Being a Developer Makes You Valuable. Learning How to Market Makes You Dangerous

I really cannot emphasize enough how the intersection of these two fields is a) extraordinarily rare, b) extraordinarily capable of producing directly attributable, measurable improvements across an entire business and as a direct consequence c) very, very richly valued by the market right now.

One of my favorite sayings: <i>Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. Getting people to pay for what you executed on is more everything.</i><p>If there are 1000 people who are 'idea people', 100 of them can execute on an idea; actually build something. 10 can get that thing sold.<p>Those 10 are the dangerous ones.<p>Great post.

<i>Being a Developer Makes You Valuable. Learning How to Market Makes You Dangerous</i><p>I hope this is true! I've been developing for 12+ years, and always had an <i>interest</i> in marketing, but never really <i>studied</i> marketing. Now, I'm one of three tech co-founders of a startup that does not yet have a dedicated marketing person. So, I've finally been diving into really trying to learn and understand marketing (and sales).<p>OK, wait, I did take "Marketing 101" at the local community college a couple of years ago, but that's the only formal education on the topic I've had.<p>Now, I have a huge stack of sales and marketing books I'm working through. So far I've mainly focused on the Jack Trout, Al Ries, et al. stuff... <i>Positioning</i>, <i>Re-positioning</i>, <i>The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing</i>, etc., and I've been going through a video series from Chet Holmes (of <i>The Ultimate Sales Machine</i> fame).<p>Looks like some good resources in the linked article, so looking forward to chewing through some of that as well. And here's a pre-emptive "+1" for more good startup marketing related links on HN!

But isn't this just stating the obvious? being a Developer + learning $cool_skill makes you $positive_adjective.<p>Well duh. Also, the sun rises in the east.<p>$cool_skill element_of {marketing, design, negotiation, leadership skills, design, writing ....}<p>$positive_adjective element_of {dangerous, rockstar, ninja , pirate, extraordinary, one in a million, cool, killer ... }<p>mix and match and you have a dozen or so catchy titles.<p>Throw in links to the top books on the topic and links to some blogs, and most importantly an ad for an ebook somewhere in the post. Profit.<p>Repeat a few dozen times. Landing pages for SEO. Hey you are a guru!<p>Maybe, I am just feeling too cynical abut such 'how to do a startup' porn. Feel free to ignore me.<p>OTOH HN generally has good discussions, even when the submission is spammy/low quality.

Plain old marketing is simple. You gotta reach your audience. You gotta figure out what they look at, and you gotta get their attention. If your audience is searching Google, you hit them with SEO and Adwords. If they are watching TV, you gotta get on the shows they are watching. Once you get their attention, they know about you, and then it is matter of sales if they buy.<p>For good branding, it helps to have a good name, logo, etc. Although, in the end it helps if they like your product.<p>If you're in a crowded space, marketing is going to be harder. Although, I've never really found marketing to be that complicated. If you are in a crowded space, it can be harder to market, because your message gets crowded out.<p>Who is struggling with marketing? Let me know. I don't really think it is that hard.

It's amazing actually how many programmers don't concentrate on marketing at all. I've recently got a few emails from fellow developers asking if they need a blog/twitter/google+ account in order to get customers as a freelancer.<p>The answer is yes, yes you do!<p>The proof, 3 months in to my freelance career and I'm already getting customers, via blogging and Google search results. Heck I've even been lucky enough to get one customer as a direct result of getting front paged on Hacker News.<p>I have no idea whether I'm approaching "dangerous" yet. But I know for certain, I've still got a lot of marketing effort to go, and one hell of a lot left to learn.

Agreed.<p>I own <a href="http://drivingtests101.com/" rel="nofollow">http://drivingtests101.com/</a> . It is a free driving test prep website covering ~400 tests across 11 countries, all states/provinces and vehicle types. It was not until we spent time on SEO and pushed to get into the media a few months later before we truly began to realize the fruits of our labor. A product or service can often lead to no monetization without a push from marketing, aside from the true viral one-off hits. Do not count on this!<p>Marketing is key and I would encourage all business owners, not just developers, to learn this invaluable skill.<p>Good luck!

