"if you build it, they will come". Never has one cliche been so exactly wrong.
Programmers, myself included, believe(d) that the code is the product. That the code will speak for itself. That being "better" (for some definition of better) is enough. If I build it, they will come.
The truth though, the code is about 10% of the effort to make a successful product. It is much more work, and frankly harder work, to to the marketing to get the product in front of the customer. It is then much more work to turn that into a sale (if your work is commercial.)
For decades I've heard programmers lament that they do all the hard work, they deserve the lion's share, all those guys do is sell it.
So here's the thing. Your code does not just "get attention". You earn that by investing time, and money but mostly time, in getting that attention.
That means going to where your target market is. Showing them you can add value to the group (I spent a lot of time answering unrelated questions.) showing how your offering can add value to the group. You do not "get" attention, you have to _earn_ it.
So, if you want your product to get more attention, then by extension you need to personally get more attention. You need to find your target group, be useful, be helpful, engage with them, built trust.
So you've made a tool for people without a smart-phone. OK, not a market I would have chosen[1], but that's not relevant. The thing you need to figure out is how to reach those people. Since they are not online, you will need to reach them offline. You need to go to where they are, not expect them to find you.
[1] choosing a market first, one you have a strategy to reach, then making a product is usually better than the other way around. Not least because joining a community, and adding value there for s while, before making a product, builds trust. It also helps you build a product they will find useful, not just something you randomly thought of.
This is life; through failure we learn more, through persistence we achieve.
It's true that effort helps success, and working for visibility is as important as working on making something great.
But sometimes life is just arbitrary.
Anyone who has worked in the "pop" media knows this. Artists pour their life and soul into films, symphonies and albums that get no listeners. They practice guitar for 10,000 hours and agonise over each note of a composition. They push and nothing happens, and they live in perpetual hope of "being discovered" in a world of overwhelming over-supply. One day some kid sticks a bangin' donk on a boing sound and it goes straight to the top of the charts with no explanation.
Unfair? Unjust?
Not really, if you allow for the essential randomness of things. Perhaps we put far too much belief in our ability to value things, and that includes marketing and communication as much as "quality" of design and execution.
Of course its unfair. Life is unfair. There is quite literally nothing in life that is "fair".
Fairness is the worst hope you can have. If you are waiting for life to treat you fair, then you will die disappointed. And if you are reading this, then likely you are so far ahead of fair that fairness can only be a step back.
If you have success, then the best thing you can do is spread some unfairness around. Help others up, you can't help everyone, so it's not fair, but it's the best you can do.
Give someone an unfair leg up, give someone an unfair opportunity. Pass on some of the unfairness you already have.
I'm not sure why you think that's neither unjust nor unfair. All you said is "it's random". I'm not sure why "it's random" implies it's not unfair or unjust.
Really think on it for more than a second - all the products that are “huge” are scaled through this “sales and marketing are more important.”
If your initial MVP doesn’t stop people in their tracks, turn around and say “I will cry if I can’t buy this.” Then go home, dust off and try again. Otherwise, yes, you will slog with the rest in SGA and CAC games.
scale isn’t the only way to success.
Oh, I think they are. You just haven't seen them (yet?) and you probably never will, because their creators are slaving over perfection, somehow expecting the randomverse to spot it.
The winners are the ones who accepted imperfection, who were brave enough to show the incomplete, who were prepared to make the effort to do more than just write code.
VHS over betamax, Windows 95 over OS/2, Apple 2/mac over amiga. Our history is littered with marketing over product.
For every success there are 10 guys with a story about how their effort was better, how the winner was rubbish. But the winner always won the marketing game.
Too many coders are playing the perfect game of checkers, in a world where everyone else is playing an average game of chess.
+1000!
Praising is cheap.
It implies that people aren't actively looking for better solutions to their problems, which is just blatantly false.
If industries spent all of their marketing budget on research and development, we'd live in a very different world. Maybe even a better one. A world where companies aren't asking "how can we fool people into buying more of what we're already making" and instead ask "what can we make that's so good it practically sells itself?"
Quality always rises to the top. That's a law of nature.
No, they don't.
The majority go with the defaults, and most of the rest stick to the first thing that "works for them".
If they try something else it's usually because of either mass promotion (like with Java in the late 90s) or hype by a smaller team of early adopters (like with Node and such), not by patiently looking and evaluating solutions alone.
>Quality always rises to the top. That's a law of nature.
That's not even close to a law of nature.
In fact, "crap rises to the top" might be closer to being that. I mean, if you want a blatant example, see the music top-10.
But even they won’t find you if you don’t have an SEO-optimized page, for example, to give you a somewhat extreme example. Just doing nothing and waiting for someone to come is not an option.
