The Developer Guide to Promoting Your Work – Todd Gardner
· You’re building a product (You!)
o Great products sell themselves – WRONG
o Selling to friends is easier than selling to strangers
o Mark, sales, evangelist, support
· Minimum viable personality (MVP)
o How will you change the world?
o What do you stand for?
o What do you hate?
· Create for them – make useful and truthful things
· Elevator Pitch
o What do you do?
o How am I better for it?
o What’s the next step?
· You’ll get rejected and that’s okay
· Business card – does it tell the story?
· Page design
o Targets the audience
o Have a goal
o Don’t overdo it (ex. writing your own blog software to have a blog)
· Marketing
o “The Funnel”
o Landing pages – fulfill your goals
o How to test? Market analytics (ex. Google Analytics)
o Cost per click
o Conversion rate = cost per customer
o Lifetime value – depends on what you’re doing (ex. selling books, subscription service)
o Cost to acquire customers should be 1/3 less or less of lifetime value
· Things you can do right now
o Start professionally speaking
o Build your audience
o Measure the funnel
o What are you being effective at?
· Questions, answers, observations, recommendations
o What’s the hardest part? Making that transition from developer to selling a product.
o Marketing can be a full-time job.
o Learn more about marketing before just hiring it done. This way you have a baseline of measuring if they are doing a good job or not.
o The first sales guy they hired works entirely off of commission
o Started marketing the business through the use of a demo