
A checklist of marketing ideas for side projects - karlhughes
https://www.sideprojectchecklist.com/
======
FHMS
"Cold call ~20 people who might be good customers."

IMHO this is probably the first! thing you should do. To my own surprise
people will give you money for your service even if you don't have a websites
(and name, logo, slogan or anything else), and you send your 'product' via
email.

And 3 out of 4 ideas don't survive these 20 calls - so you'll save a lot of
time if you sell first and build later.

Emotionally that's not easy - of course - but it's what you will be doing all
day anyway if it goes well, so why not start early?

~~~
pjc50
That's extremely surprising to me; I'd have assumed that 19 out of 20 cold
calls would be rejected _regardless of how good the product is_.

~~~
Aeolun
I guess if it's something that's genuinely interesting, it's the same kind of
flattering as if a crew/group of students with a camera accosts you on the
street to ask your opinion on something. I'm happy to provide feedback if it
comes with no requirement to pay.

~~~
FHMS
Totally agree! People's willingness to tell you about their thoughts is the
N.1 way to get a call started.

Now imagine that group of students opened the conversation with: "I saw you
raise your hand in C101 this morning, and thought your question was very
interesting. What made you think of that?"

------
mhoad
I do a lot of this stuff professionally so I was interested to take a look at
an "outsiders" approach to this. Honestly, you've done an incredibly good job
on this. Great suggestions!

~~~
karlhughes
Thanks so much! To be fair, while my primary job has been as software
developer for the past several years, I've worked in startups small enough to
know what the marketing team was doing. You pick up a lot of general business
knowledge working for a small company.

------
OjelaFunderbunk
This is a great start! I noticed that 90% deals with MARCOM strategy with a
bit of SWOT thrown-in too.

As someone who is responsible for bringing products to market on a daily
basis, there is a considerable amount of strat being omitted which will better
prepare you.

Pricing. Determine where you want to position your product in the market.
Identify the competitors that compete on price vs the one's that compete on
quality. Determine where you want to position your products and which
competitors to go after. This should help you determine which customers you
want to market towards as well. It also helps you determine the effort you can
apply to each channel. [Spend more time on the difficult customer to obtain].
Michael Jordan didn't become Michael Jordan by practicing his dunk. He
purposely worked on the weakest part of his game to make him the greatest.

~~~
bhnmmhmd
Great ideas! I was wondering, what book/tutorial/website would you suggest to
someone interested in digital marketing?

~~~
j_s
They might not be back. Here are some options that have made a splash here on
HN over the years:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14041248](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14041248)

Justin Jackson as mentioned there is about to release an update to his
"Marketing for Developers", so he's pitching a 24hr "deal" (meaning make sure
the bundle is worth $100 to you; I don't necessarily recommend it) right now:
[https://justinjackson.withcoach.com/marketing-for-
developers...](https://justinjackson.withcoach.com/marketing-for-
developers/buy?coupon=PREORDER)

You can see the stuff he gives away for free on YouTube here:
[https://www.youtube.com/justinjackson](https://www.youtube.com/justinjackson)

~~~
bhnmmhmd
Thanks! I'll definitely check them out.

------
albertgoeswoof
There are so many things to do here- on top of actually building the side
project itself. It's probably worth reading and understanding the benefits of
each activity and then prioritising the ones that work for your business.

Just be careful not to deprioritize items because they're outside your comfort
zone.

------
tonyedgecombe
Don't forget to create the product as well.

