos (your perceived character) is the most important.

2) People make judgments by comparison/anchoring.

3) People process information best from stories.

4) People are foremost interested in things that affect them.

5) Breaking patterns gets attention.

6) People look to other people's decisions when making decisions.

7) People will believe things more easily that fit their pre-existent mindset.
The converse is also true.

8) People handle one idea at a time best.

9) People want more choices, but are happier with fewer.

10) People decide first, then rationalize - If people are stuck with
something, they will like it more over time.

11) Experience is memory, the last part of the experience is weighted heavily.

* Keep in mind that this should not necessarily be used a checklist; see what the director of a large creative agency says on the subject:

"I think that in broad strokes these truisms are accurate, but they aren't
really how I personally get to the bottom of the marketing equation when
working on a brand.

Of them, I think 1 and 4 are probably the closest, but I think the biggest
problem is the same problem you find in how any analysis of consumers, or what
is usually called "consumer behavior" is used -- it is, by definition, one
step removed from what you're trying to analyze, yet it's treated like the
consumers themselves.

Because consumers are often perceived as black boxes to marketers, there's a
temptation to analyze their behavior and then market to that analysis instead
of to them. Maybe this is because I'm on the creative side, but for me the
most useful role of research is to inform and guide what is a form of for our
consumer. To not just analyze what drives them, but to genuinely it yourself.

Reading research about twelve-year-old girls' purchase decisions and focus
group transcripts is not the same thing as thinking like one. I have a client
in that market, and I read everything when I'm working on something --
research, web sites, fan magazines, television -- but none of it is a
substitute for sitting in a dark room and genuinely trying to imagine the
trials of what it must be like to actually be a twelve-year-old girl from a
first person perspective.

It sounds absurd, but that's how you come up with great ideas -- to do your
best to become a twelve-year-old girl, and then develop things that you would
enjoy.

So I think truisms like yours are useful as long as they remain a means to an
end, and not, as they so often do, a checklist, or worse, the end itself."

~~~
talsraviv
Amazing summary. I've bookmarked this comment. Thank you. It would be great if
you'd elaborate on each one in a post with one story that may have led you to
realize this - to make it more memorable. Heck this could probably be a
textbook but a short post would get the most eyeballs. And when you post it,
i'd like to be the first to know.

It's [almost] like a checklist when working on any marketing project to get
inspiration from and make sure you're doing a complete job.

~~~
klbarry
Thank you. I intend to make and have sketched out a simple website that shows
the list, but each item links to a separate page with sources, and also allows
for comments. Alas for a lack of spare time!

