Finding the right building:marketing ratio

I think it’s fair to say that indie hackers rarely love marketing. Most of us attempt to avoid it in favor of building new things. But at the end of the day, it’s just one of those things we’ve gotta do.

So the question is, how much marketing is the right amount of marketing? And how do we Goldilocks the building:marketing ratio so that we can get it just right? Here's what I've found. 👇

Methods for splitting building and marketing

Well, first off, I've heard of a few approaches that might suit. I’ll list them below.

Yongfook's 50:50 week-by-week

@yongfook trades weeks: One week of coding, one week of marketing, and repeat. He often recommends this approach; in fact, he likes it so much that he created a cutesy free tool for it. As he tells it, his 50:50 split is simple and realistic, and it creates a good flow since coding gives you things to talk/market about.

Plus, since the 50:50 split is week by week, context-switching is kept to a minimum. That’s the best part IMO. It’s astonishing how much time we waste switching between tasks, particularly if those tasks are very different.

Interestingly, Jon doesn't think this split should change according to your product’s maturity. Even pre-launch, he believes this to be the right split. Fair enough — it seems to be working for him.

Dorsey's daily themes

You may have heard of Jack Dorsey's approach. Every day of the week has a different theme. I think this will apply more to him than most indie hackers, as we often need more than a day to work on something before it’s sensible for us to switch to something new. But still, there's merit to his approach.

Here's what Dorsey said about it:

All my days are themed. Monday is management. At Square we have a directional meeting, at Twitter we have our opcomm [operating committee] meeting. Tuesday is product, engineering, and design. Wednesday is marketing, growth, and communications. Thursday is partnership and developers. Friday is company and culture. It works in 24-hour blocks. On days beginning with T, I start at Twitter in the morning, then go to Square in the afternoon. Sundays are for strategy, and I do a lot of job interviews. Saturday is a day off.

Building 99%+ of the time

This is not something I'd advise, but focusing only on building can work for certain products.

@knolan: I have a bad habit of spending 99% of my time building new features, 0.9% of my time worrying about the fact that I'm not doing marketing, and then 0.1% of the time actually doing marketing. 🤣

But I think this may be one of those rare cases where a laser-focus on product first before marketing has been a good thing overall. By scaling up the user base gradually, I've been able to avoid drowning in support requests, and it has allowed me to preserve the free time I've needed to re-architect the product several times before arriving at the more polished solution it is today.

I know "if you build it, they will come" can be a seductive and dangerous mantra for solo developers (and especially first-time founders). But even so, after validating the idea with version 1.0, the main thrust of my efforts has simply been to make the product so dang good that eventually people in this space can't help but take notice. Maybe that's finally working a little bit.

@fxtentacle: 100% development. I checked with https://trends.google.com/trends/ beforehand that people search for the exact product that I want to sell them and I built a landing page a year ago with those keywords. Since then, I get sales almost exclusively from organic search traffic, but I struggle to keep up with support and feature updates.

Marketing 99%+ of the time

And some folks are focusing almost completely on marketing. Ironically, their quotes are less verbose.

@seoguy: 99% on marketing.

@leisenming: Being a techie, I have to be careful with this. If I am not, I end up 100% development. Currently, I am 100% marketing :-)

Daily splits

You can, of course, split up your hours in whatever way works best each day. Building in the mornings, marketing in the afternoons is a common one. The benefit of this is that you can stay on top of everything, every day. You aren't falling behind on bug fixes while you work on marketing, and you aren't falling behind on social media responses while you build a feature. But it requires a lot of context-switching, which is inefficient. And since you don't get much time for each task, you're probably going to change directions before you've even finished what you're working on.

@davidgut: One solution could be to set x hours for product work and n hours for marketing work. Even if you only spend 1 hour per day doing marketing, if you do it every single day and "work like a lion, not a cow.." there will be results.

Shooting from the hip

Lots of folks just work on whatever is most urgent in the moment — whatever will push the needle most. If that’s your preference, here's how to decide what to work on. But this approach can be dangerous for indie hackers since we're biased toward building. We'll make up any excuse for why that feature is the most important thing in the world right now.

