- “Marketing is evil!” ... perhaps but it’s also a necessary evil if you want anyone using your product
- “Build it and they will come” ... except they won’t unless you tell people
- “I hate spam/push messages/ads therefor everyone else must do to” ... but engineers tend to be the grumpiest about this stuff. Drip marketing to get users to engage progressively with your app, for example, can be valuable to users that even forgot they installed your app in the first place, because something distracted them right after
- “We have all these features / options so let’s so let’s just show them all to the user and let them figure it out” ... paradox of choice etc
And many more. You could _almost_ argue that some jobs, like PM, UX researcher, designer, digital marketeer largely exist because of the narrow mindedness of engineers... I don’t mean that seriously for obvious reasons but think there’s some truth in it
I think most engineers associate marketing with sleazy SEO/affiliate/self-promotion people who offer little to no added value to the web, society or humanity, who will lie, cheat and steal to make a buck. Most engineers don't want to be like those people in any way, and that's a good thing, because we'd all be better off if those people were gone.
But not all of marketing is "I have a shitty product, it has no encryption, but I will just say that it has super mega NSA encryption because stupid consumers will not know the difference". A lot of marketing is just getting the information out there.
I think it's similar to SEO in that sense. There's the shit that's manipulating Google (and Google is willfully playing along) by just spinning the same text thousands of times and stuffing keywords into it. Everybody would be better off if that disappeared. But there's also the basic common sense SEO. Make sure your HTML works, well, make sure you have your headlines in <h1>, <h2> etc, make sure the important pages you want found can actually be reached with links on your site, make sure your site loads fast etc.
From that perspective, if you are not lying in your marketing, then you must just be telling truths about your product. So what's wrong with just writing the features and letting us decide instead of adding all the flowery weasel words?
Obviously this doesn't work for most people. Long feature lists can even be a turn off. But I think software people often see products through the lens of what it can do instead of how it makes them feel. That is the hurdle I think a lot of us have to get over because we are so used to writing code to make programs do things and not to make people feel things (I can't imagine how that unit test looks).
^ DECENCY PROFIT
| ---> <---
| ---> /---- <---
| /--- \----
| /---- \----
| /--- \----
| /--- \--
+------------------------------------------------>
EVIL GOOD
^ DECENCY PROFIT
| -> |\ <----------
| -> | \ <----------
| | \-
| / \--
| / \-----------
| /- \------------------
+------------------------------------------------>
EVIL GOOD
One, market competition means you won't survive unless you're optimizing for profits very strongly; with strong enough competition, if your competitor does something shady, you have to follow suit or risk being outcompeted.
Two, professional specialization. I sometimes quip, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to be separated from it by enough levels of indirection". I mean it. There's plenty of entrepreneurs who wouldn't feel comfortable going to someone personally and lying about their product, or spying on them and selling what they learned to a scammer. But if such entrepreneur hires a marketing manager, who then outsources all marketing to an external agency, which buys its tools off-the-shelf, you may suddenly end up with lies in ads and 50 megabytes of trackers on your GDPR-violating website, and at no point each individual's conscience crosses the "this is EVIL" threshold; everyone can point at each other and say, "I'm just doing what I'm paid to", or "I didn't know my subordinates/subcontractors would do that".
I'd argue it's a simple division of labor. Engineers need to stay focused on solving technical challenges. Also, when it comes to PM - it's more than just writing product stories or prioritizing them. Doing stakeholder interviews is as art. Asking the right questions is crucial.
So while Engineers stay focused on the how, the PM stays focused on the what. And the UX translates the what into an interactive map easily understood by target audience.
Cue in the stereotypical markethead rappresentation: vapid, buzzword filled, socially successful.
We all sucked at programming in the beginning too! Just keep at it and your marketing chops will improve.
They are often dead wrong about this moral high-ground, good brand/marketing can be the difference between success and failure.
I've lived in this difficult world for decades, started out as a programmer, but the majority of my work is marketing and brand management. Iv'e worked with start-ups that 100% refuse all brand/marketing, and others that are completely misguided. But ive also worked with very successful companies that devote the time and money to marketing. After all what's the point of making something if no one uses it.
Car's sell because they have personality, it's not just about what's under the hood.
This is a pretty sweeping generalisation.
You said it here. Some.
Like some engineering endeavors are outrageously ridiculous. No?
You assume it is a matter of ignorance and not them simply not caring. I've come to find many people who work in marketing almost Trumpian in their relationship with information.
"End to end encryption" doesn't show up in a marketing brainstorm that goes unnoticed into branding creatives. Chiefs, Management, Product Teams, marketers, engineers, product managers, everyone knew it.
One of the main problems with project that launch their marketing campaign is their attempt to create an image of something they are not yet to become.
