Day 99: Marketing Week

One of the best parts about writing a log like Road to Ramen is that it’s very easy to spot areas where my intentions are incongruent with my actions. For example, I’ve been jabbering for ages about how I need to stop being a hermit developer and focus on marketing, and yet, my posts are still focused on development and product.

I was hoping to get Intention’s social features out before launching and trying to market it, but reflecting on yesterday’s post, it’s clear it’ll take a few iterations before I get the core mechanics right. Instead of delaying marketing on a feature whose completion date is unknown, I’m going to launch with what I have. The core product is solid, and the social feature is a nice-to-have, not a need-to-have.

So this week, I’m going to stop all feature work and focus entirely on marketing.

Yup, I’m finally freaking doing it! I have three major goals for this week:

Launch Intention on Hacker News, Product Hunt, Reddit
Read Traction by Gabriel Weinberg (thanks to Alex Roe for the recommendation) and come up with at least 3 concrete marketing strategies
Start executing on one of those strategies

The first goal is more of the same “Hail Mary” marketing that I’ve done in the past, but it’s still important to do it. The second and third goals are where things get exciting, because I’ll actually be trying something new.

Here are the steps to goal #1:

Improve the landing page
- Add testimonials
- Add a privacy policy
- Add a section to link to Hide Feed
Create blurb explaining Intention
Create assets for Product Hunt
- Logo
- Featured images

My intended timeline:

Today (Monday): Improve landing page
Tuesday: Launch on Reddit, HN; create assets for Product Hunt
Wednesday: Launch on Product Hunt; read Traction
Thursday: Develop 3 marketing strategies
Friday: Start executing on one of them

I’m usually too optimistic with my timelines so we’ll see whether I’m able to follow it precisely. Let’s goooooooo!