
Dear Clueless About Marketing Programmer: Yes it’s hard, but not impossible. - iamchrisle
http://www.chrisle.me/2013/11/dear-clueless-about-marketing-programmer-yes-its-hard-but-not-impossible/
======
ebbv
As a developer who is heavily involved in our marketing department; I really
don't think it's hard at all.

Marketing is about a few things:

\- Who is your customer?

\- Why should they buy your product?

\- Find them and tell them.

The problem with marketing is it can get really expensive really fast and if
you're limited in capital then that becomes a problem.

But it couldn't be simpler. There's no complicated problems to solve like with
programming. It's a single task; find your target audience and tell them about
what you have to offer.

If you don't have convincing reasons why people should buy your product, then
that's a product problem, not a marketing one.

Also, marketers DO have a tools. If you think they don't that's probably one
reason why marketing is so hard for you. All of your advertising should be
using tracking which lets you see conversion rates, average income per click,
income per view, etc. and help you make future advertising decisions.

EDIT:

I should clarify that I think Marketing can be/should be a full time job and
if you can afford it, it's good to have a person (or team) dedicated to it.
But I don't think it requires the same kind of problem solving that
programming does.

~~~
austinhutch
> If you don't have convincing reasons why people should buy your product,
> then that's a product problem, not a marketing one.

"Marketing" is an ambiguous term in comparison to "programming". I believe
finding product-market fit is a marketing problem.

------
lukethomas
As someone who does marketing and writes code, I've seen that programmers
_think_ there's secrets to marketing that they don't know (hence the
programmer who says he "is clueless about marketing")

The reality is that a marketer who seems to have everything together is
putting on a great show. Marketing broken down into its simplest form is just
running tests, measuring them, and finding out what works and what doesn't.

Each business is different, and marketers deal with irrational humans instead
of computers. If you're a marketer and think you know everything, it's a bad
combination.

------
collyw
Marketing is harder than programming?

To a programmer yes.

If programmers and marketers were to swap jobs, my guess is that programers
would get closer to achieving the marketers job than the other way around.

~~~
roymurdock
It's hard to compare which is more difficult.

Marketing is more of a soft skill - it takes relatively more creativity and a
better understanding of human nature than programming languages. This isn't to
say programming isn't a creative pursuit; it's just creativity bounded by
logical constraints imposed by whatever language you're working in.

Programming is more of a hard skill - it takes years of studying and
practicing the different languages and mastering the logical thought processes
that make things tick.

So difficulty depends on what your natural talents are. If you're an
intelligent, logical individual you might find coding easier. If you're an
intelligent, creative individual you might find marketing easier.

I think the prevalence of UX/UI design has evolved from a need to have both
spheres in order to build the best projects possible. It combines the human
aspects of customer experience with the mechanical aspects of making shit
work. Apple got it right and look where they are now.

~~~
melindajb
This: it all depends on who YOU are. I've met many a coder who cannot even
conceive of how to promote the product, but will rip out an idea provided by
someone else that we think is impossible; in a couple of hours in the middle
of the night; with a twist that makes it insanely great. They marvel at the
idea; the rest of us marvel at their technical skill. No one is "better" or
"more intelligent." We're all just part of the team, each bringing our gifts
to bear.

------
iamben
+100 karma points for contacting the author of the original post and helping
him out - and then writing this. We need plenty more people like you around
here :-)

~~~
iamchrisle
thanks.

------
nawitus
>In some ways marketing is harder than programming. Writing a program, you can
see your errors and find the root problem with stack traces.

That doesn't make programming easier, because expections are way higher for
programming. Code correctness is orders of magnitudes higher than "marketing
correctness". Marketing models are extremely fuzzy when compared to the
average software.

In other words, if someone did invent a "stack trace for marketing", then the
expected level of correctness for marketing would increase by a huge amount.

------
zzzaim
As another developer preparing to "launch" a product, this is rather
encouraging.

Would be nice if you could share what suggestions you gave Basil regarding his
site (with his permission). Might be enlightening to many, even if it's only
relevant to his product.

~~~
iamchrisle
I'll let him blog in detail about it but one suggestion I made was that a
single page website could be harder to get visibility on just simply in terms
of Google search. At least in terms of the people he believe to be his direct
competition.

If he's looking to attract specific types of developers he should consider
create pages targeted to those developers. So those pages would get indexed
for the specific developers who are searching for a jira/github/fogbugz
tracking app.

------
danmaz74
As one more hacker who works in marketing, my suggestion is to start as soon
as possible to spend some time building relationships with the influencers
you'll want to talk about your launch and then your new releases etc.

Unless you're funded by some well-connected VC, you're going to need those
relationships.

------
austenallred
The most difficult part of being a marketer is finding out what _actually_
works. There is all sorts of advice out there from people that give you tips
and recommendations, and 99% of them have no idea what they're talking about.
In that way it can be a lot like programming; you can either pay some kid
$10/hour to slog it out and figure it out as he goes, or you can pay a premium
for someone who can say, "oh yeah you do this and this and this," and he's
done.

It's a lot easier to pretend to be a marketer than it is to pretend to be a
programmer, because you can sell something that doesn't work all day and
people will still unknowingly buy it. Some people, I fear, discount what great
marketers can do because they never actually learn the difference.

One of the reasons marketing and finding a good marketer is hard, is because
you don't know why (or if) it's not working. Imagine if every time you coded
something up you never actually got to run a program and see what the results
were. Marketing can feel the same way; you build something, and it is probably
failing somewhere, but until you finally put it together right you don't
really know where. Are you advertising or marketing in the wrong places? Does
your landing page suck? Maybe your product actually sucks and no one cares?
You just have to test and test and test to try to create some semblance of
data.

Then when you do actually do it people say, "Oh, that's it? That wasn't hard."
Like when a great designer creates a very simple logo that communicates the
essence of the brand in a beautiful way, and someone says, "Well that only
took you five minutes." It's not about the five minutes it took me to create
that; it's about the years of work I put in to learn _how_ to create that. It
takes a hell of a lot of work to get to simple.

I had some serious cognitive dissonance when I started giving out some of my
hacks in "The hacker's guide to user acquisition" (first chapter -
[http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-the-
first-1...](http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-the-
first-1000-users-twitter/)), the only reason I'm spilling some of my hard-
earned secrets is because I see too many good products die because whoever
built it never got it out to the right people.

I'm not sure how programmers can differentiate between a marketer that knows
what they're talking about and one that doesn't; that's as difficult as a
marketer discerning who is a gifted programmer and who isn't.

So, knowing what actually works is hard. Is marketing harder than programming?
Not for me, it took me a week to figure out how to get my first rails server
live and on Github. But just like any other field, there is a long, long
learning curve if you're going to do it well.

~~~
grinnick
Dude. When's the next chapter coming? I've been waiting for like a month now!?
:-)

~~~
austenallred
It's about halfway done; should be out by this weekend _crosses fingers_. It's
about getting press, and man there's going to be some cool stuff in it.

------
Goopplesoft
I made a ask HN similar to this yesterday:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6692952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6692952)

It really is difficult especially because everyone wants to found their idea,
so its especially hard to find a good marketer to pair with you if youre a
good programmer. Otherwise no matter how good you are at it to some extent
your using your time inefficiently since a marketer will be better. For the
relationship to be truly successful you have to both be driven and care about
the product and in most cases that wont happen unless the idea is joint.