The stage-by-stage approach

Then there's the balanced, flexible approach of shifting your focus according to where your product is at. It's worth noting that this is not the same as shooting from the hip. Here, you plan what you’ll do at different stages in the product lifecycle, or certain product milestones, etc.

@grendorf: I'm probably 1:1 right now. But as my product becomes more functional, I'll shift further into marketing. That is the beauty of software, once you solved the problem, you need to switch into distributing the solution!

Basically, solve problems to get and retain customers. Otherwise, market.

@chiefrocker3: Build the product to a certain level, then switch to promoting. Once users are in and you get feedback, then potentially switch back to improve experience

@allison_m: Usually, only spending an hour or so a day promoting Sidekick. I think it's working for now, because users are coming in!

But, there's just so much development to be done for the app the be in a good healthy place. So for now, that's where our attention is!

I think after we get it to a certain spot, reach a certain set of KPIs, then we'll switch the attention to marketing/promoting.... (famous last words :P)

@adriaanvanrossum: marketing is more important than the product. I've always heard people say that the product needs to be so good that it will sell itself. And yes, I think a product needs to be very good, but if nobody knows about your great product, what then? With this in mind, I put a lot of my time into something I considered to be very important: the launch…
…At the moment I'm focusing two-thirds on marketing (building sites like Privacy First Products and doing blog posts and interviews like this that generate traffic) and the remaining third on building new features, such as real-time data.

@dlowe: Right now, I have development paused until I build a core group of users or critical mass around my marketplace.

The 100:100 approach

A lot of indie hackers are solopreneurs, and I think that's often the right way to go, at least in the beginning. But there's something to be said for having a cofounder — particularly one with a different skill set and mentality from you.

Many of you will be familiar with plausible.io. From what I understand, @ukutaht built it but it wasn't gaining much traction. Then @marcosaric jumped in as a co-founder and marketed that thing through the roof.

This type of partnership is a really solid approach that allows you to focus on both simultaneously and move twice as fast.

@clbindsey3: 99% building because I have a co-founder who's an amazing marketer

And a thousand other splits

Of course, the options are pretty much endless. Here are a few more that indie hackers have suggested.

Jekabs Endzings: Building 80% - most of my products are product led which I find more natural and interesting.

@kevcon80: Right now I’m at a 5:2 ratio of building the product vs marketing my product codernotes.io, but I’m worried that I’m not spending enough time on marketing leading up to the beta.

@felix12777: 60% marketing 40% product improvement

@jpescada: At least half the time. Especially if you’re a technical guy. Building things feels more natural and productive but if you’re not spending equally as much time selling it, success will be harder to reach.

Factors to consider

The way you split building and marketing will ultimately depend on a lot of different factors. I already mentioned that the stage in the product life cycle is one. Here are a few others that I saw mentioned.

@chessspyder: The complexity of the project technically has to play into the optimal ratio. For the simplest project, it will be all marketing. For more-complex projects, building has to take a larger share of the pie..

@nafetswirth: It all really depends what foundation you're building on.

If you know your customer well and their problems + they actually have a problem they're willing to pay for, [building] is most likely the way to go.

But that's not often the case, and marketing then is a necessary reality check.

@_shifting_gears: In this incredibly crowded and saturated market, no matter how awesome the product is, there is no way to avoid marketing to make that awesomeness be noticed.

But those who have their "seed audience" in communities, sub/reddits, personal networks, etc., can probably afford focusing on their products and not on marketing. Their seed audience will market their awesome products for them...

My take

Personally, I'd go with the stage-by-stage approach. Different times call for different amounts of marketing. But this approach still allows you to maintain some kind of structure, which I like. For me that structure would be something like:

• Pre-launch: 90% building, 10% marketing (probably building in public)
• Launch: 100% marketing
• Post-launch: 80% marketing, 20% building
• Stable growth: 50% marketing, 50% building. And at this stage, I'd probably go with @yongfook's model of going week by week.

And my honorable mention would be the 100:100 approach. Cofounders are an ace in the hole, but I'd wait to bring one on until your business has some stable growth going for it.

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What's your split?

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