Not really. Think about it for a moment: are there more people actively searching for better solutions to each and every single problem they may or may not know they have? Or are there more people like you and me who go about their day just fine completely oblivious that there might be out there a far better way of doing things, or not even bothering to spend a second to address some nuisance they have?
> If industries spent all of their marketing budget on research and development, we'd live in a very different world.
Yes, it would be a world where fortunes were spent on R&D whose outcome benefitted no one at all because no one ever heard about the outcome.
Also, as a corollary to your anti-marketing stance, multiple redundant R&D projects would be wasting resources developing stuff that was already developed and reinventing the wheel primarily because no one knew that it was already done.
That is definitely not a law of nature.
> but they don't want take the required steps to get that attentions
In the end, it comes down to this. So yes, there is now solution. I want to get the benefit without investment because I dream of a world not existing where everyone would do research to find the best.
Exactly. And you don't need to. No one says you _have_ to market. But marketing leads to attention. So I think you know the cause effect here.
>> . I want to get the benefit without investment because I dream of a world not existing where everyone would do research to find the best.
I'm not sure I can say this without being a dick, which is a pity, because I'm not trying to be a dick. I'm saying this out of a place of respect.
There are around 8 billion people on earth. I promise you that if I did all the research I'm pretty sure (statistically) your projects are not the best. There's an even chance they are not even average.
Plus, I'm guessing there are likely 100 projects that do what your do. Should I do a deep dive into each one. Do a comparative analysis? 1 hour on each? Say a month's full time job? Repeat for every bit of software I've ever installed?
Did you install each BSD build and every Linux distribution, and every other OS out there before you selected one for your computer? Did you try Oberon or reactOS? Surely you did your own research for this most critical part of computing?
Of course not. We outsource our research. We Google. We solicit the opinion of others. We use whatever is convenient, available, and in front of us.
Me, I did research. I decided that people who were prepared to put effort into marketing would make a product that better fitted my needs, because they are showing interest in customers.
Again, I say this not to be a dick. You have choices. You understand cause and effect. You are welcome to do the work, or you are welcome to labour in obscurity. It's your choice.
But make no mistake, you are not doing your own research, and you are not making the best product. I'm sure you are making things with value, but if you don't get it out there, we'll, the result is well understood.
Maybe I am similar, I am very reluctant to promote my work, I don't want too much attention.
I actually briefly worked a job doing social media marketing where it was my job to create attention grabbing content. I had some moderate success there, but the more I succeeded the more I was overwhelmed, I really did not enjoy having to deal with so many messages every day and gave up the work very quickly. Part of me liked the attention, but a bigger part didn't want it.
tl;dr: I am an introvert, sounds like you are too, maybe some successful introverts can share their advice with us.
“Someone else created a very similar app. This person modded the old app before, is for sure more active in the community and has far more knowledge in the game. He has a better legacy and he deserves it.”
Then the author says:
“I don't like people catching attention. I don't want attention to my person. I don't want some "Look at him!"-moments. I want "Look at this!"-moments.“
And yet the author did a ”Look at him!” to the competition. Others are probably doing the same thing and that’s why their work is getting attention. Maybe somewhere in this introspection lies the answer.
If you feel you have something others may find useful, just mention it. You’re doing yourself and others a disservice by not doing so. What’s the worst that can happen when mentioning your app has that feature people are requesting? You have to start somewhere.
You can have an amazing feature set but if no one knows about it then it wont get used.
It's the same with you as a developer. You can be the best developer in the world but you won't get paid like you are unless people know about you and you're in demand.
Also that title reminded me of this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi8ShAosqzI&ab_channel=Kolle...
It was the one time that a project of mine generated a bit of buzz on HN. But I hadn’t posted it myself, someone else did. But they posted a link to a fork, which no changes of their own, claiming that someone else had posted it. The fork got 30 ish stars and follows, and nobody in the HN thread pointed out that they were starring a fork with no changes.
This really sucked, since I would have liked to develop an open source project that had users, but this was my project and now I had to negotiate with some other guy I didn’t know who had probably just taken the credit for my work. It didn’t work out.
Anyone else had this happen to them? What’s a constructive way to deal with that?
"Hey, I am the original author of this. AMA."
"this is a fork of xxx, I'm looking forward to seeing the community grow in this way. I'm the author of xxx, feel free to AMA, or reach out. Any participation in the project is welcome and encouraged."
The suggestion to do an AMA in the post seems pretty decent too.
But, I’ll have to come out of hiding soon enough, have spent the last year+ developing a pretty unusual project. Actually I’m sure I should have been blogging about it already. But it’s hard for me to have positive expectations, and I know that alot of what I have to say is going to be divisive.
Now that I saw the first replies to my comment, I realize that I wasn’t really seeing the big picture in that moment, someone can’t really steal your open source project, the thing to do would have been to mention it in the thread and then just keep on developing it as I had been. Anyone who wanted to use it would eventually realize that the fork wasn’t where the action was at.