I'm trying to dig into Marketing and really figure out how to hack it. I've found patio11 extremely helpful, and also some of Peldi's posts on the Balsamiq blog: <a href="http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2008/08/05/startup-marketing-advice-from-balsamiq-studios/" rel="nofollow">http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2008/08/05/startup-marketi...</a>. I will definitely check out some of the recommendations here.<p>Does anyone have any other actionable suggestions for reading? I've picked up a few books but I'm looking to really dig in and get better at selling SaaS stuff online.

I would really extend this to the following qualities that people in the field of building products should try, to the best of their abilities, to be good at. They might not become the best at each one, but enough to become potent and in the very least better than they were before trying:<p>-Understand technology. What it takes to build, scale, maintain and fix things. What are the affordances and benefits of one approach over the other.<p>-Understand design. Not just pretty pixels (in fact that is the least important part, IMHO). But the WHY. How it affects people, what the goals are, why the current system is broken or why it does not exist.<p>- Understand Marketing. How do you convince others that your product (idea or finished) is THE one they should vouch for. Why should they invest time and money into it. How can you make them believe that you know what you are doing and better than any bad experiences they have had with products of that kind. Selling/Marketing is not evil. It is a necessary (evil). Many humble and smart people fail to understand that.<p>I totally understand it is very hard for one person to be great or even good at all three. But hey most don't even try, so you are already better then them the first day you try.

The best part about being a developer and interested in marketing is you have all kids of opportunity to learn and tinker.<p>You can build a mobile app, submit to the app stores and see how it sells. Track your sales, dive into the numbers and find out what works and what doesn't. Does a good design help? What key words help your app get found? What about your UI? Do people love it? Hate it? Why?<p>You can build a static website and attach Google Analytics and see where your traffic comes from, how is your SEO working? What mobile users are on your site? What pages are they viewing? What's your conversion rate?<p>Build an e-commerce website and see what sells. Does the position of the items matter? What colors are people buying? What are your buyers preferences? Are your price points too high? Too low?<p>There's so many cool things you can learn when you start to get interested in marketing. If you're hacker, you can have a lot of fun and learn a ton of stuff just by creating simple things and seeing how the public/users react and use it. It really is completely fascinating.

I started as a developer, coded the first version of Visual Website Optimizer myself, but quickly discovered the importance of marketing. I agree to the OP's assessment that marketing is every bit as juicy as coding. Discovering a channel, executing a successful marketing campaign and crunching out hard ROI from it, seeing 10 customers because of it is as exciting (if not more) as learning the wonderful node.js and implementing a chat server on your own.<p>That said, I'd say after a certain scale, it becomes incredibly hard to do both: a) coding; and b) marketing. There's so much to do in both fields that you cannot do justice to both _at the same time_. So you have to eventually build a team and decide between coding or marketing (but the great part is that by that time you can afford to do this).

Speaking as a developer, I think I can see the analogy between dev and marketing. But from a learning perspective, software development has a big advantage. You can build everything from a hello world app to your own toy OS without being negatively impacted by existing software out there.<p>As a marketer, it seems like you always have to be on the cutting edge. What worked in the 1980s is unlikely to work in 2012. Even what was cool in 2008 is unlikely to be effective today. The next problem is that marketing is, by its nature, a public activity. Doing it badly is embarrassing and likely limits your ability to even give it a second try.

This is a topic near and dear to my heart; I am a developer who tried to take up marketing but gave up.<p>So this post's call to action is to read/listen/watch various resources; in sum they are probably dozens of hours of learning. With a little searching, I'm sure the actual material available stretches into hundreds of hours.<p>So my question, similar to the one I posted almost a year ago [0], is: what is the best available material out there, where I can learn 80% of marketing in 20% of the material?<p>0. <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2967010" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2967010</a>

I've always thought the person running the development team should understand marketing, and the person running the marketing efforts knows how to develop. The two are so intertwined, but at the same time, it's important to separate the effort. Just like in engineering, the devil is in the details not the conceptual idea. You want a marketing person who knows how to get everything just right, to get in front of customers, sign people up, etc

Feel free to call me a n00b or uncultured, but I don't get your anti-spam measures to subscribe to your posts via email.<p><i>Prove humanity by completing the lyric: "Blame..."</i> huh?

