If you're a developer, indie hacker or maker then you've probably scratched a few itches in your time and just built something you thought was a good idea. It might be to generate income on the side like a blog or course, a SaaS start-up that can replace your day job, or a project to showcase your skills and increase your employment prospects.
I'm building Swell Diary, a curated and organised collection of YouTube surf videos. I'm building it for a few reasons:
- I love surfing, watching surfing videos, and simply want this service to exist.
- As an experiment to see if I can take a website from scratch to significant traffic (maybe revenue).
- To learn and document the journey and help other developers who don't understand marketing.
Do you hate marketing as much as I do?
Being a dev, my first love is designing, building and making things. Nothing beats losing yourself for hours in code, finally getting that MVP working just the way you want it and deploying it for the world to see.
Inevitably however, no-one will see it. What do you do now? You know deep in your heart that you have to step away from the comfort of your IDE and do "marketing".
You know what to do but the drudgery of it fills you with dread. Or you fear you're going to have to suppress your introverted ways and become a social media influencer. Or you just don't understand marketing and don't know where to start.
I hear you! But it has to be done if you want your idea to go anywhere.
#MarketingInPublic
Over the last twenty years I've learnt a bunch of scrappy approaches for launching websites and getting that sweet initial traction. My experience has mainly focused on SEO and other time consuming but low cost tactics.
Many of the techniques I use today are no different from what I did back in 2000. And they're the same techniques I used to market my last start-up Shotstack, which ranks number one for the high converting keyword term video editing API.
Over the next year, I plan on sharing all my tactics, along with new things I learn so that developers and indie hackers can see what works and what fails. I'll share the stats and numbers and hopefully I can get pages ranking number one and become a leading destination to watch surfing videos.
Launching in Stealth Mode
Over the last several months, I have made the first mistake of indie hacking - building in stealth mode. And related to that; taking months to launch.
There is a simple reason and one really important benefit.
The simple reason - I've actually built this during a well earned sabbatical from work while I transition out of my last start-up. Perhaps it's the love of building or some kind of compulsive disorder, but I still felt compelled to work on something. I have been able to work on this at my leisure without any real sense of urgency.
The benefit - I've launched the website without doing any marketing for a number months. I've recorded and observed exactly what happens with this approach. From this I've established a baseline to measure the effectiveness of my marketing efforts.
While I have elaborate plans of all the features Swell Diary could incorporate, I'm holding off from development for now. The most important next step is getting those first visitors and a steady stream of traffic.