Day 104: Marketing Week Retrospective

marketing

Five days ago, I declared that this would be Marketing Week: I’d stop feature work on my products and focus entirely on marketing.

I set out to accomplish three goals:

  1. Launch Intention on Hacker News, Product Hunt, Reddit
  2. Read Traction by Gabriel Weinberg and come up with at least 3 concrete marketing strategies
  3. Start executing on one of those strategies

And… I accomplished none of those goals. Well, that’s not entirely fair. I accomplished part of the first goal: I launched on Product Hunt and Reddit. But I still have yet to launch on Hacker News, and I haven’t read Traction yet.

This was largely due to spending quite a bit of time reworking the landing page, which was a worthwhile investment. I’m tempted to spend more time improving the design so it doesn’t look like a developer with zero design skills whipped something together using nothing but Bootstrap (which is exactly what it is). But I don’t think that’d be a good use of my time. The site is good enough that my efforts would be better spent learning about marketing and executing on different strategies.

I’m going to continue with my focus on marketing this upcoming week. I’ll spend time on fixing bugs and implementing a few features in Intention that many people are requesting, but I want to primarily prioritize marketing.

We all know how just how good I am at planning now, but here’s the one I have for this upcoming week:

That’s right, I don’t have any action-oriented goals besides finishing the process of launching from this past week. As much as I’m tempted to set concrete goals around doing things, I’m going to devote this upcoming week solely to learning and absorbing as much about marketing as I can. If I come up with marketing strategies, great, but it’s not expected — I want to give myself the space to explore without the pressure to immediately act on the things I learn.