
Side Project Marketing Checklist - Zweihander
https://www.sideprojectchecklist.com/marketing-checklist/
======
gallerdude
I'm always unsure about marketing. I do think that the balance between the
thing you're creating, and the marketing of it is a clean 50/50 split.
Creating something great is extremely important, but telling people about it
is equally so. One of biggest lies is "if you build it, they will come." You
actually have to grab them by the necks, and show them what you've built.

I think the second biggest lie is the opposite of the first one - that people
don't care. My side projects are in game dev, and sometimes it feels like
people are actively trying to ignore your stuff. The truth is, there's so many
amazing, next-level games out there that being _just_ great, isn't enough. I
used to price my games at $1, because I was desperate to be heard. But the
fact is, this isn't the real cost for most people. For most people, the real
cost is oppurtunity cost. Yeah, I could play your game, but I'd rather spend
my time playing the game that's 10x better.

~~~
koonsolo
Maybe not 100% related to original story, but have you seen the article of
Ryan Clark about marketing your indie game? It's by far the best one I came
across with the best info as far as I know.

[http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RyanClark/20150917/253842/Wha...](http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/RyanClark/20150917/253842/What_Makes_an_Indie_Hit_How_to_Choose_the_Right_Design.php)

------
Fiahil
That list explain perfectly why I don't want to work on "marketing stuff"
anymore. So much opportunity to waste time and money on trivial things.

A blog ? A "sneeze page" ? What's the point if you don't have anything
interesting to write ?

A/B testing landing page and newsletter ? Is that difficult to get honest
feedback from people who care ?

~~~
pyronite
> A/B testing landing page and newsletter ? Is that difficult to get honest
> feedback from people who care ?

Individual feedback doesn't replace large-scale A/B testing. If you're getting
feedback from people who care (possibly implying they know you personally),
it's also possible that they could deliver biased or unrepresentative
feedback.

~~~
Dunedan
For large scale A/B testing you need a certain amount of visitors first to get
the necessary statistical significance, otherwise its feedback is
unrepresentative as well. A lot of side projects probably don't have enough
visitors for that.

~~~
closed
I disagree, if a person has to make a decision under uncertainty, and a priori
favors neither group A or B, then they might as well use any visitor
information available to them to guide their choice.

They just shouldn't be too confident they've made the correct choice.

~~~
encoderer
You are just using noise then. It's not a matter of opinion, it's statistics.

~~~
closed
If you are waiting for N observations, so that a NHST will have some level of
power, and you assume each observations is drawn from the same distribution
(as your test likely does), then you do not see each observation as noise.

You will just be acting under reduced certainty, but if you have to act, any
information is better than no information.

(I'd be very interested to hear your statistical explanation).

~~~
encoderer
The trouble is disproving the null hypothesis. In your test, if one variant
beats another, you take that as a weak signal that one may be better than the
other. The data doesn't support this. Without applying a standard to your
p-value, you cannot disprove the null hypothesis: that your variant is likely
no better or worse.

I'm not a statistician, but I've run a lot of b-tests.

~~~
Silhouette
You're ignoring closed's point that "a priori favors neither group A or B".

If you are starting from a neutral position, considering two possible
alternatives with neither presumed to be more favourable than the other, then
any statistical test based on using one outcome as null and the other as
alternative hypothesis is fundamentally inappropriate. Any such test
inherently favours one outcome over the other, rather than starting from a
neutral position.

As closed is trying to explain, if you really do start from neutral then even
a tiny number of data points is still better than no data at all. You
shouldn't have too much confidence in whether you're really making the right
decision, but if you have to make a decision, you are still more likely to
make the right one if you go with what the data tells you, even if it's only
telling you by a very small margin.

~~~
encoderer
Ok so walk me through this in practice..

The way I see it, you need to prove that A is better than B by a sufficient
margin to be distinguishable from pure noise.

So, imagine you put up a landing page with 2 variants. Each one gets 500
visitors. You have a conversion on one, but not the other. It's your
suggestion here that there is some significance to that single conversion?

I think the problem is, you have no idea if that user would've converted had
she landed on the opposite variant. That is, you can't disprove the idea that
your test makes no impact at all.