Although having great marketing skills is invaluable, I have come to the conclusion that having a deeper understanding of design is crucial to modern developers; it seems to me that more and more developers are cropping up and the demand has shifted from them to people with great design capabilities.<p>I guess the morale of the story is to learn everything you can!

So true. Reading books about marketing is good but they are too 'vague'. From my experience, executing marketing / selling is much harder (and more fun) than you think and the only way to learn it. Just get out of the building and start embarrassing yourself (literally).

Definitely agree here. I have a Marketing background but have been learning how to develop the past 3-4 months.<p>Marketing = Principles/Thoughts Software Development = technical/tangible skill<p>Marketing = Ideas; Software Development = Execution of those marketing ideas.

I'd like to hear more about non-web marketing like direct mail. I would think small businesses would be more receptive to that. After all, they might not realize they need your tool until you put an advertisement in front of them.

How to market on HN:<p><pre><code> - Write an interesting blog post and post it to HN - Include a link to something you're selling somewhere near the end of the post </code></pre> There are so many people doing this it's unreal.

The aim of a founder is not to be the best marketer or developer. It's goal should be knowing just enough to hire the best people in every field and lead the team. This what makes a great founder.

I support this message as a Marketing/Finance major turned software engineer.

I'd like to call these marketers Growth Hackers. They're a different breed of hackers, and they're just as important as the engineers. A successful startup should have at least ONE growth hacker in the team for it to be successful.

Note: I am not a developer. My experience is in e-commerce marketing and my degree (est. May 2013) is in Statistics.<p>I've loved the field of human persuasion for years, and I think I can add something that I have written in the past to this conversation. I essentially made a list of marketing "truths", based on my research and experience, and have tested it against others. What remains of the list is what no one has been able to refute, so I think it's decently close to a list of universal irrefutable "rules of marketing."<p>The Truths of Marketing<p>1) Ethos (your perceived character) is the most important.<p>2) People make judgments by comparison/anchoring.<p>3) People process information best from stories.<p>4) People are foremost interested in things that affect them.<p>5) Breaking patterns gets attention.<p>6) People look to other people's decisions when making decisions.<p>7) People will believe things more easily that fit their pre-existent mindset. The converse is also true.<p>8) People handle one idea at a time best.<p>9) People want more choices, but are happier with fewer.<p>10) People decide first, then rationalize - If people are stuck with something, they will like it more over time.<p>11) Experience is memory, the last part of the experience is weighted heavily.<p>* Keep in mind that this should not necessarily be used a checklist; see what the director of a large creative agency says on the subject:<p>"I think that in broad strokes these truisms are accurate, but they aren't really how I personally get to the bottom of the marketing equation when working on a brand.<p>Of them, I think 1 and 4 are probably the closest, but I think the biggest problem is the same problem you find in how any analysis of consumers, or what is usually called "consumer behavior" is used -- it is, by definition, one step removed from what you're trying to analyze, yet it's treated like the consumers themselves.<p>Because consumers are often perceived as black boxes to marketers, there's a temptation to analyze their behavior and then market to that analysis instead of to them. Maybe this is because I'm on the creative side, but for me the most useful role of research is to inform and guide what is a form of for our consumer. To not just analyze what drives them, but to genuinely it yourself.<p>Reading research about twelve-year-old girls' purchase decisions and focus group transcripts is not the same thing as thinking like one. I have a client in that market, and I read everything when I'm working on something -- research, web sites, fan magazines, television -- but none of it is a substitute for sitting in a dark room and genuinely trying to imagine the trials of what it must be like to actually be a twelve-year-old girl from a first person perspective.<p>It sounds absurd, but that's how you come up with great ideas -- to do your best to become a twelve-year-old girl, and then develop things that you would enjoy.<p>So I think truisms like yours are useful as long as they remain a means to an end, and not, as they so often do, a checklist, or worse, the end itself."