A product about optimizing products, followed by a series of blog posts about making such product, making-of videos, and finally an ebook telling you everything about the launch of the product and how you can apply that to your products (hopefully real). Aren’t we all tired of these marketing treadmills?
> A product about optimizing products, followed by a series of blog posts about making such product, making-of videos, and finally an ebook telling you everything about the launch of the product and how you can apply that to your products (hopefully real). Aren’t we all tired of these marketing treadmills?
This actually reminds me a lot of the way pyramid/MLM schemes worked back in the 90s (and probably still work now). I got briefly snared by one of these things as a kid, and the materials were certainly of high perceived quality (nicely bound, etc.), but it didn't take long to figure out that the whole thing was about selling the thing you were being sold. Similarly a massive proportion of Amway's revenue, and the revenue of successful Amway members comes from the sale of materials and seminars related to building your "business". The household products themselves are very much a sideshow.
All these deeply meta, self-referential product optimization products have a similar - slightly grubby - feel to them. Old ideas repackaged as new. I mean, I suppose fair enough if you can make a living out of it and you're not actually scamming anyone, but how many of these damn things does the world really need?
Writing about a successful launch is a fairly common occurrence. This is a process called shared what you learned. In most cases the learnings are not financially-related, and in fact most launches on Product Hunt don't make any money. Some sign up some customers, but many products are free. Mine just happened to be a paid product.
All companies, everywhere do this, not just indie hackers looking to share what they've learned from their process.
Business news writes about revenue numbers hit by large companies every day. This is a form of advertising. Sadly, I do not have Forbes to do a story on my tiny payday, so I write about it myself.
I also don't think this is re-packaged content. I only know of one other person (the file I was inspired by) who did the same. In my ebook, I talk mostly about the process of setting up the page, with detailed steps for the launch -- but the lessons are 2-fold (how to design your website for success, and how to launch). The design aspect is a highly in demand service that your company has probably hired for multiple times. In fact, every business in the world (or just about) hires people to work on their websites and make them work more efficiently. Those who don't usually don't survive. It's a skill you need in today's competitive environment.
Reminds me of the joke "a man was selling books on the corner entitled 'how to become a millionaire'. Naturally, I bought one—turns out the trick is to sell a million books for a dollar."
It's a good joke, but I think it's intellectually cheap and easy to use as a snarky response, but completely misses the factual arguments.
Not everyone who teaches can sell. Not everyone who sells can build.
I can read a detailed step by step guide by a guru who spells out exactly how he made his billions, but that doesn't mean I can execute it.
My shared account is just me sharing my learnings. I have already shared most of it in public. The ebook is me practicing what I preach -- that everything can be monetized if you just apply some effort.
Check out my tweets to see exactly what I am talking about.
For most of the modern economy, it's marketing treadmills all the way down.
The primary idea -- that a product will make the consumer's life better -- is what is being repackaged and resold over and over again. In most cases, consumers are buying the quick shot of dopamine they get when they swipe their credit card, not the product itself.
> The primary idea -- that a product will make the consumer's life better -- is what is being repackaged and resold over and over again.
I wish.
What’s being resold and repackaged is telling other people how to make money by telling other people how to tell other people how to make money by telling other people how to make money.
I think the key difference is authenticity. This person admits they have a day job, they continue thier day job (at the moment), and they made 10k - not quite enough to buy a Lambo. If you were seriously considering launching a product, this looks to have some usefull information. Certainly looks better than the 'marketing 101' or 'seo for Google's books on Amazon.
This is absolutely right. Most of similar products sell themselves as experts in the field and try really hard to convince us that they offer some special magical recipe. This guy seems sincere about what he's giving.
Folks start out trying to make money online, until the eventually come to realise, the only way to make money online, is to sell a product telling other people how to make money online.
> the only way to make money online, is to sell a product telling other people how to make money online
That's patently untrue. For every huckster hawking his latest course, there are 10x as many successful marketers. You just never hear about them because they run actually successful websites.
Anyone you see ranking for "best hosting" or "best website builder" is likely pulling in nearly 6 figures a month
There's also a terrible self-fulfilling cycle where the the content producers will solicit their testimonials from those that will undoubtedly speak highly about the content regardless of its quality, under the quid pro quo of getting it free.
I suppose this is not limited to the internet marketing genre, but I've found from my own experience, this is common.
Small anecdote: I was once asked to review an ebook in the internet marketing space based on some things I was doing at the time. The "author" had created an ebook that consisted of clipart, default Microsoft Word formatting, and egregious spacing to pump up the page count. The "author" was furious when my review was neutral rather than glowing.
I totally agree with this statement, but don't see how it applies to what I wrote. My summary was to explain how I utilized my time and energy to build a product and launch it on a popular platform (with some pre-sales). I do not teach anyone how to make money online. In fact, most product hunt launches are free apps and resources.
Maybe another way to look at it is people overestimate the importance of marketing strategies and underestimate the importance of a product people really want. Lots of people spent time getting really good at marketing and e-commerce only to find the thing they were selling didn’t have much of a market fit.
Hey, thanks for the comment. The process of talking about building a product is fairly standard and is called "build in the open". While there is certainly a rewarding feeling in selling something you built, I get more pleasure to know that my work has inspired someone on the sidelines to pick up their side project or even quit their job and start their own micro SaaS.
