What do we really mean when we say a feature is done?
I've followed Max Rozen's journey building Online or Not, his website uptime monitoring SAAS for several years now, but a sentence in his recent newsletter really struck with me:
A good summary of 2024 for me is: I spent way too much time worrying about feature gaps in the product...and not enough time marketing.
This is something I'm guilty of myself as, I suspect, are many developers who are, at best, reluctant marketers. We build features to make our products more useful for existing customers and to (hopefully) attract new ones, but how will they know if we don't tell them? A feature isn't done when it's shipped, it's done when the world knows about it and knows how to use it.
Get the word out - somehow
Not every new feature deserves front-page exposure (though big ones and frequently requested ones do!) but every feature does deserve to be covered in your help docs. I think help docs are an often overlooked marketing channel - if they are well written and talk about how your product solves a problem, not just how to use it, they can be valuable to your users and to people searching for information and so can generate search traffic.
Marketing needs discipline
Spending enough time on marketing is about discipline. Jon Youngfook of Bannerbear fame has talked about how he split his time 50/50 between development and marketing - literally alternating 1 week building features and 1 week writing about them.
Jon's approach really resonates with me, and I'm going to try and follow it as I build SavvyIdeas, though with one key difference. Although Jon was a self-funded indiehacker, he was full-time on Bannerbear from the start. I have a day job, and a week is rarely long enough to ship a new feature, so I'm going to do 2-week cycles, which should be enough coding time to build a reasonably complex feature and enough marketing time, to update the docs and the marketing site and do at least one other marketing activity of some description.
Let's see how this goes...