~~~
sterex
It would seem odd if the marketing checklist had "Create product", wouldn't
it? :)

------
cstpdk
Great list! Might there be a market / an interest in a dashboard + chatbot for
taking care of these things? Keeping track of milestones, doing the trivial
signups an presenting how the different initiatives are performing and can be
tuned?

~~~
alvis
I, as a very organised perfectionist, am so keen to have one. However, having
said that, while it would be a great tool, I'm just not quite sure how many
are willing to pay for it.

In my opinion, a tool providing insights (e.g. basic data science) besides
tracking can provide at least a better value than a pure tracking tool.
(Disclaimer: I'm working on one myself :])

Interesting enough, there's a similar checklist/dashboard idea for funding
round in the UK ([https://seedlegals.com](https://seedlegals.com)), handling
all the legal hiccups in a much cleaner and organised way. But their market is
quite different and there's much higher incentive for customers to pay for it.

------
vram22
I like the way you have gone about this - very systematic and seems somewhat
comprehensive (though of course more points may be added over time). Thanks
for making it.

~~~
karlhughes
Thanks! I hope that along with help from others we'll make it very
comprehensive over time.

------
nathan_f77
This is really, really helpful. I will try to do all of these things for the
project I'm currently working on. But man, cold calling 20 people is going to
be so much harder than actually building the thing.

~~~
karlhughes
I don't think you _have_ to do every item on the list for every project;
that's where you sort of need to know yourself and your audience.

That said, direct contact with your customers/users is extremely helpful. It
might not have to be cold calls if you happen to have a good network already.
I've never been good at cold outreach either, but I have no problem talking to
people I know might be interested.

------
Roedou
Great resource. The one name in there I didn't recognize was '7search'; I
clicked through, but it seems to have shut down within the last week, so you
can probably remove that.

~~~
karlhughes
Good to know, thanks!

------
j_s
Do you have time to explain your choices and/or process as you used a static
website generator + theme for this project's web site when it appears to be
optimized for blogging?

Right now I'm looking at Hugo + Kube but there are so many not-normal things
to use (Hugo + Github Pages all in source control but publishing different
branches / folders, Kube using not-normal-Hugo stuff since it's got non-blog
stuff, etc.) Is there a one-stop zero-to-hero guide anywhere for this kind of
thing?

~~~
karlhughes
Good question. I used GitHub pages and Jekyll for the site because it's
something I've used before so I knew it would be easy to set up.

Initially this project is just a checklist and some supporting pages, but as I
learn more, make updates, and use the checklist for my own side projects I'd
like to write blog posts there as well. Having a blog in the same domain as
your main project is also good for SEO from what I hear.

I don't have a good tutorial handy for the setup, but maybe that's something I
could write about? It probably took two hours to customize the theme and get
the landing page up, so pretty quick, but there were a couple gotchas the
first time through.

~~~
j_s
Sharing the gotchas would help me a lot!

------
deerpig
This is brilliant, but it's in markdown. I've converted it to emacs orgmode so
I can use org checklists and integrate into my todo list.

[https://github.com/deerpig/side-project-
marketing/blob/maste...](https://github.com/deerpig/side-project-
marketing/blob/master/marketing-checklist.org)

~~~
karlhughes
Awesome! I've been considering adding alternative formats. Is there any way we
can automate the conversion?

~~~
pcdavid
Pandoc ([https://pandoc.org/](https://pandoc.org/)) can do it: pandoc -f
markdown -t org -o marketing-checklist.org marketing-checklist.md

~~~
deerpig
Actually, that's what I used, but in this case the conversion didn't work very
well. I had to do a lot of editing to get it formated so checklsts worked and
get all of the links converted. Org is a bit more finicky than markdown...

I wish the pandoc conversion worked better because it would be nice not to
have to update changes by hand.

It's all little things like making sure that there is only one space in every
"\- [ ]" between the dash and open bracket.

The original placed the entire document under a level 2 header, so I placed
all top headings under their own level one header. I also changed the bottom
level of headings into boldface link items so that org could see all of the
checklist items. If you open both versions side by side you'll see how I did
it.

Again, thank you for the list, it really is fantastic. I'm considering
creating a different version for NGOs and Non-Profits here in Cambodia.
Marketing is a large part of what NGOs do to raise funds and there is a lot of
overlap between commerical websites and non-profits. But there are a lot of
resourses available for non-profits which could be added as well.

------
pgeorgep
Wow, love it! Has anyone put this on PH yet?

Another one to add would be a LinkedIn bot for auto profile viewing. It's a
pretty efficient way for people to see you viewed their profile, they view
yours back, and check out your site/project.

------
davkap92
Nice idea thanks! One suggestion maybe add some sort of priority marking/ time
spent for each one, as I would say some are definitely higher priority than
others

