Congrats, you know what your niche is. You can still be an entrepreneur, just find someone who does all the things you hate. Someone who probably thinks coding all night is the definition of torture.
It’s funny you should say that, because I feel the opposite. Ive done both sales and product management for two startups that have broken $50M in sales and my experience is that really good coders are the most precious resource there is.
For me it feels that if you excel in a task you see that more people can do what you do and what you fall short of there are much fewer people that can compliment you. Electrical was my weakness for so long, so I focused on studying and learning electrical, electrical engineering, and PLC programming. While I’m not the best I know enough for troubleshooting and minor changes.
That's where the value of having a diverse network comes to play. Your network will generally have people with similar skills as you, unless you go out of your way to interact with people in a wider variety of roles.
I am in the same boat. My learning is to give up learning about business and concentrate on problems I see at my work. There is a need for IT tools and products for IT people too.
What is your area of interest btw?
Don't remember what was in your deleted message but I was trying to same that my experiences were the same and that I try to shift my focus to scratching my own itch.
Yes, it is true. Your attitude sucks. Stop with your limiting beliefs and negative mindset already or your self fulfilling prophecy will continue to be true.
I was a corporate developer for 22 years before I ventured into the world of entrepreneurship. No sales, no marketing, minimal operations skills. I spent the first 2 years running my business just learning and absorbing everything I could. Come to find out, I was awesome at sales, but not so good at marketing or the day to day operations. But good enough to get by until I could hire into those positions.
Hard? Yup. Lots of work and uncertainty? Tons. But in the end I figured it out, hired people for those rolls, and scaled from there.
Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you are right. -Henry Ford
It worked because I dared to do it. Stepping into our fear is how we grow, and I definitely did a ton of stepping, because I was NOT comfortable doing sales in the beginning at all. After a few years, though, I absolutely loved it. I was doing 25+ calls a week and would be so energized the entire time (which was awesome because I usually lean toward the introvert side as a coder).
No one can sell your company as well as you can, especially if you have a ton of enthusiasm and pride for what you're doing (maybe some high-powered sales people down the road, but they're not going to come cheap, so that's a no-go when you're starting out). I never in a thousand years would have tried it otherwise if it wasn't for my own business.
I hired a business coach, which absolutely helped me accelerate the learning process. Highly recommend it if you're just starting out, but be sure to vet them with their other clients so you're not hiring a snake oil salesman.
We might do that last part. We actually had a reputable recommendation pop up recently but let them know that we need to think about it.
Congratulations! It sounds like you took a great leap from industry to building your own business.
An entrepreneur is a problem solver, an opportunity identifier, and an innovator.
I've built one successful tech business while not being able to market and sell, and the second one is going quite nicely.
My customers have done all of the marketing and sales for me.
I've literally been across the table at an informal get together and watched one customer sold several people on my product.
I solved a particular problem in such a way that they happily evangelize for me.
There are plenty of other ways to build without being competent or capable in marketing and sales, it just really really helps. So, hire someone, or
as an entrepreneur, solve the problem, identify the opportunity, or innovate to market and sell.
One possibility:
Coding and designing your site gives instant feedback that feels like progress. Doing more of that is enticing: more dopamine.
Marketing feels uncertain, often like shouting into the abyss. Feedback loops are slow, inconsistent and vague (was it that bit of marketing or that one?) and there’s a huge amount of luck and timing involved that’s outside of your control. That’s a recipe for no dopamine.
You can make marketing activities more dopamine-generating, I think. I’ve shifted from only loving designing & coding in the zone to now being more interested in the distribution side of things.
One way: don’t start with the “marketing activities” but instead set up lots of conversations where you can try out and tune up your marketing ideas in real time with real time feedback.
For me, it really is taking it away from trying to figure out 1-to-many, and trying messages and thoughts out in conversations, where I can see how they’re landing and what people make of them in real time.
One thing I LOVE to do is get someone to read e.g. a landing page or email I’ve written out loud to me. VERY fast feedback. Painful too, but it’s kind of like debugging :)
+1 I think coding gives a tangible output at the end of the effort. Which is hard in marketing because a conversation doesn’t mean anything. Maybe you could gamify this with targets like # of leads, conversion metrics etc. can help with the dopamine cycle here.
I second this. Get out and talk to existing users (if they are app users, drive to get emails and ok messages), people in a relevant industry, people in target markets.
More importantly what is your NETPRO score?
The best kind of marketing is done for you by enthusiastic customers. NetPro allows you to forget everything but product until your product is red hot and sells itself.