~~~
Silhouette
You're still thinking in terms of one version being the default and the other
an alternative that must be positively proven to be better. If you are in a
situation where you have cases A and B and no particular reason to believe _a
priori_ that either is more likely to be better than the other, that's a
fundamentally different situation.

And in that situation, yes, if you run both versions with randomised visitors
and you observe a small but non-zero sample where one converted and the other
did not, that _is_ evidence that one version may be better than the other.
It's not particularly _strong_ evidence, but it is a non-zero amount of
evidence in one direction over the other, and that's better than the nothing
at all that you had to separate the cases to start with.

Therefore, if you must make a choice about whether to adopt one version or the
other at that stage, then in the absence of any better evidence, it is more
likely that the version that has converted performs better than the version
that has not and logically you should adopt the one that converted.

Of course in reality you would probably prefer to collect stronger evidence
before making a decision if that is possible. But if it's not then, as closed
wrote before, any information is better than no information at all.

~~~
encoderer
Have you ever watched a test against a lot of traffic? In variants with 50k
test, 50k control each day you can see _wild_ swings from one day to the next,
until you reach statistical significance.

I think you and the other guy want that single conversion to be evidence, but
in reality, it's statistical noise.

A coin flip assigned that user to that variant. If they were going to convert
anyway, you will be deriving meaning from pure coin flip chance, and you have
no way of knowing with a single conversion whether this is true.

Again, it's not about going in with an assumption of which is better, it's
about realizing that in split testing the biggest challenge is disproving the
null hypothesis.

~~~
Silhouette
_I think you and the other guy want that single conversion to be evidence, but
in reality, it 's statistical noise._

It _is_ evidence, just like any other properly collected data point. It's just
very weak evidence, is what we're saying.

Of course in real world situations there may be a lot of variance and the
correct answer may well turn out to be the other one. But in the absence of
additional information, that is true for literally any number of samples that
is less than whatever proportion of the population would give you absolute
proof that your chosen answer is correct. If you have 50%-1 samples and every
single one went with option A, you're still wrong if the other 50%+1 would
have gone for option B.

What you're calling "noise" is an ill-defined concept. Qualitatively there is
no difference for a result in a two-way test between a single sample and
50%-1. You still don't know for sure which answer is the right one. However,
you're going to be much more _confident_ about having the right answer in the
latter case, which is what I think closed was trying to explain to you.

 _Again, it 's not about going in with an assumption of which is better, it's
about realizing that in split testing the biggest challenge is disproving the
null hypothesis._

But if you're running a test with null and alternative hypotheses, you _are_
going in with an _a priori_ preference for one outcome over the other. You are
literally saying that if the result is close enough, you will prefer not to
reject the null hypothesis, and therefore whichever variation you have
arbitrarily chosen to be your null hypothesis will be the answer.

That is self-evidently not a neutral assessment of option A vs. option B, and
therefore there will be some cases where your test is more likely than not to
make the wrong decision. In short, you are using an inappropriate test for the
situation that closed was describing.

~~~
encoderer
Alright, last comment from my side, just to clarify:

>> You are literally saying that if the result is close enough, you will
prefer not to reject the null hypothesis, and therefore whichever variation
you have arbitrarily chosen to be your null hypothesis will be the answer.

This is a misunderstanding. The null hypothesis is that your two variants have
no statistical impact on conversion and any edge you see is just random. That
is the hurdle you have to overcome to gain any useful direction from B
testing.

GL!

~~~
Silhouette
Fair enough, my phrasing before was a little casual, but the underlying point
is sound. A hypothesis test might tell you that there is no significant impact
on conversion at your chosen level. However, you still have to make a choice
between option A and option B. If you have no _a priori_ reason to favour one
as the default and no additional data to consider -- which, again, is a
crucial detail in the situation closed was talking about -- you should
logically still choose whichever option that was most successful during your
experiment. This is simply because if your conclusion was correct and there is
no impact on conversion then which you pick doesn't matter, but if your result
was a false negative then it is more likely that the more successful option
during the experiment is the better choice. Given that you're going to pick
that one anyway, your hypothesis test hasn't actually provided any useful
information to help inform your decision in this scenario.

