Comment by CuriouslyC

Comment by CuriouslyC 3 days ago

I've had a similar problem in my personal development journey.

I haven't solved it, but my experience has lead me to believe that building in public and blogging/vlogging your journey (why you started and what you learned) is promising. That type of content drives brand and product hype via views/engagement, helps you filter ideas (if your vlog is getting no traction, maybe not a great product?) and avoids promotional post rules in a lot of communities.

My new years resolution is to dial in my content driven development pipeline.

matt_s 3 days ago

> That type of content drives brand and product hype via views/engagement

Product hype might be hard with developer/tech types of tools. Devs have very good BS radar and "hype" is sometimes all there is in a lot of content. I see and hear a lot of the "build in public" being promoted as the way to do things with the "build an audience" mantra.

There is a huge hurdle to produce good video content, it takes a lot of time to record, edit and publish quality videos. Publishing quality videos can help get traction/views/subscribers but that doesn't mean it will translate into paying customers either. Do people really want to watch software developers code or talk about it? There has to be other ways to market a product.

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CuriouslyC 2 days ago

There are some hacks to make video content easier:
1. Just do split screen videos where you talking head with slides on the other, and read off the slides.
2. Record in segments, with a full reset between each segment. Makes editing really fast.
3. Don't stress about small mistakes. People are into authenticity, it's ok.
Lighting/"studio" design is still an art, but you can get something set up in a day or two. The harder part is coming up with good video ideas, and doing a compelling title/thumbnail/hook. That's a rabbit hole.
If you have a social media following you can leverage that. Cold calls can work if you're selling big ticket items, but you also need to be good at sales and do a lot of legwork so I wouldn't go down that route. I wouldn't start advertising until you can demonstrate product market fit.

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ClipNoteBook 3 days ago

Thanks for the reply. To be honest I love the coding part, but getting users or even testers to actually try the tool is a nightmare for me. I am still trying to figure out a clean way to commercialize my projects without getting flagged as spam everywhere. And yeah the building in public idea is exactly what I just started doing. If you are curious, I have a blog page for the tool where I am writing what I am learning. Happy to share the link: https://clipnotebook.com/blog

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bruce511 a day ago

You are not alone. You like coding. That's where all the fun is. You code things uou want, things that interest you. Since you like to, you know, eat occasionally, you start thinking about monetizing your code.
Unfortunately, as you are learning, this is 100% backwards. Writing something that is commercially successful starts by identifying a potentially commercial product.
In other words, you need to start by Marketing, not programming. You're looking for 3 things;
A market you can reach; That have money to spend; That are prepared to spend money to make some pain go away.
It might be obvious that a market might exist (say something that makes govt more effective) but selling to govt requires enormous resources you don't have.
It might be obvious a market exists (a tool for refugees to apply for aid) but they have no money to buy anything from you.
It might be obvious a market exists (trips to the moon) but you can't build that.
Once you have found a market you can reach, who have some money, and are willing to spend (perhaps with a deposit) then (and only then) should you start coding.
Commercializing stuff you have already made is hard because the product was tailored to a specific user, and he already has it (aka you).

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