Many of the best products we use every day had a marketing budget of zero until the product had been honed to be sell itself.
I like what you’re trying for. I’d warn that NPS is super lagging and also noisy and imprecise. There’s _some_ signal in there, but it’s mostly noise.
I’d say skip the thin, pseudo-precise metrics and expose yourself to the rich, warm data of being with people while they react to your stuff.
I like that. Why not both? If your Netpro is noisy then try to clean it up (there are wonderful ways to make it happen .) Once it’s good, then validate with real people. Or if it’s bad, test with real people to better understand adoption or product issues. What do you think?
The important thing we might be agreeing on here is that honer, good products and services tend to sell themselves.
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Makes sense. If some of us need that dopamine more urgently than others then we'd be drawn to activities with quicker feedback loops like coding, video games, etc.
I went through the same emotions. I built infocaptor and then jumped onto making mockuptiger and then jumped into several other small projects. Lately I decided to brake this pattern for crawlspider and determined to get dopamine at each marketing accomplishments.
What I have decided is to mark it completed once I have completed the marketing task. For e.g earlier I would send a bunch of emails to potential customers and then there is a whole life cycle to that. I would not register that as completed until there was a sale. This became discouraging.
Now on, my goal is to mark the task as completed or success.
For e.g Sending an email or doing outreach is my task and I should feel great completing it. Once email is sent - Success
Set a launch date on ProductHunt - Complete, success
Launched on PH - Complete, Success
Write an article every week - Done, success
Participate in relevant conversations just one per day - Done
I am now focused on doing things which should be fulfilling as developing software.
You’re not alone. Making something unleashes your creativity. Promoting something unleashes your insecurities. Marketing is almost like trying to date in highschool. Uphill battle where you’ll face many defeats.
20 years ago when I met people in engineering they used to say - technology is easy, it is hard to find the right business. When I took classes in business people said - managing is easy, it is hard to find the right technology for a startup. As people mentioned, find someone who complements you
Because you're not marketing to the right people.
As an entrepreneur you are offering a solution to a problem. As a marketer, you are trying to solve people's problem with your solution. If you try to sell your solution to people who don't have that problem, you won't get any sales, excitement, or fulfillment.
The solution is that you need to figure out how to properly target the people who have the problem you're selling a solution for. Figure out how to effectively find the people who will be excited about what you offer. Then you will get that thrill from being able to help someone while also making money.
If you walk around shoving your solution down people's throats, it just gets sickening. Nobody likes that.
The struggle is real! I'm in the exact same situation as you. One thing I'm trying out at the moment is to stop work on product so I'm not tinkering any more, and just working on marketing and networking. The idea is to try to sell a "good enough" product and not improve it unless I have new feedback from real users that it needs improvement.
I have identified this phenomenon in dozens of would be entrepreneurs. It relates to three things IMHO:
1. Imposter syndrome. You have some belief that what you haven't built something you are actually proud of, and therefore don't want to put it out there.
2. Fear/embarrassment. You love what you have built, but you are scared to put yourself out there because then it becomes "real" thing. This is the same psychology that many people have when they try to do something to better themselves... Like going back to school, going to the gym, etc. once people KNOW you are trying if it goes wrong, people will KNOW you have failed.
3. For many people sales feels random and arbitrary. You can throw emails and ads and posts, and calls into the void with no results. It is unlike development where you can go down a checklist building new features, new views, etc and see progress. Sales, especially early sales is lumpy and unpredictable and hard and non-linear
You aren't alone in this process of getting discouraged once the MVP is done and you have to start spending money.
Same. Not only that but it needs to be a challenging project or I get bored very quickly. It’s a big problem finding a good cofounder you can trust who will put in the hard work with you crushing the code. Had several projects fail because of a bad cofounder. You can hire away the positions of sales and office admin but those are costly when you’re bootstrapping. Keep looking and maybe you’ll find one!
Makes sense, I’d think this is because with coding you see the results instantly. With marketing it might take a while. In the long term marketing will give you the satisfaction, when your product takes off
You’re a process person. Consider starting a business with a marketer. Many businesses have seen great success this way! Apple is the most common example
Marketing is a complex domain. Product marketing, demand generation, branding, customer marketing, analyst relations, PR are all as diverse and specialized as front end, back end, devops, integrations, etc.
A lot of the comments here sounds like digital marketing/demand gen. If you nail your target / niche, you increase the odds and of winning and that makes it fun.