Truth is there is some kind of trauma at play, and actually there is for a lot of people, but trauma is still a bad word, we don’t really talk about it on HN, actually a lot of conversation in tech has been sterilized, the mindshare is highly sought after.
I have the same problem, except it's not "I'm jealous that somebody gets more attention" but rather "I don't get attention and I have no idea how to change that". Doesn't looks like I'm the only person with this kind of issue, either.
I often see high-effort blog posts with, like, one or two comments under each post. Sometimes none at all.
To give a related example: https://twitter.com/tom7 does super high effort funny things for SIGBOVIK — e.g. see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xDxjbXAqTPg — and yet his personal blog of 20 years at http://radar.spacebar.org/ has at most 5–10 comments per post.
I used to have 500 followers on Twitter and they would respond to things sometimes/often... and even then I felt like the attention would be very lukewarm. In the end I gave up, deleted the account, and decided that I'm just not going to rely on strangers for attention at all. I still think it's possible, it's just that I personally either don't know how to do it, or have some kind of a background issue (ADHD? anxiety? attachment issues? something else starting with A?) that prevents me from somehow asking for attention naturally/consistently. At least that's my current theory.
Eh.
I get it. But this is the kind of advertising that's OK in my book. Exposing people who are clearly interested (rather than maybe interested based on, for example, previous shopping habits) to something they have not heard of. And of course you don't want to steal attention, but you can do it in a polite way, demonstrating respect to the other product. Maybe you have to be a little shameless in those situations if you want your products (not you) to get attention.
Yes, that's definitely right. As long as there is not something extremely unfair, I am very polite and don't want to offend anyone. I personally feel offended by let's call it "usual marketing techniques". They try to blend, discredit other's and so on. That's not me. In the current example with the GH app, it's also more complaining about the Reddit algorithm, but that one is also logically, like said, that someone with higher reputation get's more attention and back on: I don't want to post useless stuff. I only write, when I have something to say. Good example is a German news portal: There is a limit of 50 comments you need to write before you are allowed to post links. It's not about, if that is a good idea or not, my point is: It took me 9 years for this. Because I only wrote a comment, when I thought this has really value for others. So again, my reputation on this board is from an algorithm perspective really bad. Same may go for Reddit.
OP's app is Gloomhaven Secretary. The other app is X-Haven Assistant. I announced a similar app, Gloomhaven Full Stack, before either of those apps were started and before GH Helper was discontinued.
All of our apps can exist only because of the generosity of Gloomhaven's creator, Isaac Childres. He made all the game assets available for use in apps as long as we don't make money. And we are all building on the success of GH Helper. We are standing on the shoulders of giants.
Everything OP says about XH Assistant, I could be saying about GH Secretary. I had all the features before both of them. I have original features that they both "copy". (I did it first, but ideas are cheap, and they may have come up with it independently.) But they both look a lot nicer than mine. I feel jealousy too, but I understand why users would like the other apps more than mine.
After my initial jealousy, I was actually quite glad they existed because I could now tell users if they don't like my app, no worries try one of these others. I include links to the other apps when I post updates to my app. I often tell users about GHS along side my own app if they both address a user's issue.
To address my own jealousy, I try to feel more gratitude. I think of it as healthy competition and happy to promote competitors if they are more what the user wants. I should probably do more to acknowledge the apps that inspired me.
For now, my app still has features the others don't. I created my app to do more than GH Helper, intentionally not be a clone and experiment with ways of doing things differently from GH Helper, and to combine the functionality of 4 different apps that I was previously using. I am resolved to the fact that the other apps might eventually implement all those features, but I will continue with my app as long as I have new ideas I want to add.
First of all, I think you're still a bit out of competition, because FHA and GHS are really clones of the old GHH. So it's like the chess app has gone, we create two chess app clones and you do 3d-chess app. So in that case my comparison about features is really about covering the original app and not about new features I added. So first disclaimer, but you already know that: I really appreciate the work of the other app devs. I wouldn't be able to support all the editions, if I couldn't scrape all the data from FHA. And I am never ever jealous, if people prefer one app over another. In this particular case, it's really about the Reddit visibility (and GH community there): An update from my side gain ~30 upvotes, FHA ~180 in half of the time. Because of that there are also more comments and many comments like: "I still use the old app, would like to switch if you have feature XY (from the old app)" and they seem to just not heard about any other app exists and already support that feature. To go the chess metaphor, I am talking about people used to play the normal chess, they used to it. Your 3d-chess might be a good replacement too, but it's just not the same. And then they asking when the knight will be implemented so they can switch (I totally exaggerate here, don't want to boil down the good and hard work of FHA!), I am just looking and thinking, the knight is working like month ago, my last update was about multiplayer. But again, I am not jealous in that way, that I think they should please use my app, because I am better and so on. But due to Reddits sorting, they just haven't even heard about other app existing. And yeah, I don't want to play those social algorithms. GHS get mentioned enough and already a lot of people like it. But it was now the third time where I posted an update and 1-3 days later, FHA update is killing just everything regarding upvotes and feedback. And then I am jealous. That's all and I ranted a bit about that on the internet. Now it's there, and I felt memories about my other project, where I also tried to get some attention I was more jealous, because then the other projects gaining more attention were really out of scope and I couldn't even appreciate any of this.
