DjangoCon Europe 2017 - Marketing for Developers

Speaker: Tracy Osborn

Marketing is hard.

Marketing is no fun.

Marketing takes a lot of mental energy.

Marketing is necessary and worth it.

Try to understand your customer, especially if the customer isn't you

Figure out what the customer thinks/wants/uses, how they work. Go to local conferences etc. (Being your own customer is easier, btw.)

Don't forget to add analytics

Consider using segment.com which can can save you time by managing external services. Consider also using briefmetics.com to receive emails with your analytics overview.

Have a landing page and collect email addresses

A landing page leads to a maintained email list, and a maintained email list leads to initial users! There are loads of services to send good emails, and landing pages too (launchrock, gh pages etc etc).

Launch as early as possible

It does not to be perfect or done. Features can be added later on! Build a minimum viable product, then upgrade it. You'll think differently of your product after the launch (and after user interaction). It will change your product and your roadmap in a good way.

Write content

Writing words is hard. Do it regardless. Write blog entries, or write on medium, or write on somebody else's blog. Just write. You don't have to build separate blogs for every product, using a personal blog/medium is perfectly fine.

Notify your email list about your content. Think about timing, too.

Writing is great for promotion that does not look like promotion and provides SEO, too.

Writing may seem scary or boring or just plain hard. Try to get out a first draft, without revising in any way. Then revise in a separate step.

Get your content out there

  • Try hackernews, but don't count on it.
  • Try reddit with the various subreddits (but they don't like things to look like self-promotion).
  • Try twitter, with both your personal account and a project account.
  • Facebook is frustrating, but you can just push our blog posts there.
  • Use kickstarter if you want to build a digital product.
  • Cold-email people with short, human, non-automated (sounding) messages, manually, providing an obvious benefit.
  • Use something like Boomerang for Gmail to send automatic followups.
  • Publish related businesses/developers/humans on your blog, reaping the traffic.
  • Paid ads may be profitable on reddit, but in general is not to be recommended at all.
  • Collaboration with other projects/businesses are seldom worth it

Resources for more

… Tracy had logs of links here. Please check her slides, I wasn't fast enough to catch them all.