How much time do you spend on marketing compared to building/designing/developing?
Do you have established traffic channels and spend more time building/perfecting, or is your product built and polished and you invest more time in marketing and content?
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I spent about 2 months of marketing/idea validation then 4 months to build an MVP and now I plan on doing a lot more marketing
Hey George, how do you do idea validation? I am trying to validate an idea for streamers, any tips on how I can go about doing it?
I suggest you create a landing page that illustrates your idea and then you try to get people to signup for a waiting list using ads or reddit or even cold outreach on social media.
George, thanks for the suggestion. I made a simple sign-up page and now am running FB ads for 4 days (with a $100 total budget) to create an email list. Are there any quick marketing guides that you can recommend (or any suggestions on my current strategy)?
You have a good starting point but you should also use reddit to try to understand who are your customers, understand their problem, and drive traffic to your website from there too! Try to get at least 100 email subscribers
Free publicity here, want to drop your project link? I am also working on a solution for streamers, but don't have the mvp built yet :)
From investors' perspective, I know that it is better to spend more on marketing rather than on development.
I spent most of my time in building and less in marketing.
I love building and solving problems more than marketing.
I need to learn to market.
I spend too little on marketing and I am trying to change that 😁
I know I should probably flip the percentages round so that I spend more time on marketing than development, but development really is taking so much time to deliver what's needed (hardcore C/C++ work).
Same here. As a dev who sucks at marketing, development is so much more comfortable for me.
I related to this sooooo much haha
Yeah, I feel like as developers we want to just build until it's perfect (or at least working lol) but marketing even before a product is finished is also super important it seems.
Yes marketing before a product is finished is super important. Otherwise you'll release it to the sound of crickets, and will be left wondering if you poured months/years of your life into something that almost nobody wanted, or you just suck at marketing... Or maybe both. ;-)
It defintely depeends on the stage, as @JessLeBrun said.
I have moved from 90/10 development/marketing to 10/90.
I think it depends on what stage of the process you are. Building something? Get it to almost perfect, then go ahead and put time into marketing. There's no point in marketing a bad product, and there's no point building a product if you can't get anyone to use it.
I think it's really depends on stage you are...
It think it should be 50/50. You could have the best product but if no one knows it, then it doesn't exist. But, you also need to invest time to build the best product ;)
i do in segments,
a. complete 50 percent of product
b. work on 50 % marketing,
c. rinse and repeate
this helps me to make sure
1\ i don't spend too much time building a product which others don't need
2\ i won't be exhausted development workflows.
Building the product is a safe haven for me. And it's terrible honestly. Whenever I'm not sure what to do I go back to building. In practice I should spend that much time on marketing and when in doubt do more marketing.
I go back and fourth , depending on how my mood swings. I will say SEO of my jamstack forms service has been a struggle.
I feel like spending months on the idea validation without building can sometimes be a struggle. We're building https://app.contrarian.ai a search bar for your customers' pain points. We analysed billions of social media comments to help you pinpoint the issues your customers care about the most. I'm hoping that this will speed up the time from idea to execution.
Makers always underestimate marketing. I know this because I am a maker.
For my team at this team, it's 50-50. Before launch it'll be 30-70
I basically spend all my time marketing Evoke haha.
My co-founders handle all the building work :)
I need a cofounder like you!
well done
Earlier I spent all my time on development and almost none on marketing, but since the MVP is completed, I'm focusing more and more on marketing daily.
I have plans on adding new features, but I need feedback before selecting the features I will work on!
Getting the marketing/building balance right is tricky. My #ABitGamey blog takes a big chunk of my time. Phil… https://abitgamey.substack.com/p/top-5-posts-of-2022
For me this depends GREATLY on the project. Below are 3 different examples based on the project:
The simplest for me have been projects where the value is very direct so the programming is very minimal and I spend 75% or more of the time on marketing.
An example is https://www.brandesaurus.com/ which is a thesaurus of brands. For most people this is "obvious" enough where they know the value well enough they're either in or out.
Another example is my core startup https://dvnc.tech/ with this business it's closer to 50/50 because it's a productized service. This means that supporting clients is just as important as marketing because if we don't do high-touch support then the customers are more likely to churn.
Last example is https://twitter.com/ottojokes this is a video game which means working on the game is wayyyy more important than marketing after a certain point. For games I recommend marketing early to validate the idea then going into dev mode because then you'll be able to share cooler screenshots and build a more engaged audience. With games we've been much closer to 75% development and 25% marketing.
For us we're going to be marketing our core business and tools closer to how we market our games as we believe this will create a difference maker for how people perceive the value of the brands
I guess in a perfect world you oversee the people doing the work on both sides, marketing/sales/branding/partnerships one person/team & operations/building/developing/product/service the other person/team
I choose 50/50
Products must be perfect and always fix bugs and update features
But. Going hand in hand with marketing is to hear customer feedback otherwise we might as well make the product for our own use.
The pdfinvoices.fordeer.io we're working on looks like it's going to be behind schedule, it deserves the option of parallel development and marketing.
Finally, I'm marketing Fordeer products outside of us making products on Shopify and it's not easy, if someone is working on the same platform we can exchange and share.
Thank.
Definitely its 50/50 - 💯
I have experienced in my product as if I spend more time in designing/building than marketing, my result would be not satisfied rather if i would spend time equally, i have got good results in the output as i expected...
Currently 20/80. Still learning though. I am thinking of increasing the ratio to 30/70, and finally to 50/50 because they’re both important.
For me is 50/50 and depends on each case
This 👆
The 50/50 rule is the simplest and the one I use now.
I was trying to create complex rules while building meetme.io for years and progressing slowly.
I switched completly my mindset after a bad customer feedback one day in middle January. I wanted some change and created AirCal.co. Now am doing this 50/50 rule and the reaction on Twitter has been amazing. Growing like crazy. Check out my last post about Calendar + AI demo : https://twitter.com/romaindewolff/status/1630138307446296578
I really want to spend more time on development, but it's obvious that the market is more important, so I think a 60/40 split is a reasonable ratio.
I voted 70/30, and that is in addition with having a part-time CTO . It allows me to work on existing marketing channels and exprimenting new ones. That's something I was not able to do when working solo and which makes a tremedous difference.