I am developer, not a marketing guy. Need help.
Hello everyone.
I hope I can get some advices here. I am developer, a solo developer. I make my project, snapencode.com. It is a self-host video platform. The idea is you buy license one time, for lifetime. No more monthly pay. You own it.
The building part, is fun for me. I love code. The logic.
But now., marketing. I am so lost.
My brain is for code, not for sales. When I try to write for sales, the words feel… wrong. Fake. I feel like a bad car salesman. It is a very hard feeling.
I do the basic things. Make some social account and try to post. But I know this is not real marketing. I just don't know what to say, or where to say it.
So I ask you guys,,, what did you do?
If you are a developer like me, how you learn to sell your thing? Did you pay someone? Is there a simple way to start that is not feeling so ,, fake?
Any information is good for me. I feel like I build a good car but have no key to start it.
Thanks
Replies
So there's a lot to unpack here I'll try to break down.
I think the first thing you, and all of us, continously need to always work on is the story. I noticed throughout your own product pages you have things like "OpenAI Whisper integration for accurate, multilingual captions". If we take a step back, it looks like you're not really writing for customers, but for yourself or a colleague. Customers aren't colleagues. I suspect your "brain for code" is saying "well, customers want to know my product is well built, uses modern technology, and isn't junk!" but it seems like you're having trouble writing marketing because you're writing it as if you yourself are reading it, not customers.
That might be why you don't feel you're doing "real" marketing when, at least in my day job, for products I review, and for my own product, anything that spreads the word is indeed marketing. Whether thats advertising locally, online, and so on.
Who are you marketing too and separately, why are the people you're marketing too going to be interested? Are they more technical and have you gone to other forums to evangelize your product? Are they less technical and more availible on insta/X/BlueSky and are there certain tags you can use?
It feels like you're asking for a single answer, but some of the really market focused people on here who have WAY more experience than me can confirm even one of these aspects of marketing your brand can take months and are complex. You really need to find out:
Who your customers are
Where they communicate/respond too
What they seem to engage the most with
Find a measurable metric, even if it's not great
If you don't have the above, then really all you can try to do is shotgun your presence but that can feel like you're screaming into the void because you can't measure anything. I personally feel like luck is an underrated and secret sauce to success, but even if you get lucky and went viral, if you're not speaking the same language nobody will know what you're selling.
Scade.pro
From my side, I work a lot with early-stage products and content strategy. What usually helps is to shift the perspective, think of marketing as teaching and sharing rather than selling. Instead of pushing people to buy, you give them useful knowledge around your product. That way, you attract people who already feel the pain your product solves.
who do you imagine as your first users indie devs, small businesses, creators?
Hello, I am a marketer and maybe I hope I can help you.
how about ask by yourself these question?
Why do you make this product? and what inconveniences did people have?
Where are they you think? I mean not whole audience but core user who will love your product
They concern how this will help them, not functional specifications. So what do you think which sales points makes this attractive and feel like that? Which format is best to show it? Text, photo, or video?
It may help you about knowing both your audience and product.
I hope these questions help your problem
I’m in the same boat honestly, figuring it out as I go and I absolutely second what someone else said about not taking on a defeatist attitude from the start. I’ve learned there’s no magical “marketing guy”, in fact you're advantageous over a marketing person since you understand your product best so it's how to communicate that needs nailing.
It's too easy to feel lost with this, I'm not out of it either just yet but fortunately there's no wrong way to do it, just ineffective ways.
Personally, it’s just finding where your users hang out and the most natural and persuasive way to reach them. Don’t underestimate cold outreach either. I’m building a trading & investing education app, and so what's worked for me (when I started from zero) was just jumping into online questions and offer my product as help and something I built for myself that could help them too (which is the truth).
It’s all experimenting and tweaking until something sticks, and honestly pretty fun as you get more into it.
I can relate to this a lot. Most devs I know love the building but freeze up when it’s time to “sell.” It feels fake because we picture sales as pushing, when really it can just be explaining your thing in a way that makes sense to others.
What’s helped me:
Don’t try to “sound like marketing.” Just explain why you built it and what problem it solved for you. That’s usually the best copy anyway.
Show it instead of describing it. Short demos, gifs, even a scrappy Loom walkthrough do way more than a paragraph of text.
Pay attention to the words early users use when they describe it back to you. That’s marketing gold because it doesn’t sound forced.
And yeah, where you share matters. Posting on Twitter/PH is different than jumping into niche forums where people actually have the problem.
One other thing I’ve noticed: design/positioning does a lot of the “selling” for you. A clean landing page that makes sense at a glance makes it feel way less like you’re trying to push. The page itself does the trust-building.
Curious, have you had any early users try it yet? What did they say back to you?