"Cold call ~20 people who might be good customers."<p>IMHO this is probably the first! thing you should do. To my own surprise people will give you money for your service even if you don't have a websites (and name, logo, slogan or anything else), and you send your 'product' via email.<p>And 3 out of 4 ideas don't survive these 20 calls - so you'll save a lot of time if you sell first and build later.<p>Emotionally that's not easy - of course - but it's what you will be doing all day anyway if it goes well, so why not start early?
I do a lot of this stuff professionally so I was interested to take a look at an "outsiders" approach to this. Honestly, you've done an incredibly good job on this. Great suggestions!
This is a great start! I noticed that 90% deals with MARCOM strategy with a bit of SWOT thrown-in too.<p>As someone who is responsible for bringing products to market on a daily basis, there is a considerable amount of strat being omitted which will better prepare you.<p>Pricing. Determine where you want to position your product in the market. Identify the competitors that compete on price vs the one's that compete on quality. Determine where you want to position your products and which competitors to go after. This should help you determine which customers you want to market towards as well. It also helps you determine the effort you can apply to each channel. [Spend more time on the difficult customer to obtain]. Michael Jordan didn't become Michael Jordan by practicing his dunk. He purposely worked on the weakest part of his game to make him the greatest.
There are so many things to do here- on top of actually building the side project itself. It's probably worth reading and understanding the benefits of each activity and then prioritising the ones that work for your business.<p>Just be careful not to deprioritize items because they're outside your comfort zone.
Great list! Might there be a market / an interest in a dashboard + chatbot for taking care of these things? Keeping track of milestones, doing the trivial signups an presenting how the different initiatives are performing and can be tuned?
I like the way you have gone about this - very systematic and seems somewhat comprehensive (though of course more points may be added over time). Thanks for making it.
This is really, really helpful. I will try to do all of these things for the project I'm currently working on. But man, cold calling 20 people is going to be so much harder than actually building the thing.
Great resource. The one name in there I didn't recognize was '7search'; I clicked through, but it seems to have shut down within the last week, so you can probably remove that.
Do you have time to explain your choices and/or process as you used a static website generator + theme for this project's web site when it appears to be optimized for blogging?<p>Right now I'm looking at Hugo + Kube but there are so many not-normal things to use (Hugo + Github Pages all in source control but publishing different branches / folders, Kube using not-normal-Hugo stuff since it's got non-blog stuff, etc.) Is there a one-stop zero-to-hero guide anywhere for this kind of thing?
This is brilliant, but it's in markdown. I've converted it to emacs orgmode so I can use org checklists and integrate into my todo list.<p><a href="https://github.com/deerpig/side-project-marketing/blob/master/marketing-checklist.org" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/deerpig/side-project-marketing/blob/maste...</a>
Wow, love it! Has anyone put this on PH yet?<p>Another one to add would be a LinkedIn bot for auto profile viewing. It's a pretty efficient way for people to see you viewed their profile, they view yours back, and check out your site/project.
Nice idea thanks! One suggestion maybe add some sort of priority marking/ time spent for each one, as I would say some are definitely higher priority than others
Very well done. I really like checklists, I use them as my todo list, project organizer and general stuff. So I created Sorter to help me: is a webapp to organize ideas, tasks and information using bullet points and hashtags. It´s open source if you want to check <a href="https://github.com/vitogit/sorter" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vitogit/sorter</a>
> <i>Free Promotional Channels / Write and distribute a Press Release.</i><p>For smaller projects this does not work at all. All it does is it attracts spam from various Indian "wire services" and that's it.<p>> <i>Paid Promotional Channels / StumbleUpon</i><p>Only if you want to see how a 100% bounce rate with sub-second page stays looks like. Absolutely useless otherwise, although it is very attractively priced.
Here's a shared workflowy of the checklist for anyone who wants to use it:
<a href="https://workflowy.com/s/FSjJ.Z6V7qfO5CD" rel="nofollow">https://workflowy.com/s/FSjJ.Z6V7qfO5CD</a>
I did not see under which license you released the downloadable content. Mind sharing it here?<p>If you havent licensed it, one from creative commons might fit.