A GUIDE TO SELLING SOFTWARE, APPS, AND DIGITAL PRODUCTS

Marketing for Developers

by Justin Jackson

Chapter 1

Introduction

"Programming is black and white. Marketing is a world of gray." - Brett Florio, Co-Founder of FoxyCart.com

Do any of these describe you? Youre a developer. Youve built a product: maybe its a mobile app, maybe its SaaS so!tware, or maybe its an old-fashioned desktop client. Now you need to make sales, and you dont know where to start. Maybe, you havent started building anything yet because youre afraid youll build something no one wants. Or, you might be a startup looking to get traction. If so, this book is for you.

A developer who knows how to code and market a product is basically unstoppable. I want to help you to build, market, and sell your own so!tware.

How a customer buys

While we o!ten think of marketing from our perspective, its helpful to think about it from a customers point of view. Think of all the things that need to happen in order for someone to buy your product. They need to: 1. Self-identify that they have a need

2. Search for a solution 3. Find your product in the midst of that search 4. Evaluate other options 5. Decide, and buy The chapters in this book are designed to help you walk your customers through each of these steps successfully.

Why marketing is challenging

When it comes to building products, the biggest problem us technical people have is this:

technical challenge ! more sales

This surprises us. We get an idea for a thing, and think about the technology we'd use to build it:

"I could build this on the Twilio API!" "I could learn that new CSS framework!" "I could use this new tool I just bought!"
The problem is that this is all focused on us, the creator, and not on the customer. If we're going to sell products, we need to quit thinking about what's cool to us, and focus on what customers need. Here's a lesson I learned the hard way: the best way to do this is to listen.

An example:
I was walking to my barber for a haircut, dreaming about all the ways technology could improve my barber's business. "So!tware is eating the world!" I thought. As I walked, I began to create so!tware (in my mind) that would eliminate perceived ine"ciencies, save him hundreds of dollars a month, and increase sales exponentially. Then I went in, and got a reality check.

Me: "So, have you ever tried using scheduling so!tware for your appointments?" Barber: "Oh man, I've tried like 10 of them. Terrible! They're all terrible." Me: "Really? None were helpful. Why?" Barber: "Almost all my bookings happen on the phone, or via text message. There's nothing I've found that's more e!!icient than looking at a paper calendar on the wall, and !inding a time on there. If I have to walk over to the computer, I've already wasted too much time. I have 5 seconds to look, and determine when I have a spare block. All the so!tware I've tried just gets in the way."
It only took a single conversation to realize that the so!tware I was planning in my head wouldnt help my barber.
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This is the power of getting out and listening to people. Here's the hard part about building, and marketing, products: we have to commit ourselves to the best solution for the customer even when it's not the most challenging thing to build. The truth is, in some cases, a customer might not need more so!tware. If we're really going to help people, and we're really going to improve their lives, we have to be open to all possible solutions. Sometimes, yes, they'll need good, simple so!tware that solves their problem. However, there are other times, where they might need something else, like a

Sidebar:
There's a temptation to try to change people's priorities so they t our ideal. For example, I could have argued with my barber that a paper calendar is a terribly ine"cient way to organize his business. This is almost always a bad idea. " First: he knows his business way better than I do. " Second: changing people's priorities is almost never protable. The amount of energy, time and dollars required makes it a losing proposition.

better paper calendar, that helps them book appointments more e"ciently. Really, we won't know until we listen. If you want to get good at marketing and sales, you're going to need to get good at really listening. Throw away

your preconceived notions; open your ears to what your target market has to say. You can do this in direct conversation, like I had with my barber. However, it's also helpful to go to places where you can be a silent observer. I received this email a few weeks ago:

"I'm not good with people; I work with computers all day. Computers are predictable: you tell them what to do, and they do it. People are unpredictable! Is there a way I can stay behind my screen and still do marketing research?"
Yes: luckily, the Internet has many places where you can go and be a "silent observer", especially if your target audience is online. You can go to forums, sub-reddits, Facebook groups, and Quora and listen to what people talk about. Here's what you're looking for: what are people in your target market always complaining about? What pain gets brought up repeatedly? This is the same process I used to choose the topic for this book. When I hang out with other developers, I ask questions and I listen. Here's a pattern I started to see: developers have the amazing ability to build things, but they're intimidated by marketing. It confuses them. They don't know where to start. Here's a few quotes I've collected:

"Like a lot of programmers, I used to view marketing and sales as something that was scummy and below me. It amounted to essentially tricking people
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into giving you their money and they didnt get much in return. It wasnt until I had a product to sell that my view on marketing completely changed." "I am an engineer and product developer by trade. However, sales and advertising are much tougher for me. What works? Social media? Google AdWords? Bloggers?"
My friend Patrick Mckenzie has a great quote: As developers, and as product people, we have the ability to create things, which is magical. You already have the ability to create; this books aims to give you the tools to share those creations with the world.

