
Ask HN: As a dev, how have you built up your online marketing skills? - dhruvkar
Generating traffic, funneling traffic, converting traffic.<p>How have you gotten better at this? What do you recommend other developers do to successfully grow their projects?
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busymichael
I launched a web app in 2017 as a solo entrepreneur. I have been focusing the
last 6 months on marketing. Here are a few things I did to get started:

1\. Commit to spending at least 50% of your time on marketing. For every hour
of coding, do an hour of marketing.

2\. I used the book Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer
Growth to build a marketing plan.

3\. The first exercise of the book was to focus on the outcome you want (for
example, I want 1000 paid subscribers by end of 2018) and then figure out how
big of a funnel you need to build. That helps you be realistic about what
types of marketing to do.

4\. I took a Udemy class on digital marketing -- It was about 20 hours of
material that was on sale for $12. I found about 1/3 of it useful.

5\. I am focused on marketing ideas that are repeatable and scalable. I do a
lot of work up front to setup a marketing idea, but then I can keep it going
with minimal new work. For example, to do blogger outreach, I first built and
tested a drip campaign in Mailchimp. Then I harvested the first 50 blogger
emails myself and determined my campaign would work. After that, I outsourced
the blogger email collection. Now, the free lancer collects the contact info
and loads it into my drip campaign.

~~~
dhruvkar
This is a helpful list, thanks.

I've read traction as well, and am currently using the Bullseye Framework [0]
with some success.

At the end of it, it still feels a lot like " _throw stuff against the wall
and see what sticks_ ".

Personally, I don't have a lot of clarity around how to repeatable test and
measure.

0: [https://medium.com/@yegg/the-bullseye-framework-for-
getting-...](https://medium.com/@yegg/the-bullseye-framework-for-getting-
traction-ef49d05bfd7e)

------
fenier
Learn Analytics. Take the free courses and earn Google Analytics Individual
Qualification. Instrument your site and learn how your funnel behaves, how
different programs you have in place contribute and so on.

You must know your existing numbers before you can improve them.

Next, look into things which drive traffic (AdWords, Paid Search) or can
recapture traffic (Remarketing). You should also consider a Tag Manager, such
as Google Tag Manager, or Tealium.

If your traffic is high enough, you could learn how to run valid AB tests, but
if your just starting out, chances are you do not have enough traffic to do
this effectively.

In addition to the above, learn the vocab. Analytics, especially in a
marketing context, can be very dense, and you'll need to understand the terms
to get the most from other more marketing focused resources (books / forums,
etc).

~~~
dhruvkar
All useful, thanks. Two questions:

1\. What does tag manager do that simple analytics can't?

2\. What is the lowest traffic amount needed to effectively A/B test?

~~~
fenier
A Tag Manager allows you to add easily add and remove things like Remarketing
Tags, AdWords tags, etc - without you needing to manually alter every page of
your site all the time. This allows you to easily integrate with 3rd party
services without constant code changes.

Generally, you need something on the order of 1,000+ conversions in the test
period to have enough traffic to generate a statistically significant result.
There are a lot of articles about AB Testing and you should read up on it
before deciding it's for you. In addition to the traffic, you need to be able
to define a non-biased test, and be able to analyze it effectively.

------
codegladiator
Find a partner who is good at this.

Marketing/selling is not a learn-by-night thing. You need to be invested
completely in it to get results.

~~~
muzani
I personally think it can be learned overnight. And a "non tech" marketer who
understands the product does far better than an experienced marketer who
doesn't know anything about it.

However, it is a full time job to improve in.

It's like code - many people can make a MVP, but trying to scale it needs
dedication, and the great ones can do 10x the mediocre ones.

------
muzani
I'd just recommend hiring someone for this, whether you pay them in cash or
equity. The same logic that to hiring testers.

Marketing is very time intensive work. Your time is probably better spent
improving features. You should be understanding marketing principles, but the
grunt work should be done by someone else.

Marketers are, in general, cheaper than programmers. That doesn't mean they
are worth less, just that the supply is higher and less training is needed.

Even if it's more expensive, programming is also very mentally consuming work.
You don't want to be spending 4 hours programming and 4 hours marketing. It's
better to spend 8 hours on one or the other.

However, don't get freelancers unless you plan on engaging them long term.
Like UX designers, a good marketer needs to understand the product and user
inside and out.

~~~
dhruvkar
Good advice. Where have you found good marketers that you can engage on a long
term?

A few marketing companies I've talked to are either (1) we'll write a blog
post for you every month for $100 or (2) pay us $60K a year and we'll take
care of everything.

Neither of those sounds appealing. Working one-on-one with a competent
marketer, however, sounds doable.