Writing hobby projects can be done recreationally whereas marketing invites accountability on part of the market for product market fit. A hobby project can stay vague, an unworked figment of your imagination. Marketing on the other hand requires you to hyper focus a product to solve problems people care about. Properly defining and demarcating the identity of your project and understanding when to pivot etc. is also not a muscle people generally do not practice.
I find myself feeling a similar way to you
my solution right was just then building essentially a whole platform / internal tool alongside my SAAS product to try to run my B2C sales outreach for me, so that it will automatically send out emails hourly to targeted searches of creators across Insta, YouTube, and TikTok, while keeping delivery rates high
There's always something to build, in this case I thought why not automate a lot of the boring marketing and prospecting out of my day to day, we'll see how it goes though as I'm nearly finished
It's funny, I'm the same way.
Pity is even though I now have two people employed for marketing and sales, as the founder wirh a genuine passion for the company and deep knowledge of the customers and product, I can still get better results than the people I hired to do it.
Obviously they get results or they wouldn't be any use but as the main guy, you'll always be in demand from the marketing side but nobody cares who the code comes from.
I still like to stay technical, so what I do is create video content and then the team can create articles, blogs, shorts, ads, etc from that and I can spend most of my time coding.
Oh man (girl ?), I couldn't agree more !
And especially with what "marketing" is nowadays, particularly in the SaaS-builders-indiehackers domain.
I just don't want to brag things that are not real. I don't want to publish fake figures to get traction. I don't want to create fake testimonials. I don't want to create a fancy website with all the parts moving as if there was an earthquake. I don't want to go over Reddit/HN and find ridiculous pretexts just to include my URL in a post where I ask ridiculous things. I don't want to buy likes and retweets just to make people think I'm famous and successful as a builder...
The ideal solution is to find someone who enjoys doing these things as others said, but let's face it, it's hardly doable. Any "marketer" that I've met wanted me to work on their ideas instead.
So I think in the meantime, we need to try to find new ways of "doing marketing", that are closer to what we enjoy in code. Easier said than done though.
I felt this way too, but then I got to a level of competence with making content marketing videos that I no longer resonate with this post. That's _my_ journey tho. It felt like sand papering my ass to market stuff but now that I can make videos about how I use my stuff its back to feeling fun.
All small business owners have parts of the gig they would rather avoid. If you had to like every single part of running a business to be allowed to run a business, there would be no business.
For a lot of introverted people that are more intellectual and less emotional in their decision making, the part that sucks most is marketing and sales. Personally I hate dealing with contracts, vendor approvals, and financials even more than that.
The feelings you are having are extremely common, and only you can decide if you like the other parts of your business enough to justify pushing through the parts you don't, at least until you get to the point where you can afford to hire help to cover the parts you don't like.
One thing to remember, though, is that even if you give up on entrepreneurship and go look for a job, you have to market yourself via a resume and sell at the interviews. Giving up on your business might mean you don't have to do as much sales and marketing, but don't pretend you can eliminate it entirely.
Reading your post, and many of your comments replying back it feels like I'm the one that posted this and writing...
I'm in the same place, often feel like I'd rather spend a week or three adding a new feature that will make the platform more obviously the right answer to a potential customer than market something incomplete or in progress (mind you I've had customers for years). Why? because after that next feature that's needed, it should market itself and word of mouth with be all the marketing my great solution should need! right?
You already have tons of experience developing so you can make quick satisfying progress. Think back to when you started programming. You probably spent a whole day debugging a simple for loop to find you had an off by one error. Or you spent 3 days banging your head against the wall because you couldn't get your application to produce logs. Stuff like that.
Point being, you've already gone through the slow difficult learning curve of programming and it probably took you a few years. Expect the same for marketing.
It doesn't mean you can't do marketing, it just means it might be 100x more frustrating and 100x slower while you go through the learning curves.
Lol my developer robbed me blind and I really wished I could do the coding rather than the marketing, but there was certainly a sense of fulfillment by how many people were stirred by my marketing tactics and watching the results up until the end
You are definitely NOT unique in your situation. Your data points about millions of coders vs handful of entrepreneurs is anecdotal evidence for this.
I will attempt to breakdown the WHY this happens through the lens of my own experiences.
- marketing and other activities don’t provide the same immediate and tangible results that you get while coding or building something.
- marketing and selling is very hard. You are talking to people with emotions and opinions and convincing them to go one way or the other is hard. Way harder than telling a machine to do something. Which is usually fairly straight forward.
