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.<p>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 <i>just</i> 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.
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.<p>A blog ? A "sneeze page" ? What's the point if you don't have anything interesting to write ?<p>A/B testing landing page and newsletter ? Is that difficult to get honest feedback from people who care ?
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.<p>Half of this is common sense, 'make an about page, make a contact page', that is basic...<p>Then there's a ton of stuff here that is hypothetically cool to do but practically speaking will not be productive.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>[edit] Here a playlist from Google on how to implement AARRR in Firebase[2]<p>[1] <a href="https://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-long-version" rel="nofollow">https://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pi...</a><p>[2] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl-K7zZEsYLnslvfInomPdIR17eV4BsUm" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLl-K7zZEsYLnslvfInomP...</a>
Missed a big step at the end of customer research:<p>* Use the results of your research to make sure you are building something that customers will actually want/need enough to pay for.
It starts off nice, but past the blog part, it seems to just be mixing some low quality things with the high quality stuff.<p>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.<p>I would recommend this to be a list of marketing ideas depending on your phase, rather than an actual checklist of things to do.
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.
> [ ] Record/post video of you reading the post on YouTube.<p>Lol, really? I don't see the benefit of doing that. It's way faster to read text than to watch a video.
Marketing is a must for an idea to become a successful business. However most side projects are much more about learning and exploration.<p>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.<p>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.
Perhaps replace both subscription forms with a single link in the header? They take too much space and are distracting.<p>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.
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.