~~~
muzani
Ideally a cofounder. It's usually a win-win deal, pay them a little now but a
lot when you have money later. And unlike tech, marketers usually immediately
bring in income. If they believe in the product (as a marketer should), it
would be a great deal for them.

If the product is mature and generating income, you might be able to work out
something like a 5% deal or less, with minimal payment.

But if you don't know anyone, I'd still take all the blog posters I could
find. We used that as our main marketing medium because of cost effectiveness
and it worked out really well for us. You might end up partnering with a
blogger too, like I did.

------
hluska
I still consider myself more of a developer than a marketer, though I've had a
ton of success at marketing. To up my skills, I did a few things:

1.) I went back to University in my late twenties and completed a degree in
marketing. I was already good at building shit and long stints in sales had
shown me that if a qualified person came to me, I could convert them into a
paying customer. Alas, I sucked at generating leads, so I went back to school,
hoping that I'd learn.

In retrospect, the business degree was mostly useless, but I picked up some
good lessons. The best lesson was about measuring and reporting success. The
second best lesson was that the world's most respected marketers often release
dud campaigns (to start with), measure everything, and correct their course.

As part of my business degree, I took electives in social and cognitive
psychology and research methods/stats.

The business degree had some unintended benefits too. For one, on average I
did between 10-15 presentations a semester. Over the course of the degree, I
went from hating giving presentations to absolutely loving it. Also, oddly, I
wrote way more useful code over the course of finishing my business degree
than I did in a computer science program. And, I founded a company right out
of my program, mostly because of encouragement, advice and (crucially)
introductions from professors and especially mature students in my program.

2.) I internalized a lesson from University and made a habit of releasing dud
campaigns, measuring them and learning how to correct my course. This is still
my secret weapon and I'm successful at it because it uses many of the same
skills I use writing code.

It's odd to me that so many people treat marketing more like a liberal
art/creative process when it deserves to be treated more like a scientific
process.

If you start with a hypothesis "ie - people with purple hair will like my
product most", run experiments to validate/invalidate that hypothesis and
meticulously record the results, you will learn some very interesting things
about your product and customers. You'll also likely learn that your product
needs a bunch of help to appeal to enough people to make a living. And, you'll
often learn that your initial hypotheses about who your customers will be are
often wrong. So, fuck it, release duds, measure everything and go from there.

Feel free to email me if you'd like some examples of this. I know some people
think it's a little weird to treat marketing like this, but it not only made
it fun, it helped me learn and develop myself into a good marketer.

------
tmaly
In terms of learning, there is a great podcast I can recommend called
"Everyone Hates Marketers"

The host has some really fantastic guests and advice.

~~~
dhruvkar
thanks, definitely will check this out. heard the name, but never listened.

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ajeet_dhaliwal
It’s something I struggle with because the advice and reading I do doesn’t
seem to quite match up to reality. Also for a while I focused on outbound
sales which has been comprehensively disastrous. Marketing to develop inbound
is generally a lot better for online/Saas in my experience, focusing on
getting adwords and content has helped a lot personally.

------
indescions_2018
Find your niche. Preferably one in a rapid growth area.

Cryptocurrencies are a great example of this. If you visit sites such as
ethereum.org. You will see they share a certain design aesthetic.

If you can provide a unique service. Private blockchain development and
hosting, for example. You immediately have an "in" with which to begin the
conversation.

Good luck!

~~~
dhruvkar
Getting into a rapid growth area definitely gets you a leg up.

I'm in such area (ketogenic diet). However, that's not a magic bullet.

There's competition still for eyeballs. How to get some of those eyeballs on
your product consistently is the question.

~~~
muzani
Oh lol I started a keto diet startup. It's quite self advertising but it's a
niche. We had lots of actual professional marketers and couldn't squeeze
anything more than organic marketing for it.

~~~
dhruvkar
> couldn't squeeze anything more than organic marketing for it

Were you not able to get an ROI on paid ads?

~~~
muzani
Didn't fit our business model for a number of reasons - market was not urban,
huge e-commerce competitors drove prices up too much, profit margin was paper
thin, made worse after some new taxes and weakening currency. FB also doesn't
target ethnicity, whereas our core product was recipes targeted towards a
cultural group.

It was a good thing in the end though. We met someone who was spending huge
money on marketing the same things as us, but were paying really high costs
and had to really increase the prices to compensate. They acquired us, partly
because of our really low, organic marketing costs.

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cm2012
/r/marketing is a fairly decent resource, this topic comes up often there.