I'm not saying this won't be challenging.

You probably write better code than I do. The reason that you're better at it is you've spent thousands of hours practicing your cra!t. For the past ve years, I've been getting better at programming through practice. In the same way, you can get better at marketing. With practice, you can join other developers, like DHH, Rob Walling, and Patio11, who have mastered this ability to build and market their own projects. To get the most out of this book, youre going to need to think di#erent. Instead of specs rst, architecture rst, code rst, youre going to learn how to think "people rst".

Understanding people, and what motivates them, is the key to unlocking the sales and marketing process. Once we have this understanding, we can build products that, in some ways, market themselves. Skeptical? Unsure of how this might look in practice? In the next chapter, you'll nd a case study that illustrates what the research process might look like.

Chapter 2

Case Study: Research

A practical example of how to do research

"Things really switched for me when I started looking at my email newsletter as a product. There are a lot of people that have a box on their site. Why are people going to subscribe? You have to give them something." - Brennan Dunn
I know that getting your rst customers (or mailing list sign-ups) can be tough. To help you, let's walk through a case study of how to do the research. Let's say you started with a question:$

"I wonder if there are people that want to learn how to program in C#?"
The rst step would be to see who's interested in this, and what their pain is. Most people building a list will only go one level deep: "the pain is they

want to learn C#." That's too general. For example: there'd be a big di#erence between the needs of a 70 year-old retiree who wants to learn to program, and a college student who's been using computers since he was 5. So you need to force yourself to really dig and identify a specic group you're going to focus on, and you need to target a specic pain.

Let's start on Reddit.

Why Reddit? Reddit is home to many well-formed communities (called subreddits) and is easily searchable. I started with a search query: "want to learn C#"

Already we can see some interesting information. First: we can see which communities on Reddit are asking this question most frequently. There's a

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subreddit called /learnprogramming and another called /gamedev. We also see that the top search result was "I want to learn C# for making games, where do I start?" Continued research conrms the trend: theres a number of folks interested in learning C# to build simple games. When I dig a bit more into each thread, a more detailed picture of the audience starts to emerge: These are people that know the basics of programming. They o!ten have previous programming experience. Multiple threads mention Python. They're having a hard time nding tutorials online. They really don't like much of the existing reference books or Microso!t resources. There's also a group of people looking to learn C# with Unity3D. Based on this information, I'm going to target novice programmers who want to learn C# by building a basic game. Their biggest pain is nding well organized tutorials. This looks like a perfect opportunity for an email course. O#ering a free course (or PDF download) is a good way to test out demand. The time involved in creating the content is relatively low (when compared to

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building a full product) and it o#ers the people who sign-up something of value right away. Here's what my landing page could look like:

Want to learn the basics of C# game development but can't nd good tutorials?
Learn C# by making a simple RPG with 7 easy tutorials delivered straight to your inbox. You'll learn to build a game in one week! Subscribe to get your 7 free C# game dev tutorials.

I have an audience, a pain point, and a landing page. Now it's time to promote the landing page and test the response to what Im o#ering. The great thing about doing your research rst is you'll have a starting place to promote your new resource. To start, I can reply to these Reddit threads, and tell them about my course:

"I run a 7 day email course that teaches the basics of C# development. By the end of the week you'll know how to build a simple RPG: <link here>"
I wouldn't stop there: next I'd reach out to inuential folks in the C# and C# game dev communities and ask if they'd share my course with their

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audience. I'd also look for other threads on Quora, Hacker News, and Stack Overow where I could promote the landing page.

The research feedback loop

The whole idea with this phase is to create a feedback loop: 1. Start with a hypothesis: There are people that would like to learn C#.

2. Collect data by observing what people need (this is especially e#ective in online forums; you can observe what questions people are already asking). 3. Prune the data by revealing the most relevant results. At this stage we go through all of our observations (data) and look for patterns. We get rid of the outliers, and look for the relevant bits of data that come up over and over again. The question we're trying to answer here is: "What is a big pain that this group needs solved?" "Where are they getting stuck?" 4. Focus on the most relevant problem, and determine how to solve it. 5. Repeat the process by testing out our new hypothesis: People will pay for basic game tutorials so that they can learn how to program in C#. Heres the benet: each time we go through this feedback loop we get a stronger and stronger signal of what people actually want.

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Once we have a strong signal, we can start marketing e#ectively. We can go back to the people we observed and say: "Do you have this problem? What do you think of this solution?"

