Day 88: Do things, tell people

marketing

In Intern Playbook, an online course I created last year to help tech interns get the most out of their internships, one piece of advice I give is to make sure that they evangelize their work and make sure people know what they’ve done. The idea is that the way that you communicate your work and its impact is just as important as the work itself, and that it’s easy to fall into the trap of building and not talking to others about it.

It’s time to take my own advice.

I know that Hide Feed and Intention are both at a place where they’re providing a lot of benefit to people who use them, and it’s time that I shift my focus to sharing it with a broader audience. There are of course a bunch of things that I still want to build, like:

  • Netflix support in Hide Feed
  • Performance optimization for Intention (specifically redesigning the architecture for how Intention works with Firebase)
  • Intention on mobile (!!!)
  • Integrating Hide Feed with Intention?

But I’ve been in “do” mode for too long, and it’s time that I shift into “tell” mode. I was talking to a close friend the other day, and he said that now that he’s spending so much time at home, he’s watching YouTube way more than he’d like to. I’m going to guess that tons of people are also being sucked into distracting sites more than usual due to result of shelter-in-place, and I think Hide Feed and Intention can be of great support.

I’m going to try to think of ways to approach marketing in a more systematic manner and actually try to tackle it instead of occasionally playing the slot machine of posting on Reddit / Hacker News / Product Hunt and hoping a million people find out about my work.

I don’t have much experience with marketing and distribution so I definitely have a lot of reading and research to do. I’ve quite enjoyed building so I’m a bit sad to take my focus away from it for a while, but I gotta do what I gotta do!