Marketing Writings - first week

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I am building Writings, a small app to help me write, organize and share my content. I was a bit lost to find what is the best marketing approach to promote it and I subconsciously ignored it.

The point that finally pushed me, was a tweet I saw, something like: If you don't tell yourself about your product, nobody will know about it. I started looking for an actionable guide on how to do it by talking to people.

Marketing, especially for indie builders, is a vague topic. Who knows what works and what you should do? But, what I learned, is that there is a list of known methods from which you should choose, and choosing the right stack of them would eventually mean successful marketing of your product.

The main point of marketing is to increase the visibility of your product. That should be your main goal. It's like when a parent is waving to a child from the audience while they perform.

What an indie builder needs is the bare minimum effort in order to get enough measurable data from which future actions can be taken. With this post, I want to share my insight on that experience so far.

The not-building myth

Contrary to public opinion, you should have the minimum useful product that you want to sell to the users. If you are building a Twitter scheduler, you need to have the scheduling working, with the least visible bugs. You cannot say 'coming soon' on the key features of your product. If you hesitate about whether you should be doing more marketing than building, the question to ask is: do you have enough features to market?

Marketing is close to sales, and selling a product whose key features are broken does not make much sense. If you need more time to build and enable the set of features that mark your product remarkable, do it before you start marketing it. Otherwise, you might do more harm than good.

So how did I start? With talking.

The power of your audience

You can see in my pinned tweet, that my main goal with almost everything I do online is to build relationships. I talk with them in DMs, we exchange feedback, I help them, and I ask them for help. We do what every other human does under normal circumstances.

I started by talking to my Twitter audience in DM about my product. As a matter of fact, I started asking questions even those that are neither my followers nor I follow. If I noticed someone is in the niche, I'd go for it. Rarely who answers, but 100% of them read the message. With that, I increased the visibility of my product.

If you already have some audience (and I don't mean in k's), and you are present on whatever social network (not just Twitter, it can be Facebook, Reddit, TikTok, etc), use the opportunity to ask for an opinion. Your audience will most probably say Ah nice product or _Wow, such a clean design —_which is not what you're after (you need rather harsh feedback), but the audience is the first group of people you should be talking to. The village talking about it is more important than the TV saying it. If you get your online friends familiar with your product, they will start talking about it even without you being there (which is a huge win).

A note here: There is a significant difference in how a person with 40k followers addresses their audience and how a person with 800 followers does it. The first would address the masses by publicly tweeting or asking for help, while the latter would personally talk with the most active members of their audience. The ...