Its like gathering specs for a so!tware project

When you follow this approach, the marketing becomes easy: all the hard work is done during the research stage. It's like gathering requirements for a so!tware project; the clearer the specs and architecture, the easier it is to sit down and write code.

Always be researching your niche; never stop. I look wherever people congregate: forums, mailing lists, blog posts, o!f-hand comments from people on Twitter, support portals, user groups. - Amy Hoy
People dont really care about us. Yes, as individuals we have dreams and aspirations, but our customers are focused on their own issues. The key to successfully building and marketing a product is to choose an audience you can speak to, and then nd their pain.

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Chapter 3

Choosing an audience

Photo by Kevin Jaako / http://www.ickr.com/photos/jaako/

If you're reading this book, you probably fall into one of three camps: 1. You've already built a product, and you're looking to nd customers

2. You have an idea for a product, but haven't built it yet 3. You want to build a product, but you don't know where to start Regardless of where you're at right now, you have two important questions to answer: 1. What group of people am I going to serve?

2. What problems is this group actively looking for solutions for?

Years ago, I met Mike McDerment from FreshBooks. FreshBooks is online invoicing so!tware; over 5 million people have used their platform to send invoices, accept payments, and track expenses. Mike explains the genesis of FreshBooks in this blog post:

"In January 2003 I was running a four person design agency. I was using Microso!t Word to create our !irm's invoices and I was pulling out my hair because Word simply wasn't built to create good looking invoices e!!iciently or report on my business. One day I accidentally saved over an old invoice, and something in me snapped I knew there had to be a better way. Over the next two weeks I coded up a solution for my clients, and eventually we turned that side project into what is now FreshBooks."
When I met Mike in Miami, we were discussing marketing strategies. He was telling me about all the di#erent ways he was reaching potential customers. One thing stuck out for me:

Me: "Mike, it sounds like you're only going a!ter web designers. Why not market FreshBooks to other niches?" Mike: "Starting with web designers made sense for us. We were designers, we knew where they hung out, we knew they were online, and we knew they needed to manage invoices (because we had that problem ourselves). It would have been way harder, and expensive, to go a!ter plumbers: web designers was a niche we could easily get to."

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Since then, FreshBooks has expanded to serve all sorts of niches: lawyers, marketing agencies, plumbers, therapists; but choosing that initial target group was important. In retrospect there were two things Mike did right:

1. He chose a group he already knew well.

He didn't choose plumbers, because he wasn't a plumber (and didn't understand that industry). However, he did understand web designers; he knew the challenges they faced. He could speak to that group. He also knew that they'd be easier to reach, because they congregated in groups online. For example: in 2008 FreshBooks was running ads on TweetDeck and Echophon, two popular Twitter clients. At the time, Twitter was still a fairly small network, made up largely of early adopters in the web community. It was the perfect place for FreshBooks to reach it's niche.

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" FreshBooks initially launched in 2006 as 2ndSite

2. He attacked a "pulling-my-hair-out" kind of problem

Remember that line I quoted above? Mike was discussing why he started building FreshBooks:

"I was using Microso!t Word to create our !irm's invoices and I was pulling out my hair because Word simply wasn't built to create good looking invoices e!!iciently or report on my business."
He could have built many things for the web design community: a new portfolio service, a set of Photoshop lters, or inspirational posters for their walls. Instead, he chose the most frustrating, and pressing problem he faced: creating, sending and tracking invoices. It wasn't the sexiest, or most

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technically challenging, problem to solve - but it was a problem that was making him pull out his hair. This is why I recommend that people address B2B (business to business) markets. Businesses have many frustrations and are willing to pay to someone to take those frustrations away.

Finding your ideal customer

Many people get stuck trying to gure out what type of customers they should serve. 1. Who can I help?

2. Who is looking for help? 3. Who will pay for my help? Like Mike McDerment, I'm going to recommend that you start with a group that you already belong to. I've noticed that o!ten, product people (myself included) run away from the good opportunities right in front of us, thinking that we'll nd easier (or more protable) options elsewhere. Nowhere is this more true than a person searching for his audience. I've seen talented designers trying to build an audience of accountants and great copywriters trying to reach out to restaurants. Almost weekly I meet folks trying to market to real estate agents, teachers, and college students.

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These markets come up over and over again in the emails people send me. From the perspective of my inbox, I can see the trend clearly. The individuals emailing me can't see it: they're missing the opportunity to reach people like them. It's a mistake to go a!ter a completely new audience that you know nothing about. You're a great developer, why would you try speaking to lawyers instead of just speaking to other developers? You already have expertise in your domain; it would be foolish to throw that away and try to learn something brand new. Speak to your people. Speak to people who are like you. This will give you a few unfair advantages (which is what you want) over your competition: 1. You'll be in a better place to understand what they need (and what they can a#ord to pay). 2. You'll be passionate about serving these people, because they're already like you. Do you really want to go to work everyday for a group of people you nd dull and boring?

