Engineering as marketing can be powerful in itself
Do more marketing than you build features.
You've probably heard this a gazillion times here on Indie Hackers and on Indie Twitter. (also from me š³)
What if I told you that you can do both?
Let me tell you a bit about āEngineering as Marketingā and how you can leverage it to grow your startup.
What's this all about?
The idea is to engineer something that will market itself.
A remarkable product or experience.
Something worth sharing.
Or to build a free tool/product/service that helps demonstrate the value of your main product or company.
An example
We have a chrome extension that reduces a tedious flow down to one button click.
Our users love it because it fits right into their workflow and saves them a bunch of time.
Itās also good for activation because it acts as an external trigger that reminds people to use our product.
The chrome extension that we built to make that possible was a bunch of work, thatās the engineering part.
Someone tried it out and shared it in a private discord, thatās the marketing part.
Weāve had 2 more customers from that source since then. (Doesn't sound like much but we only have 7 total so it's a lot š)
Other types
You can also build side projects that are related to your main project.
Then try to funnel people to your main project somehow.
This way you're giving value for free upfront and people might reciprocate that down the line. (if you're patient š)
Think of it as an engineered lead magnet.
Grain of š§
Now before you go and excuse your lack of marketing by building a bunch of featuresā¦.
Take a second and let this sink in:
- You still need an initial spark of users
- You need a product that solves a problem worth sharing
So while you can use the fact that you can engineer products worth sharing, make sure your foundation is in order.
After all, you canāt build a solid house on a shaky foundation.
Conclusion
Engineering is what a lot of people on here do best.
Marketing is what a lot of people on here struggle with (me included š )
Itās worth spending some time thinking about how you can use your strengths to supply your weaknesses.
But donāt forget:
Engineering as marketing is fuel for an existing flame, not a fire starter.
You canāt completely weasel your way out of marketing. š
You
Have you made similar experiences?
What are your favorite ways to leverage engineering as marketing?
About me
I have 10 years of experience in VC startups, kinda burned out on that and am now bootstrapping niche products while applying my learnings.
Iām sharing more stuff like this on our newsletter over here and building in public on Twitter.
100%.
This is how we grew Crew & Unsplash to millions of visitors back in 2015.
Today no-code tools take this to the next level but I'm still surprised how not many people take advantage of it, especially those who have engineering capabilities (I wish I had some).
One core quality we used to look for when choosing which side project marketing idea to pursue was whether the project required low maintenance down the line. Some of the tools you are planning to build may look promising but you should also consider how much time/energy a project will require to maintain itself in the future. Great post by the way, thanks.
Interesting read. Thanks for sharing.
Looks like you should have written this article, you have a lot more to experience :)
I completely agree and it's much easier as developers to market this way. I got lucky that a URL Shortener often promotes itself because users share links with the domain all over the internet. T.LY has grown mostly organic from me building a browser extension and making it super simple to create short links.
I am also experimenting with programmatic SEO around a database of hundreds of thousands of quotes. The site is growing in search traffic and backlinks with little effort besides building the site.
Quote Site: AtomicQuote
@nafetswirth check your links at the bottom of your post.
Impressive Numbers on your extension Tim.
Programmatic SEO makes sense there.
Do you plan on monetizing it?
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Thanks for making me aware of the links.
Looks like they got messed up when I copied the post from another markdown editor š³
Thanks! Yes, T.LY has paid plans for additional features such as custom domains, API access, stats, and more.
Glad you got the links fixed. I think IH could benefit from a simple markdown editor. Iāll plan to follow along with your journey!
Sorry, I meant the quotes site here, I saw that
T.LYis monetized :)It should have been clearer, my bad.
Yeah true haha.
I used to write it in Github issues but they sometimes randomly clear out, not it's a free online editor.
I should look for a better on :D
Likewise š¤
Thanks! Currently, https://atomicquote.com/ is monetized by ads. Hopefully as traffic grows it will make a decent amount.
I'm a marketer and I have to say building a great product will always have the highest ROI. WIth that said I think alot of the people on here might be better marketers than they thought. A decent amount of marketing is researching, analyzing data and understanding what people need, what people react to as well as reverse engineering the competition. If you can use the market research side to make even better features for your product, you're golden.
Yeah, you are right, Building a product have high ROI. As one of my developer friend have started https://sniperpedia.com/best-airsoft-snipers-with-scopes/ at the start of the year 2022. and now he is enjoying it high ROI. He is very talented man.
Engineering as marketing requires marketing to get traction
I posted https://saaspages.xyz/ with no audience on PH, got 2000 upvotes and it gets a lot of visitors a month with 0 work.
If the product provides value it will be shared.
You can of course increase the chances of success by marketing it.
Marketing is Product Hunt
Not always, if you build free apps that are trullly useful and talk about them people will definitely talk n share it.
True.
I did write that tho at the end, maybe it got too boring along the way š