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Discussion on: Engineer turned CEO, Ask Me Anything!

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tonis2 profile image
Tonis Anton • Edited

How to market your product, as a developer i feel this part to be the hardest for me. What tips would you give someone that can program and deliver a product, but sucks at selling it.

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grantralls profile image
Grant Ralls

As someone who is about to start a project, I big time second this!

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tschellenbach profile image
Thierry

Also this: getstream.io/blog/creative-develop...

Though its pretty dependent on what worked for us at Stream, if you're in a different market other things will work. What are you building?

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grantralls profile image
Grant Ralls

Put simply, it is for people who are intimidated by cooking their own meals, like me. It will provide a way to easily find and sort recipes based off nutrition requirements, price, and most importantly, difficulty. I'm thinking about implementing forums for the website so people can talk and share about cooking. That would be something cool to add when I already have the MVP. All of this to give me an excuse to learn about building with React and serverless. At first, because I wanted to hop on the bandwagon, but then I learned about what makes the tech special (also to not follow the bandwagon hype), and it seems like a lot of fun to play with!

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tschellenbach profile image
Thierry

I think Serverless, React + components like Algolia, Stream, Auth0 etc. is where the cloud hosting market is going long term. It's crazy how quickly you can build fully functional apps these days.

On the other hand getting a DO or Hetzner server is as cheap as its going to get :)

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tschellenbach profile image
Thierry

I think it was YC at some point that said that you should try to be good at 2 of these: design, development, marketing. Not sure, can't remember the exact quote, but I definitely agree. If you can master two of those your chances of making a startup succeed go way up.

Once you're good at marketing note that many of your campaigns will still utterly fail. I've been doing this for years now and I think only 60-70% of the marketing projects I work on hit a positive ROI. For a great read on various approaches to marketing I recommend: amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achiev...

Next you want to get basic experience with many different types of marketing:

  1. SEM, just try buying some ads to get the feel of how it works and when you can use it for your business
  2. Content marketing, write some blogpost and see if you can get any of them to 1k, 10k or 100k pageviews
  3. Quora/Stackoverflow try to understand what makes things trend on those platforms

Your goal is not really to make your marketing succeed in the beginning. You mainly want to make sure you understand how all these platforms work and how and when you can use them to grow your business.