I think that by being transparent along the way with your target audience, telling them about the progress you've made and the difficulties your company face and overcome, that's worth more than any marketing trick. That's when your company becomes a brand, and people can recognize with it
This is more about perception and something to aim at. It's extremely difficult to develop a brand if you don't have anything to aim at, because from the moment you have an hook, you can anchor pretty much everything based on that and this allows you to do something that's extremely important in branding: consistency and congruency.
Your brand, communication, product, should all be in line with what they might not be yet, but are aiming at.
>I think that by being transparent along the way with your target audience, telling them about the progress you've made and the difficulties your company face and overcome, that's worth more than any marketing trick.
Being transparent when necessary, yes. If you have something that's harmless and innocuous, it brings no value to anyone to flag it.
Telling about progress works with a small minority, like a dev log works mainly for that audience. Stripe, Facebook, Google, have a lot of this in place to try to lure in talent, or more of that than to make people use their product - so in a sense, this is a "marketing trick".
Most people want something that works, either from a tangible point of view like a flash light that turns on, or intangible, like a piece of clothing that makes them feel they belong to something that others will recognize.
Recently finished an MVP as a personal project, and was thinking about how promote it. It's a daunting task.
It's nice to think that l337 design (well... It's functional, hopefully) and a Reddit/HN post will be enough, but that's probably analogous to writing the first test record to your dev database, techwise...
On top of that, confidence is a big thing. What if my core hypothesis is flawed, or it's just a silly product? It's natural to want to innoculate yourself against criticism and rejection... That's a fundamental psychological feature of all nerds afterall.
The trick is to remember that those responses are still better than the alternative of no one using your project or caring enough to provide any feedback. Users providing feedback is a good thing, even if it is negative.
I post a lot about my side project here and on other forums. It would be great if everyone just knew about it and already decided if it was something that they were interested in or not, but I know only a small fraction of relevant users are even aware it exists.
For me, it would be way worse to spend time building something that people might find beneficial but never got a chance to hear about, than sharing it and being criticized on the internet.
Jokes aside, a large component of marketing is in aggregating opinion. The other half is the dark art we famously complain about.
Aggregating opinion at any level is hard work. And it's almost been elevated to a science now, so it has to be respected.
So to perform all that work to derive a conclusion which will most likely (given all that's known about the probability of start ups and success) prove you wrong, seems a perverse thing to do.
Masochistic, in fact.
I think it's easier to perform this work in the third person... It turns the dynamic on its head (like the schadenfreuder one might feel when working on a software project in the capicity of a QA tester). You're performing a clinical service.
But it takes some special effort to willingly put yourself through it...
I dunno.
I suppose I'll learn more if I just do it...
Stay humble, get it out there, focus on learning, and good luck!
99% people dropped before they even saw the app.
I could have built the best app in the world, and no one would have ever known.
I experimented with two ad campaigns, on Facebook and on Reddit, both the cheapest options. Had some weird results from the FB one: most of the "reached" users were concentrated in Eastern Europe, even though my locations were set to the US, Canada and Europe. All in all, it didn't yield many clicks but for ~£10 I wasn't expecting much.
Reddit's ads are more expensive, and I was dissapointed to find that you can't target just any subreddit. They have a list of "ad-approved" ones that you can pick from. Campaign is still running but it already looks like it's reached more people. Not sure if it's resulting in more clicks though.
[0] Shameless plug: https://makely.me
I haven't signed up myself, but how are you planning on solving the chicken/egg marketplace problem?
> how are you planning on solving the chicken/egg marketplace problem
The plan at the moment is to advertise whilst it's still in deveopment and get a healthy user base of mostly creators. It will take time; I don't expect it to blow up overnight.
I have worries when it comes to attracting enough "clients" because that's significantly harder to advertise to. To start off with, the demographic we'll be targeting will be general gaming and board game enthusiasts, as well as some of the "creative" communities that exist on the web.
I have considered rebranding, but I am yet to think of something better. Makely has slowly grown on me. I'll be happy to listen to suggestions!
Some people seem to equate marketing with the promotion of existing products. Some others see marketing as helping to determine the products / services the company should build.
Are there better terms for these different functions in an organization?
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For what it's worth, one of the best articles in the list, for me, was patio11's:
Business of SaaS - https://stripe.com/au/atlas/guides/business-of-saas
Am I the only one that thinks it’s annoying that people feel compelled to announce their enthusiasm? I’ve always thought reddit comments along the lines of “have you an upvote” were annoying noise, but this seems a bit more egregious. Issues are supposed to be for reporting issues, it’s on the name! Not only did someone have to spend time to read this, and close it, but it crowds out actual issues.
Here's the link to the original source : https://github.com/LisaDziuba/Marketing-for-Engineers