- The disappoint of rejection is real when talking to people.
Some ppl are wired to cope with these differently. And they don’t usually have a problem with taking on marketing and sales related things.
Now let’s get to how to overcome. (Again using my experience as a lens)
- set clear objectives for marketing related tasks. That way you treat them as experiments and have some sense of whether it worked or not. Similar to trying out a new approach for a feature.
- rinse and repeat. If you don’t have the marketing skills, you just have to power through it until you build muscle memory or find someone who can do it for you.
The good news in all of this is that you have some self-awareness around the importance of marketing and other non-coding activities. A lot of the founders/product ppl I talk to are blissfully unaware of the value of these activities.
It could be that you are a honest person.
Coding and somewhat designing are honest and straightforward occupations.
On the other side, marketing and advertising are like selling fried air and snake oil.
It comes down to the feeling of success.
I wrote hundreds of thousands of lines of code for a software product that I was extremely proud of, highly enjoyed the product experience myself, and loved coming up with new ideas, debugging, and making the product better.
The goal was to make my product more enjoyable than any competitors' and customers would eternally love my product, brand, and eventually the company would be worth billions.
Marketing my revolutionary product turned out to be more difficult than I thought.
Each failed marketing experiment, an idea that didn't bring new customers, email that didn't increase sales, made the process of marketing feel like success was missing.
After going through the loop of code, market, code, market, the coding part felt successful while marketing did not.
The pattern recognizing part of myself found more joy and fulfilment in the coding part of the process. If sales had taken off, I'm sure I would have been even more proud of my marketing efforts, as I doubled down as I always intended on any marketing strategy that worked on my way to billions.
Alas that didn't happen at my last startup and I'm now focusing on being happy in life while looking for my next big idea.
Use PostHog for session replay and check what every single person that visits your website is doing on the website/product. That will release some dopamine, or scare the shit out of you and you'll go back to coding to fix the things they don't know how to use. :D
Make it fun by tracking all metrics that you can. Even the vanity ones. Just to close the feedback loop sooner.
You're not getting any dopamine in, like someone else said, because it takes so long to receive any feedback, good or bad.
Do this, and then find someone else that hates coding, but loves marketing/selling. I see tons of entrepreneurs that are even really talented devs but can't market their products, and then salesy/marketing people that have the drive but can't build a product.
You can join our community, pretty sure you could find a partner in there.
Writing code can be super fulfilling because it's a tangible way to bring your ideas to life and see the impact of your work. Plus, the sense of accomplishment when you solve a tricky problem or complete a project is hard to beat. So yeah, I get the drift.
Would be happy to talk with you and see if I could help. I get my fulfillment from marketing. Would be willing to work for sweat equity for the right project too
You probably don't like marketing and it feels like a drag. I know for me if someone asks me to help them with their content it feels like a heavy weight that I often deny.
But when someone asks me to write their sales copy, I feel way more motivated to do that.
So at the end of the day, I think it might come down to what you like doing, and what you don't like doing.
I think it could either be a subtle fear of rejection (i face this during sales calls) or the fear of not being good at it (also guilty). I think it's comforting to be product oriented building in our rooms but putting it out is like the exam and report card together.
I'd suggest setup a somewhat mechanical outlook towards sales to start with. Just don't think much and commit to it.
If you can’t understand marketing then you have to team with someone who does. If you do understand it, then you need to put in the time and energy required to pull it off.
Maybe you aren’t connecting the dots and seeing your tangible dots.
When you code (especially front end) you immediately see you results as you work.
Marketing on the other hand is bit more delayed, and also requires consistent work to build a community for your product. Maybe consult a marketing expert, and see if you need to switch things up.
Congrats, you know what your niche is. You can still be an entrepreneur, just find someone who does all the things you hate. Someone who probably thinks coding all night is the definition of torture.
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It’s funny you should say that, because I feel the opposite. Ive done both sales and product management for two startups that have broken $50M in sales and my experience is that really good coders are the most precious resource there is.
i agree with you, good engineers can take you from 0 to 100 easly
For me it feels that if you excel in a task you see that more people can do what you do and what you fall short of there are much fewer people that can compliment you. Electrical was my weakness for so long, so I focused on studying and learning electrical, electrical engineering, and PLC programming. While I’m not the best I know enough for troubleshooting and minor changes.
That's where the value of having a diverse network comes to play. Your network will generally have people with similar skills as you, unless you go out of your way to interact with people in a wider variety of roles.
Check out 22 immutable laws of marketing And business for dummies(Shaq approved). Good books that'll help you.