Common objections: "I don't have anything to say to people in my !ield."

This one surprises me. If you have experience and expertise in particular subject, you have something to share. Even if you're a Junior Developer,

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you might probably have a useful perspective on subjects like team building, employee on-boarding, and recruitment. I think this objection o!ten comes down to fear: we're scared to target other people in the tech industry, because we're scared they'll judge us. We know our colleagues are smart and we also know that there are trolls that could criticize our work. Theres no need to fear, because you have a secret weapon: you're going to identify, and solve, their pain. Also, people in your eld are way more likely to listen to you, than, say, lawyers or accountants. You have something to say to your industry. You could be speaking to developers working at big corporations, team leaders working at startups, or venture capitalists looking for a basic understanding of how APIs work.

"I don't know anyone who spends money."

Theres one group that I know spends money: managers. Managers have a lot on their plate: they're managing teams, resources, and objectives. If you can solve their pain in a way that saves them time, saves them money, or makes them money, you have a guaranteed sale. Think about the managers in your company: that team leader who is trying to implement TDD (test driven development), or that DevOps manager who is struggling to keep all the dev environments working properly, or the design director who's never used Git before.

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There are people all around you who need your help. Generally your audience should meet these criteria: 1. They should be identiable: you can't market to everybody. You need to pick a specic group of people, with identiable characteristics. 2. They should be reachable: audiences that congregate online are great targets, because they're easy to nd. A diverse group who are dispersed will be more di"cult to target. 3. They should spend money: if you're going to run a business, the group you're targeting should have money to spend.

Why you should target businesses

A B2B (business-to-business) market has a tremendous advantage over a B2C (business-to-consumer) market: businesses have more money to spend, and they value their time more.

"These days I pretty much wouldnt do a B2C idea. In the B2B market, you can sell on value: you save someone time, save them money or make them money. And there isthere is a much higher pricing potential in [serving businesses] and o!ten a lot less support." - Rob Walling, Startups for the Rest of Us, Episode 134
You want a low-cost of acquisition with high pricing potential.

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Heres the advantage to having a business as your customer: they have a similar CPA (cost-per-acquisition) to consumers, but their pricing potential is much higher. Consumers generally dont like recurring monthly expenses. They prefer one-time purchases, but have been socialized to pay very little for digital goods: $0.99 for an app, $0.99 for an MP3, $3.99 to rent a movie. Businesses, on the other hand, have huge monthly expenses that dwarf the cost of so!tware, and other digital goods:
Monthly business expenses Salaries Lease Your app % of total Oct $45,000 $3,900 $99 0.20% Nov $66,000 $3,900 $99 0.14% Dec $72,000 $3,900 $99 0.13%

In most cases, your product will constitute a tiny percentage of a companys total expenditures. This isnt the case with consumers, where even $39 per month can feel like a lot of money:
Monthly personal expenses Rent Food Cable Your app Oct $1,000 $315 $39 $39 Nov $1,000 $311 $39 $39 Dec $1,000 $309 $39 $39

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The other challenge with consumers is that they evaluate their budget di#erently. If theyre overspending every month, which are they more like to stop paying: their cable bill, or their bill for your product? Mind you: when I say "business" I mean anyone that can write o# a purchase as a business expense. This includes part-time business owners, freelancers, solo-founders, consultants, and hobby entrepreneurs. However, don't underestimate the value of targeting people in bigger businesses, who o!ten have the corporate credit card, and spend money more freely.

Nathan Barry: "Once theyre holding that company credit card in their hand, theres really no di!ference between $39 and $249, so long as its below that magic threshold of, I have to ask my boss for approval." Patrick McKenzie: "Which, FYI for anybody who hasnt heard me say this 100 times, that magic threshold is generally under $500 or $1,000."
(Source)

Final thoughts
While choosing an audience is important, its not worth stressing out about it. The key is to choose an audience, and then get on to the next bit: nding their pain. In the next step, if your research doesn't turn up anything, you can always choose a di#erent group later.

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Chapter 4

This is a sample

This is me, age 5

Thanks for reading! This is a sample from my new book, Marketing for Developers. If you havent already, visit my site and sign-up to receive updates on the books progress: justinjackson.ca/marketingfordevelopers When you purchase a book from an indie author, youre helping to support a thriving economy of individual makers, builders, and creators.

Justin Jackson" @mijustin

Copyright 2014 Justin Jackson. All rights reserved.

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