I appreciate your post here and think a nice rant can be a reasonable way to address ego and jealousy. I have similar feelings as you and have ranted to my friends some of the same things you said.
In the end though, for both of us, I think the jealousy is mostly unfounded. We can rant and then should probably let it go.
There's some contradiction here...
The first is on the personal level, the second is on the project level.
Although the author seems to separate the twos as being completely separated, I'm pretty sure they aren't. You can't have one without having the other.
i havent released much. and the quality is questionable. but i totally get it.
me and my SO discussed this briefly, her suggestion is to only do things for yourself.
my thoughts to that: yeah, sure. but working a dayjob _and_ working the dream, who is going to cheer me on? im bad at multitasking, so after a day or two of spinning my wheels i will most likely loose all drive, because i can see that i wont make it in the near future to the finish line. Also, nobody except me cares, but do i really care? there are projects i do care about a lot, but because i care so much i havent really put any deliberate concrete planing into it as to keep anything possible. this way i pick up small projects left and right, turn them over a couple of times in my mind and then drop them. big ones i just dream about ad infinitum... i hate it but i havent found the jenesaiqua to motivate myself to do anything really. much less so if i only do it for myself.
being cheered on by family always feels like "oh wow, that is a nice cat you drew" "its a horse" "oh yeah now i see it...(they never did)": empty encouraging words. blind eyes appreciating art. deaf ears praising the timbre of an instrument. v_v
at least when i cook a meal i can eat it and experience whether or not it tastes good. but with software? what am i supposed to make that will make my life a bit better: an automatic doomscroller? scoffs
I wish you well, lurkars, may your projects gain the recognition they deserve
One heuristic is to think of what problems you face in daily life, and imagining a way to deal with them with technology. Problems don't have to be big, and your solution doesn't have to be perfect, just helpful enough.
"omg Netflix's recommendations suck" -> Personal recommender system
"omg I want to watch this movie, but I have to search all of the streaming services individually to find out if it's even available" -> Scraper
"I have lots of tasks to do, but want them to interface with my calendar and follow a particular priority, and remind me according to some set of rules" -> To Do list
Build small things and write about them. Eventually some will find success and you can choose to keep building or not.
I'm fine with that. If people find it useful - great. I'm not going to spend money marketing free software. I do sympathize with the feeling of "that piece of crap got attention, but mine didn’t?", but that's just life.
They declined to create a FH app and Cephalofair declined then to make any more money with GHH. So it was shut down.
But this state of affairs is, as other commenters have pointed out, entirely my fault. For a library or product to gain traction in the target market, it needs three things: easy access, awareness of its existence, and good support. For a library like mine, this boils down to the following:
+ Easy access - it's my responsibility to make the library easy for other developers to find (GitHub, website), add to their projects (npm/yarn, compatibility with bundlers, etc), use in their code (well documented API, TS support, etc), and cause them minimal problems within the wider project (plays nicely with frameworks, doesn't destroy page efficiency, doesn't break the toolchain, etc). This is the work I enjoy and spend a lot of non-dev time doing.
+ Awareness of its existence - which is marketing. Either I have to spend a lot of time telling people about my library and (more importantly) telling them how my library solves their problems. Or I have to find "champions" - people who use, and like using, the library so much that they will go out and promote it for me. Or I can spend money on getting proper marketing help, adverts, etc ... which is not going to happen.
+ Good support - beyond documentation, I need to be willing to either spend time helping people resolve issues and misunderstandings they have with the library, or I need to build a community of people happy to help me do that work. Sadly I am not the sort of person who enjoys the high level of social engagement that's needed to build that community.
So, yeah ... it is my fault that the competitors get the glory. But then again they deserve their place in the sunshine because they've done the work I've not been willing to engage with. As for the occasional bouts of jealousy? They remind me that I'm still human, that I still care. Which is a Good Thing!
[1] I keep track of what the competitors are up to mainly by following their repos on GitHub. Most of the issues people raise seem to be about TypeScript errors and breaking updates. But sometimes I'll see someone ask for a feature they want added to a library, and I'll find myself thinking: "my library does that already!" and I'll get a little shiver of jealousy. Like this request for a "Transformation box for texts" made in the Fabric.js repo - https://github.com/fabricjs/fabric.js/issues/8195