In fact, I've already had a handful of conversations with people who told me my writeups were the reason they are working towards a life that does not involve the 9-5. For this, I am eternally grateful and happy that I wrote what I wrote.
The entire marketing industry is a treadmill and everything you do in life is touched by it. That thing you ate for breakfast? Marketing treadmill. The car you drove to work? Marketing treadmill.
I don’t drive to work or even eat breakfast. That’s a sad view of the world.
I get the positivity aspect here, but my rant is about meta-products marketed to other “builders” - there is just something unsettling about the idea of making money from other people’s dreams before they have even started. “Build in the open” is nice when you are actually building something.
You live in a world driven in large part by marketing and sales. It's not a worldview, it's facts.
I am not making any money from "other people's dreams. I sell a product which helps companies make their sites sell better, retain users, and satisfy their users's needs.
Your definition of building "something" other than a digital product is quite interesting, thank you for sharing your view.
Personally, I like to think that I help companies thrive, which means they can hire more people, create more jobs, enable their communities to grow. If that's not impact, I don't know what is. My blogging about it has already inspired many people to pursue their side projects - and I'm very happy about that.
Not really sure what you are getting at here... at all.
At the same time - if you are on the Dev side it is well worth it to learn as much about marketing as you can
There is an Art and a Science to creating these Marketing Treadmills and making them work
The dream is
A truly talented dev team that can make an AMAZING product
MERGED WITH
A splendid marketing team that can really market it
*
While there might not be very many similarities, you can always learn from what people do to market and sell their product. Heck some of the best marketing strategies are used by people who have things to sell which seem completely pointless
Maybe in an idiot, but reading this whole thing, I'm trying to figure out what 'an AirTable' is and why someone would sell access to one.
Is it like a FileMaker database in the cloud? Serious question, since I've seen it mentioned infrequently and it sounds like it could be something neat, or just over hyped marketing like NoSQL was at first.
Airtable is Google Sheets on steroids. The benefit of using airtable is that you can present a locked preview of the product, so the "view" is visible to everyone you share it with / or if you embed on the site like I did.
Looks like a great list. A couple questions about this sort of list:
1) Do you find there are optimizations that skew more important for Enterprisey products (which tend to have longer decision cycles and more stakeholders involved in the decision process) vs. Consumer products (which are frequently able to drive more impulse style purchases)?
2) If so, is it possible to sort or filter your list towards one direction or the other?
Enterprise businesses definitely have longer purchase cycles and their decisions hinge on multiple people with multiple touch points. While Swipe is not really tailored to enterprise, it does contain some items that may help.
You can sort the list by difficulty to implement, or anticipated outcome. I also added tags for the different types of pages you can apply the strategies to -- home page, landing page, onboarding, app, blog, etc...
Enjoyed your write up and journey. One idea I haven’t heard mentioned often is on Product Hunt give a lifetime subscription to users with a time limit of 24 hours. A great idea for early supporters.
Also, I'm a big IndieHackers fan - a great community that really supports the start up community.
If you're a front-end dev, you'd probably worked with PMs on building features that helps the product grow. This guide covers many of those features.
If you're a backend dev, you'd probably been asked to create database tables to save marketing or business data. AirTable allows many business people to create tables and gather info , and selling info without involving backend dev.
It will be interesting to see how the self-serve business tools (nocode) will affect the type of work devs will be asked to do in the future.
I assume you know what an airtable is - a glorified google sheets. The other part is information containing strategies to help a website turn more visitors into people who actually sign up and pay. There is a preview on the site itself, may make a bit more sense.
Hmm, good question. Hard to say really, but it is not a trivial amount of time. The launch itself was literally at least 20 hours. I did get 4 hours of sleep ;) But to promote the whole thing it probably took several days. Yeah that sounds about right.
For me it is more than just about the money - I do okay as a consultant. There's just a somewhat of a special feeling when you create something - a product - and sell it. It's just not the same as providing a service. I hope that makes sense.
Thanks for the write-up! Im curious, how did you promote ph launch? Did you have a mailing list to let everyone know? Where did the support come from or was it just through luck?
No list. As I said in the post, I had very little audience. Most of the success is due to me randomly messaging my Twitter contacts and asking for their support. I messaged ahead of time (maybe a few hours before?) just so it wasn't out of the blue. Everyone agreed. Some were already customers (I made some sales before the launch) so they left honest reviews of the product.
I think the other part of this being successful was the giveaway tweet, plus all the friends who just wanted to support me. I am really thankful they did!
My affiliate marketing background also tells me that if something is profitable, chances are you can scale it. So this is my goal - figure out ways to scale this thing. It's too fun to just drop now.
Fair enough. I don't have any expenses, everything I use is free. Gumroad DOES take a fee, so there's that. And taxes.. always taxes. Thanks for pointing this out!
Started reading, hit the term "airtable". Looked it up. Another company brand.
> One workspace.platform.source of truth.
> Endless solutions.
> Orchestrate powerful business solutions with a single source of truth. The only limit is your imagination.
Airtable is worth taking seriously. They built a really good web/mobile/SaaS Access-style database product, which allows non-engineers to design and use a relational database.
It's very well built, and it's having a big impact.
