"Marketing has humbled me"

Absolutely! it is a game of patience and willingness to keep improving.

And it has okay been a few weeks! Imagine those who go years without getting success. It really does take at least 18 months in most cases to build an audience, trust, brand and eventual steady sales. SAAS is a long game as I had to learn as well. Thankfully, I’m nothing but patient as a serial entrepreneur. If you hang in there, it can pay off. And the skills you’ll develop along the way will be invaluable.

Hi guys Sales and marketing guy here. Just wanted to drop this as a way to help you all out. Marketing is a way of passing your product information to a prospective customer(not to everyone, just a prospective customer). Sales is that art of getting that prospective to buy in to your idea, product or service. To help here, get offline, go looking for physical customers or businesses who you believe will be interested in what you offer. Prepare yourself, cos you will fail most time. Just tell yourselves you are looking for one person

It’s a very tough game. Just focus on where you can find them communities that you fix something for and be consistent. If you have the former right, I think it’s just consistency until you get your first few customers. Upload their testimonies and work on SEO. My app took months to build, I think marketing is just the same. We are competing against people who have been marketing a product for months and years. It won’t come easy unless you have a very rare and niche product. Good luck out there.

Currently in the same boat.. Decided to pull the trigger on coursera google marketing certs. Learned a lot for now. I don’t like just doing stuff just because so I always try to learn more about it… let’s see if the learning will help at the end

what u building OP?

Build a brand is hard. But I think that in this era it’s a key thing. Build a strong Brand (roots) and you can ship whatever you love. Hope one day will be there 🤞

yeah, building is one thing, getting people to see it is a whole different beast. i've been using replyhey.com to find threads where people are actually asking about problems my app solves, then jumping in naturally. takes the guesswork out of where to post.

I just joined a startup with my friend and I was clear that I could definitely not do any sort of 'selling' because I'm just SO bad at it (she agreed to take that on for now). I applaud people that can do it. (seriously, what are your secrets?! how do you get over the hump of both feeling cringe and like you are just a snake oil salesmen type?!) But I also recognize that it takes the whole team and I will (at some point) have to get people to want to use it once we build the MVP for testing. I am terrified of this because, yeah, I'm more of a behind the scenes organizer not a "Here's why you need this!" kind of sales person. I do believe in the product/company (or else I honestly wouldn't have jumped on) but I just struggle with conveying that to others without feeling overly corporate/salesmen-y

I feel you. I’m almost at the same spot as you, built an app for my sports community, set up 2 dates for live presentation (around 100 ppl in my community). First presentation, no one came.Second one 1 person :D It’s an free app It’s tough

I feel you. I was also humbled when I was forced to do marketing for my app. But previously, being a software engineer is also really hard, it just became less "hard" because of AI that even non-tech people can now build their ideas unless it is really complex that they need a programmer

the empty stadium part is real, and I think it's because posting to promote is the version that needs an audience to work at all. the thing that doesn't is talking to one person who already has the problem. slow and not satisfying, but it's the only thing that's ever produced anything for me with nobody watching.

This is the problem with the software engineers. They see a poorly built product and think I can do better however they quickly realize that software is but a small part of the bigger picture. Unless you find a way to sell it to people, your product will never see the light of day, no matter how Superior it is to its competitors. This is one of the reasons why people join companies like Y combinator. It has less to do with just building software, but more to do with the business connections and partnerships that you can sell the software to even if it's half baked. And Y combinator helps with those relationships.

I found that developers often love building and shipping products, but marketing and sales are a completely different game. This is where you need to clearly define your ICP and build your marketing strategy around that ICP instead of keeping it generic. You need to understand exactly why your ICP would buy your solution and what problem they are trying to solve. If you’ve built a consumer app here's my two cents could be helpful if apply them. Fix your ASO first Optimize your metadata around relevant keywords. Make screenshots highlight the core benefits, not just features. Avoid filling screenshots with heavy text. Make sure your App Store messaging connects with the psychology and motivations of your ICP. We Humans often use mental shortcuts when making decisions, so your App Store listing needs to communicate the right message quickly like with 3 to 6 seconds and clearly Use ASO to get your initial traction Think of ASO as getting your app from 1 to 100 users depending on niche regardless of where your traffic comes from, users eventually have to land on your store page and decide whether to install. But to go from 100 to 1000+ users, you’ll usually need additional distribution channels depending on your app, niche, and ICP. Analyze your funnel after you have enough data once you reach around 1000 users, start analyzing the entire funnel and user behavior. Look at: Retention Engagement Activation Conversion Where users drop off How frequently they use the app If the data shows that users are getting value from your product keep investing in distribution. If the data shows that users aren't staying or getting value, fix the product first because you can't effectively market or scale a broken product.

Feel you brother. But paid distribution is the only way out. There are basically 2 problems to solve. First, Getting the 100k eyes, and then second, marketing your product to them.Trying to find a solution to the first problem is what humbles us. As programmers and builders we dont really have an audience since we spend most our life talking with computers in their “languages” only. But luckily for us, its also the problem thats solved by influencers, and we can benefit it using paid influencer campaigns. Once you have 100k eyes on your product its totally upto your creative freedom to convert them and somehow make them use your product atleast once by running some offer or strategies.

How to find paid influencers, any tips or advice? And what are their fees in general for a saas product for trades companies if you know, or any influencers if you know?

Same boat, different week. Twenty years for you, four years plus a product I launched last month for me. The building part was the part I knew how to do. What's hitting me right now is that "no audience" and "no distribution" aren't the same problem, and I spent weeks solving the first one thinking it was the second. Posting into the void builds an audience eventually — maybe six months, maybe twelve. That's a real strategy if you have the runway. I don't, and from your post I'd guess you'd rather not wait that long either. The thing I'm trying now, no results yet so take it for what it's worth: going back through people I already worked with over the past few years and asking for twenty minutes, not for signups. Twenty conversations instead of twenty posts. Feels much worse to do and probably works better. The one part I'd push back on: twenty years of engineering didn't prepare you for zero of it. You know what actually breaks in production and what people complain about at 3am. That's the raw material for anything worth saying. What's missing is the habit of saying it out loud, and that's a smaller gap than it feels like right now.

to make a point tho i think if someone were to do it with the opposite background as you(years of experience in marketing but no tech skills), theyll have an even harder time

Get a cofounder who understand Go to market, you’ll go a long way

Right there with you! Just launched my project (25+ years in various aspects of IT and broadcasting) and I knew building it was the easy part, but even knowing that it's still a very daunting and humbling task to put some initial announcements out there and hear crickets. I'm trying to go the organic route with specific community engagement, and in the process now of trying to hone the "elevator pitch" to quickly get folk's head around the pain my project addresses. It's also hard to stay focused when I have two others in the pipeline. One at a time! I'd love to share what our projects are about and the approaches we are each taking. Message if interested, if not no worries. Best of luck!