~~~
karlhughes
The way I do it is by having a planning time for the project before I start
working on the checklist. During the planning time I'll remove or prioritize
things that I think will be most impactful based on the customers.

------
vitomd
Very well done. I really like checklists, I use them as my todo list, project
organizer and general stuff. So I created Sorter to help me: is a webapp to
organize ideas, tasks and information using bullet points and hashtags. It´s
open source if you want to check
[https://github.com/vitogit/sorter](https://github.com/vitogit/sorter)

------
orblivion
People hitting F5 on HN/Show/New is a great place to find people interested in
promoting their side projects. Well played :-) (and thanks)

~~~
karlhughes
Haha, know your audience is the first rule of marketing right?

Seriously though, it's open source and free, so while I know I'm tooting my
own horn I hope it helps people anyway.

------
huhtenberg
> _Free Promotional Channels / Write and distribute a Press Release._

For smaller projects this does not work at all. All it does is it attracts
spam from various Indian "wire services" and that's it.

> _Paid Promotional Channels / StumbleUpon_

Only if you want to see how a 100% bounce rate with sub-second page stays
looks like. Absolutely useless otherwise, although it is very attractively
priced.

~~~
Doctor_Fegg
As a news-stand magazine editor I used to love getting properly targeted press
releases for relevant products from small organisations. "Properly targeted"
is the key: if you write one release and send the same thing to a thousand
publications, of course it won't work.

~~~
huhtenberg
In this case how would a press release be different from a targeted pitch
email? Or would you skip the latter because it wasn't in a PR format?

------
icecoldrocks
Here's a shared workflowy of the checklist for anyone who wants to use it:
[https://workflowy.com/s/FSjJ.Z6V7qfO5CD](https://workflowy.com/s/FSjJ.Z6V7qfO5CD)

~~~
VladimirGolovin
Thanks, I added it to my Workflowy account. By the way, is it added as a copy?
I.e. if you change it in your account, will my copy also update or will it
stay fixed?

~~~
icecoldrocks
Don't know, sorry - duplicate it to be safe :)

------
ktian00
Very comprehensive in detailing practical options for each step. Thank you!

------
archon810
You should probably describe what Triberr is next to its mention, because
their site is absolutely useless (at least on mobile).

------
patrickbolle
Thank you!! Launched a few weeks ago but still very useful.

------
pryelluw
I did not see under which license you released the downloadable content. Mind
sharing it here?

If you havent licensed it, one from creative commons might fit.

~~~
karlhughes
It's in the Github repo, but MIT license.

I'll put a link to that in the site when I get a chance.

~~~
pryelluw
Thank you :)

------
placebo
That's neat, thanks.

~~~
karlhughes
You're very welcome.

------
mezod
very timely

------
AntonyBrown
Wow ! I appreciate these marketing ideas! I've just discovered a great
marketing tool - [https://voiptimecloud.com/online-contact-management-
software...](https://voiptimecloud.com/online-contact-management-software/) .
maybe someone will find it useful too!

~~~
j_s
I can't tell if yours is a spam account or not...

I understand I'm swinging through late but do you have time to expand on any
affiliation you have with the company, but more helpfully share any details on
why this particular $21/month tool helps you better than say, Skype?

~~~
AntonyBrown
Yeap, be sure to contact me by Skype - tanshark87

------
rustoo
An online marketing veteran here! This list is really good. I can actually
help people here execute these to-dos for their side projects.