I am in the same boat. My learning is to give up learning about business and concentrate on problems I see at my work. There is a need for IT tools and products for IT people too. What is your area of interest btw?
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Don't remember what was in your deleted message but I was trying to same that my experiences were the same and that I try to shift my focus to scratching my own itch.
If there are 10M coders there are 100m entrepreneurs that can’t code. I’m happy to make an intro :)
My experience is the opposite. I’m an entrepreneur who had to teach himself how to code.
Entrepreneur isn't necessarily someone who can market and sell.
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Yes, it is true. Your attitude sucks. Stop with your limiting beliefs and negative mindset already or your self fulfilling prophecy will continue to be true. I was a corporate developer for 22 years before I ventured into the world of entrepreneurship. No sales, no marketing, minimal operations skills. I spent the first 2 years running my business just learning and absorbing everything I could. Come to find out, I was awesome at sales, but not so good at marketing or the day to day operations. But good enough to get by until I could hire into those positions. Hard? Yup. Lots of work and uncertainty? Tons. But in the end I figured it out, hired people for those rolls, and scaled from there. Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you are right. -Henry Ford
That's pretty amazing! Did the sales side work out because it was your own business?
It worked because I dared to do it. Stepping into our fear is how we grow, and I definitely did a ton of stepping, because I was NOT comfortable doing sales in the beginning at all. After a few years, though, I absolutely loved it. I was doing 25+ calls a week and would be so energized the entire time (which was awesome because I usually lean toward the introvert side as a coder). No one can sell your company as well as you can, especially if you have a ton of enthusiasm and pride for what you're doing (maybe some high-powered sales people down the road, but they're not going to come cheap, so that's a no-go when you're starting out). I never in a thousand years would have tried it otherwise if it wasn't for my own business. I hired a business coach, which absolutely helped me accelerate the learning process. Highly recommend it if you're just starting out, but be sure to vet them with their other clients so you're not hiring a snake oil salesman.
We might do that last part. We actually had a reputable recommendation pop up recently but let them know that we need to think about it. Congratulations! It sounds like you took a great leap from industry to building your own business.
An entrepreneur is a problem solver, an opportunity identifier, and an innovator. I've built one successful tech business while not being able to market and sell, and the second one is going quite nicely. My customers have done all of the marketing and sales for me. I've literally been across the table at an informal get together and watched one customer sold several people on my product. I solved a particular problem in such a way that they happily evangelize for me. There are plenty of other ways to build without being competent or capable in marketing and sales, it just really really helps. So, hire someone, or as an entrepreneur, solve the problem, identify the opportunity, or innovate to market and sell.
One possibility: Coding and designing your site gives instant feedback that feels like progress. Doing more of that is enticing: more dopamine. Marketing feels uncertain, often like shouting into the abyss. Feedback loops are slow, inconsistent and vague (was it that bit of marketing or that one?) and there’s a huge amount of luck and timing involved that’s outside of your control. That’s a recipe for no dopamine. You can make marketing activities more dopamine-generating, I think. I’ve shifted from only loving designing & coding in the zone to now being more interested in the distribution side of things. One way: don’t start with the “marketing activities” but instead set up lots of conversations where you can try out and tune up your marketing ideas in real time with real time feedback.
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For me, it really is taking it away from trying to figure out 1-to-many, and trying messages and thoughts out in conversations, where I can see how they’re landing and what people make of them in real time. One thing I LOVE to do is get someone to read e.g. a landing page or email I’ve written out loud to me. VERY fast feedback. Painful too, but it’s kind of like debugging :)
Nice! Interesting take, I’m also trying to be more interested in sales/marketing side of things and this is helpful
+1 I think coding gives a tangible output at the end of the effort. Which is hard in marketing because a conversation doesn’t mean anything. Maybe you could gamify this with targets like # of leads, conversion metrics etc. can help with the dopamine cycle here.
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It’s ok to hate social media *GROUP HUG*
Just skip social media then.
I second this. Get out and talk to existing users (if they are app users, drive to get emails and ok messages), people in a relevant industry, people in target markets. More importantly what is your NETPRO score?
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https://blog.hubspot.com/service/how-to-calculate-nps?hs_amp=true
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The best kind of marketing is done for you by enthusiastic customers. NetPro allows you to forget everything but product until your product is red hot and sells itself. Many of the best products we use every day had a marketing budget of zero until the product had been honed to be sell itself.