In any case, we seem to be talking at cross-purposes here, so perhaps we'll
have to agree to disagree on this one.

------
jgmmo
I dislike this list. It's too much, and does not discern between
effectiveness. It's like they are equally weighted tasks. This is absolutely
not the case.

Half of this is common sense, 'make an about page, make a contact page', that
is basic...

Then there's a ton of stuff here that is hypothetically cool to do but
practically speaking will not be productive.

As a marketer I can tell you that there is some pareto optimization that can
be done here. It's likely, I think, if you did this whole checklist that you'd
find 20% of your efforts ended up bringing in 80% of your conversions. The
trick is finding what that chunk of extremely lucrative marketing activities
are for your product/industry.

~~~
karlhughes
It is intentionally too much. My goal with the list was to make something
exhaustive. The hard part - the reason companies have whole marketing
departments - is to prioritize and execute on it.

There's definitely some common sense stuff here, but for devs who are
marketing their first side project, it might be helpful to have more rather
than less.

Finally, I welcome PR's on the project! It's open source and I'm looking for
collaborators to help improve it. I'm a dev, not a marketer, so I'd love an
industry pro to improve it.

~~~
gsylvie
It's a great list. And I love the little inspirational quotes above each
section. I think the "common sense" items should stay, since what is common
sense to one is not always common sense to another.

But akin to what others have said, it's not a checklist! I think I'd need 2
additional full-time staff on my side project working on nothing but this to
implement it.

To make it more specific to side projects I think it could use a preliminary
strategizing paragraph. E.g., if you only have 2 hours / week to devote to
marketing, here's how to use this list...

------
alfonsodev
AARRR[1] is a good framework for your side project too, it makes you start
thinking in the basic questions you should know how to answer.

The tools and implementation choices are less important IMO, for some things
you could event start with a google drive doc if that makes you move forward
faster.

[edit] Here a playlist from Google on how to implement AARRR in Firebase[2]

[1] [https://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-
pi...](https://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-
version)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl-K7zZEsYLnslvfInomP...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl-K7zZEsYLnslvfInomPdIR17eV4BsUm)

------
dsr_
Missed a big step at the end of customer research:

* Use the results of your research to make sure you are building something that customers will actually want/need enough to pay for.

------
wiradikusuma
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942902](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942902)

~~~
federicoponzi
"6 days ago"... I'm not sure about HN rules, but isn't this submission
considered a repost?

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Reposts aren't considered bad automatically; sometimes a story didn't get the
traction it deserves, wrong time of day or competing stories crowd it out.

~~~
notatoad
okay, but in this case the original got ~600 points, which surely counts as
"the traction it deserves"

------
muzani
It starts off nice, but past the blog part, it seems to just be mixing some
low quality things with the high quality stuff.

Something like "Attend meetups or conferences for your target market" can be
extremely dangerous because this is a great way to spend a lot of time
accomplishing nothing just to tick something off the list. Whereas something
like "cold calling 20 customers" is so important it should be in bold.

I would recommend this to be a list of marketing ideas depending on your
phase, rather than an actual checklist of things to do.

~~~
camillomiller
it depends from the market. Cold calling can be effective in the us but should
be done with a lot of attention in Germany for example, or Europe in general.
Here we are all much more skeptical towards companies or individuals that call
you to offer something. Most of the time, even if the call is perfectly
crafted and polite you would be perceived as an obnoxious spammer. Didn't want
to diminish your comment, because I agree completely, but I think it's
important to point that out for readers who might not operate in the States

~~~
secfirstmd
Agree, its not common in UK/Ireland so if someone does it, I reckon 90% of
people just polietly try to hangup quickly

~~~
GordonS
And the remaining 10% will give a tirade of verbal abuse before hanging up -
cold calling in the UK is _not_ welcome.

~~~
user5994461
cold calling is not welcome anywhere.

