I wanted to share my startup journey, which has been an eye-opener, especially for someone who’s more at home with code than with marketing strategies. Here’s what I’ve learned along the way:
1. Quick Reality Check: Before I wrote a single line of code, I thought I had a groundbreaking idea. Turns out, what’s groundbreaking for a developer isn’t always what the market needs. I learned the hard way that talking to potential users and getting feedback is non-negotiable.
2. Social Media – Who Knew?: I initially overlooked platforms like IndieHackers or even Twitter to share my development journey. Building a community interested in your product’s progress is a game-changer – I learned this post-launch, unfortunately.
3. The Hat Trick: Being a solo founder meant I had to swap my developer hat for a marketer one more often than I liked. I wish I had known about tools like Google Analytics for website insights or even Boost App Social for automating some social media tasks, making life a tad easier.
4. Marketing’s a Whole New World: I love coding; it’s structured, logical. Marketing? It’s like learning a new language, full of nuances and unpredictability. Tools like Hootsuite for scheduling posts or Canva for designing graphics helped, but there’s a steep learning curve.
5. Juggling Act: Balancing a day job, coding, and marketing is a juggling act. I had to be disciplined about allocating specific hours for each task, using tools like Trello for project management to keep track of everything.
6. School’s Never Out: Every day is a lesson in marketing strategies, user engagement, and product refinement. Podcasts, webinars, and communities like this one have been invaluable.
If I could rewind, I’d tell myself to get on the marketing train right from the start. But that’s the beauty of startups, isn’t it? You live, you learn.
Keen to hear if you’ve had similar escapades or any ninja tips you might have!
This post may as well be written by me. After graduation, I started making Android apps (way back in 2015). I had ideas that I thought were cool, but often a bit more than what I could chew. Regardless, I made a few, released and did almost nothing to promote it as I didn’t know anything about it. Nor how important it was. After 3 years (had to learn coding and design on my own), I finally admitted to myself that just making a good app is nowhere near enough for success.
Trouble with learning marketing is that it’s best to learn on someone else’s dime, as it takes a lot of dime to experiment enough to learn. Plus you learn from colleagues too. So I did MBA to shift and now work as a marketer exclusively at early stage startups. During weekends, I code, and now I have a much better understanding of how a business is actually built. Not to mention the network and mentors. No doubt I have more to learn, but good enough to put my resources into it.