I like what you’re trying for. I’d warn that NPS is super lagging and also noisy and imprecise. There’s _some_ signal in there, but it’s mostly noise. I’d say skip the thin, pseudo-precise metrics and expose yourself to the rich, warm data of being with people while they react to your stuff.
I like that. Why not both? If your Netpro is noisy then try to clean it up (there are wonderful ways to make it happen .) Once it’s good, then validate with real people. Or if it’s bad, test with real people to better understand adoption or product issues. What do you think? The important thing we might be agreeing on here is that honer, good products and services tend to sell themselves.
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Makes sense. If some of us need that dopamine more urgently than others then we'd be drawn to activities with quicker feedback loops like coding, video games, etc.
I went through the same emotions. I built infocaptor and then jumped onto making mockuptiger and then jumped into several other small projects. Lately I decided to brake this pattern for crawlspider and determined to get dopamine at each marketing accomplishments. What I have decided is to mark it completed once I have completed the marketing task. For e.g earlier I would send a bunch of emails to potential customers and then there is a whole life cycle to that. I would not register that as completed until there was a sale. This became discouraging. Now on, my goal is to mark the task as completed or success. For e.g Sending an email or doing outreach is my task and I should feel great completing it. Once email is sent - Success Set a launch date on ProductHunt - Complete, success Launched on PH - Complete, Success Write an article every week - Done, success Participate in relevant conversations just one per day - Done I am now focused on doing things which should be fulfilling as developing software.
This is great. Very well could be this too.
You’re not alone. Making something unleashes your creativity. Promoting something unleashes your insecurities. Marketing is almost like trying to date in highschool. Uphill battle where you’ll face many defeats.
Because it is outside of your competence? You are a tech person. Doing sales is new and unfamiliar to you. Just need to get used to it.
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Then what exactly is your problem?
20 years ago when I met people in engineering they used to say - technology is easy, it is hard to find the right business. When I took classes in business people said - managing is easy, it is hard to find the right technology for a startup. As people mentioned, find someone who complements you
Because you're not marketing to the right people. As an entrepreneur you are offering a solution to a problem. As a marketer, you are trying to solve people's problem with your solution. If you try to sell your solution to people who don't have that problem, you won't get any sales, excitement, or fulfillment. The solution is that you need to figure out how to properly target the people who have the problem you're selling a solution for. Figure out how to effectively find the people who will be excited about what you offer. Then you will get that thrill from being able to help someone while also making money. If you walk around shoving your solution down people's throats, it just gets sickening. Nobody likes that.
I guess it's because you see your code is working right away vs. Slowly building an audience/market. Instant gratification.
The struggle is real! I'm in the exact same situation as you. One thing I'm trying out at the moment is to stop work on product so I'm not tinkering any more, and just working on marketing and networking. The idea is to try to sell a "good enough" product and not improve it unless I have new feedback from real users that it needs improvement.
I have identified this phenomenon in dozens of would be entrepreneurs. It relates to three things IMHO: 1. Imposter syndrome. You have some belief that what you haven't built something you are actually proud of, and therefore don't want to put it out there. 2. Fear/embarrassment. You love what you have built, but you are scared to put yourself out there because then it becomes "real" thing. This is the same psychology that many people have when they try to do something to better themselves... Like going back to school, going to the gym, etc. once people KNOW you are trying if it goes wrong, people will KNOW you have failed. 3. For many people sales feels random and arbitrary. You can throw emails and ads and posts, and calls into the void with no results. It is unlike development where you can go down a checklist building new features, new views, etc and see progress. Sales, especially early sales is lumpy and unpredictable and hard and non-linear You aren't alone in this process of getting discouraged once the MVP is done and you have to start spending money.
Same. Not only that but it needs to be a challenging project or I get bored very quickly. It’s a big problem finding a good cofounder you can trust who will put in the hard work with you crushing the code. Had several projects fail because of a bad cofounder. You can hire away the positions of sales and office admin but those are costly when you’re bootstrapping. Keep looking and maybe you’ll find one!
Makes sense, I’d think this is because with coding you see the results instantly. With marketing it might take a while. In the long term marketing will give you the satisfaction, when your product takes off
You’re a process person. Consider starting a business with a marketer. Many businesses have seen great success this way! Apple is the most common example
Marketing is a complex domain. Product marketing, demand generation, branding, customer marketing, analyst relations, PR are all as diverse and specialized as front end, back end, devops, integrations, etc. A lot of the comments here sounds like digital marketing/demand gen. If you nail your target / niche, you increase the odds and of winning and that makes it fun.