------
spapas82
Hello this list is too comprehensive and exhausting. Could somebody filter or
sort this list by importance of each task? Ie you must absolutely do these
tasks but if you skip these other tasks no big deal.

~~~
jermaustin1
The problem with filtering the list to only what is most important or
necessary is impossible, but none of them are required.

I have launched hundreds of products for myself and clients, and followed a
formula for each one, and I believe it had about as good a chance of a
successful launch as having a monkey throw darts at a wall. You always end up
analyzing what you did when your launch succeeded, and your resulting formula
is just the Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy with checkboxes.

The only real thing that truly helps a launch is having an audience already.
It might not make the product succeed, but it will at least aid in getting the
initial signups and feedback.

I have also launched "free" products to no audience of my own, and instead
found them in forums. After posting about the product, people typically would
sign up in droves. And once I had a critical mass of sign ups, I then had an
audience to market to. That would then lead me to selling a bigger version
that we were giving away for free [1]. I call this piggybacking.

There are a lot of "hacks" you can do to help your launch along, but I don't
believe any of them are better than having a baked in audience already [2].

1: [http://jeremyaboyd.com/my-first-product-
launches/](http://jeremyaboyd.com/my-first-product-launches/)

2: [http://jeremyaboyd.com/tricks-to-monetize-your-side-
projects...](http://jeremyaboyd.com/tricks-to-monetize-your-side-projects/)

~~~
jamiek88
I suspect you are right, there is a large component of luck, timing, and built
in audience.

A lot of these types of tips are almost cargo cult type checklists.

OP is thorough though and fairly comprehensive - it is interesting to read
your thoughts on this too as someone who has used these techniques.

~~~
jermaustin1
I agree, it is a very thorough.

But as I have found in consulting many "side-project" developers is they want
a condensed list of at most 5 things they can do to guarantee success.

Since on top of building the product themselves, they are also the ones having
to build the email list, build the marketing campaign, etc. Like grandparent,
they are looking for a faster list to check off.

So my fast list is:

[ ] Piggyback on an existing audience.

------
ekianjo
> [ ] Record/post video of you reading the post on YouTube.

Lol, really? I don't see the benefit of doing that. It's way faster to read
text than to watch a video.

~~~
rustoo
It does help with SEO, if you give a link back to your site :)

~~~
ekianjo
and it wastes your time since you could be doing somethIng more productive
instead or rehashing the same thing.

------
tootie
Wouldn't this list be completely different for b2b vs consumer sites?

------
dabei
Marketing is a must for an idea to become a successful business. However most
side projects are much more about learning and exploration.

It's easy to get excited about our side project and make it real. But that's a
long way ahead. Pursuing it as a side project is impractical. Not only it
requires more time than we have. But also we have to spend more time on things
like marketing than the fun stuff that initially led us to start the project.

I'd go so far as make it an explicitly non-goal to make profit when starting a
side project. You will have more fun and there will be wider range of ideas
you can explore.

------
tgarma1234
I would like to see a side project finance checklist.

------
huhtenberg
Perhaps replace both subscription forms with a single link in the header? They
take too much space and are distracting.

I'd also reduce font sizes. This is not a presentation page, but an
information dump. The more there fits on a single page, the better.

------
suyash
Love the list, quite comprehensive. To any beginner or even pro - my advice
would be to cut out 80% items from the checklist and nail down the 20%. Your
job is to which which is the 20% which will give you 80% bang for your buck.

------
handzhiev
Things like this may scare you to hell from starting anything at all.

One can do perfectly well without 90% of this checklist.

------
ziggzagg
Only the marketing part of this "side" project feel like more than a full
project to me.

------
andreasgonewild
Monetizing, check, your, check, passion, check, kills it, period.

~~~
gallerdude
Agree and disagree. Monetization is on one axis, passion is on another.

I think if you start off just making something for yourself, it may be hard to
monetize it, because it's only optimized for how you do things. On the other
hand, if you do something only for monetization, it's super easy to get
demoralized and just stop. Furthermore, monetization isn't an easy to thing to
optimize for - it's very hard to see where the sweetspot is.

But if you can find a right balance between creating something that you find a
lot of interest in, and that a lot of other people would value, you can find a
great balance of personal satisfaction and something sustainable.

~~~
andreasgonewild
I just find that whenever I optimize for money; I start making weird
decisions; decisions meant to please others, who may not share the passion.
I'm all for people paying me to create and share the stuff that I already am;
but then it needs to come without conditions, otherwise we're back to square
one.