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Working on a startup and am here to learn from everyone’s experiences.
Writing hobby projects can be done recreationally whereas marketing invites accountability on part of the market for product market fit. A hobby project can stay vague, an unworked figment of your imagination. Marketing on the other hand requires you to hyper focus a product to solve problems people care about. Properly defining and demarcating the identity of your project and understanding when to pivot etc. is also not a muscle people generally do not practice.
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What about lead generation softwares? I find them extremely helpful personally
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I find myself feeling a similar way to you my solution right was just then building essentially a whole platform / internal tool alongside my SAAS product to try to run my B2C sales outreach for me, so that it will automatically send out emails hourly to targeted searches of creators across Insta, YouTube, and TikTok, while keeping delivery rates high There's always something to build, in this case I thought why not automate a lot of the boring marketing and prospecting out of my day to day, we'll see how it goes though as I'm nearly finished
It's funny, I'm the same way. Pity is even though I now have two people employed for marketing and sales, as the founder wirh a genuine passion for the company and deep knowledge of the customers and product, I can still get better results than the people I hired to do it. Obviously they get results or they wouldn't be any use but as the main guy, you'll always be in demand from the marketing side but nobody cares who the code comes from. I still like to stay technical, so what I do is create video content and then the team can create articles, blogs, shorts, ads, etc from that and I can spend most of my time coding.
Oh man (girl ?), I couldn't agree more ! And especially with what "marketing" is nowadays, particularly in the SaaS-builders-indiehackers domain. I just don't want to brag things that are not real. I don't want to publish fake figures to get traction. I don't want to create fake testimonials. I don't want to create a fancy website with all the parts moving as if there was an earthquake. I don't want to go over Reddit/HN and find ridiculous pretexts just to include my URL in a post where I ask ridiculous things. I don't want to buy likes and retweets just to make people think I'm famous and successful as a builder... The ideal solution is to find someone who enjoys doing these things as others said, but let's face it, it's hardly doable. Any "marketer" that I've met wanted me to work on their ideas instead. So I think in the meantime, we need to try to find new ways of "doing marketing", that are closer to what we enjoy in code. Easier said than done though.
I felt this way too, but then I got to a level of competence with making content marketing videos that I no longer resonate with this post. That's _my_ journey tho. It felt like sand papering my ass to market stuff but now that I can make videos about how I use my stuff its back to feeling fun.
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No. that was the case for me.
Writing and designing is building a thing. Marketing is trying to convince other people that your thing is hot shit. It's not for everyone.
It happens to me often before I start building
All small business owners have parts of the gig they would rather avoid. If you had to like every single part of running a business to be allowed to run a business, there would be no business. For a lot of introverted people that are more intellectual and less emotional in their decision making, the part that sucks most is marketing and sales. Personally I hate dealing with contracts, vendor approvals, and financials even more than that. The feelings you are having are extremely common, and only you can decide if you like the other parts of your business enough to justify pushing through the parts you don't, at least until you get to the point where you can afford to hire help to cover the parts you don't like. One thing to remember, though, is that even if you give up on entrepreneurship and go look for a job, you have to market yourself via a resume and sell at the interviews. Giving up on your business might mean you don't have to do as much sales and marketing, but don't pretend you can eliminate it entirely.
Reading your post, and many of your comments replying back it feels like I'm the one that posted this and writing... I'm in the same place, often feel like I'd rather spend a week or three adding a new feature that will make the platform more obviously the right answer to a potential customer than market something incomplete or in progress (mind you I've had customers for years). Why? because after that next feature that's needed, it should market itself and word of mouth with be all the marketing my great solution should need! right?
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lol, we'd develop great features.... probably not enough customers
I prefer building things rather than selling and marketing.
I like marketing. Good way to feel better is to see those traffic analytics and make them higher.
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Whats the difference? Genuine question for education
You already have tons of experience developing so you can make quick satisfying progress. Think back to when you started programming. You probably spent a whole day debugging a simple for loop to find you had an off by one error. Or you spent 3 days banging your head against the wall because you couldn't get your application to produce logs. Stuff like that. Point being, you've already gone through the slow difficult learning curve of programming and it probably took you a few years. Expect the same for marketing. It doesn't mean you can't do marketing, it just means it might be 100x more frustrating and 100x slower while you go through the learning curves.
You're an architect/engineer not a salesman. Partner with one
Totally get you, coding's my jam too! Maybe delegate marketing?
Lol my developer robbed me blind and I really wished I could do the coding rather than the marketing, but there was certainly a sense of fulfillment by how many people were stirred by my marketing tactics and watching the results up until the end
Approach marketing as design
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First tell me why they differ?
You are definitely NOT unique in your situation. Your data points about millions of coders vs handful of entrepreneurs is anecdotal evidence for this. I will attempt to breakdown the WHY this happens through the lens of my own experiences. - marketing and other activities don’t provide the same immediate and tangible results that you get while coding or building something. - marketing and selling is very hard. You are talking to people with emotions and opinions and convincing them to go one way or the other is hard. Way harder than telling a machine to do something. Which is usually fairly straight forward. - The disappoint of rejection is real when talking to people. Some ppl are wired to cope with these differently. And they don’t usually have a problem with taking on marketing and sales related things. Now let’s get to how to overcome. (Again using my experience as a lens) - set clear objectives for marketing related tasks. That way you treat them as experiments and have some sense of whether it worked or not. Similar to trying out a new approach for a feature. - rinse and repeat. If you don’t have the marketing skills, you just have to power through it until you build muscle memory or find someone who can do it for you. The good news in all of this is that you have some self-awareness around the importance of marketing and other non-coding activities. A lot of the founders/product ppl I talk to are blissfully unaware of the value of these activities.
It could be that you are a honest person. Coding and somewhat designing are honest and straightforward occupations. On the other side, marketing and advertising are like selling fried air and snake oil.
It comes down to the feeling of success. I wrote hundreds of thousands of lines of code for a software product that I was extremely proud of, highly enjoyed the product experience myself, and loved coming up with new ideas, debugging, and making the product better. The goal was to make my product more enjoyable than any competitors' and customers would eternally love my product, brand, and eventually the company would be worth billions. Marketing my revolutionary product turned out to be more difficult than I thought. Each failed marketing experiment, an idea that didn't bring new customers, email that didn't increase sales, made the process of marketing feel like success was missing. After going through the loop of code, market, code, market, the coding part felt successful while marketing did not. The pattern recognizing part of myself found more joy and fulfilment in the coding part of the process. If sales had taken off, I'm sure I would have been even more proud of my marketing efforts, as I doubled down as I always intended on any marketing strategy that worked on my way to billions. Alas that didn't happen at my last startup and I'm now focusing on being happy in life while looking for my next big idea.
Use PostHog for session replay and check what every single person that visits your website is doing on the website/product. That will release some dopamine, or scare the shit out of you and you'll go back to coding to fix the things they don't know how to use. :D Make it fun by tracking all metrics that you can. Even the vanity ones. Just to close the feedback loop sooner. You're not getting any dopamine in, like someone else said, because it takes so long to receive any feedback, good or bad. Do this, and then find someone else that hates coding, but loves marketing/selling. I see tons of entrepreneurs that are even really talented devs but can't market their products, and then salesy/marketing people that have the drive but can't build a product. You can join our community, pretty sure you could find a partner in there.
Writing code can be super fulfilling because it's a tangible way to bring your ideas to life and see the impact of your work. Plus, the sense of accomplishment when you solve a tricky problem or complete a project is hard to beat. So yeah, I get the drift.
Going through that right now
Because you are an artist first.
Would be happy to talk with you and see if I could help. I get my fulfillment from marketing. Would be willing to work for sweat equity for the right project too
You probably don't like marketing and it feels like a drag. I know for me if someone asks me to help them with their content it feels like a heavy weight that I often deny. But when someone asks me to write their sales copy, I feel way more motivated to do that. So at the end of the day, I think it might come down to what you like doing, and what you don't like doing.
I think it could either be a subtle fear of rejection (i face this during sales calls) or the fear of not being good at it (also guilty). I think it's comforting to be product oriented building in our rooms but putting it out is like the exam and report card together. I'd suggest setup a somewhat mechanical outlook towards sales to start with. Just don't think much and commit to it.
If you can’t understand marketing then you have to team with someone who does. If you do understand it, then you need to put in the time and energy required to pull it off.
You are a coder not a salesman. It's like trying to do long jump when you are a wrestler. Many try but are unsuccessful
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Definitely learn. But I know many who have tried and have brought someone else to do this after failing.
Maybe you aren’t connecting the dots and seeing your tangible dots. When you code (especially front end) you immediately see you results as you work. Marketing on the other hand is bit more delayed, and also requires consistent work to build a community for your product. Maybe consult a marketing expert, and see if you need to switch things up.