You should start promoting yourself and building your audience before you have a finished product or even before you have a great idea that you want to build.
1. The major problem most startups face is marketing and the ability to carve out a niche, find and retain paying customers.
Even with a stellar developer team and a stellar product, your startup may not grow or survive without a great marketing and sales teams.
You should start promoting yourself and building your audience before you have a finished product or even before you have a great idea that you want to build.
Most first-time developers actually ignore marketing.
They’re oblivious to the challenge of attracting people to take a look at something they’ve created.
There are so many times that I have seen developers spend countless hours building something, releasing it with no fanfare...
Create a website on your domain name and start publishing great content about things that you know (or even things you’re working on or trying to learn about).
Don’t fall into the idealistic developer trap of wanting to build this from scratch.
Use something like WordPress and with a plugin or two you can get a great website, blog or even a MVP done...
This time is better spent on building an audience and talking to actual people you are trying to serve.
Traditional PR and getting press mentions is not as efficient and cost effective for startups. It’s difficult to become a new Warby Parker.
Paid advertising on Google and Facebook is fine if you can afford it and have time to..
It stops producing results as soon as you stop paying. Same can be said for influencer marketing.
Content marketing, on the other hand, is easy to start with (you can simply produce content yourself) and if done well
Content can be anything from blog posts, YouTube videos, podcasts, and live streams.
It depends on what fits best for you (and the audience you’re trying to target).
Your first customers will find you through your content.
Building an audience can even help you figure out what product to create and...
Ask visitors to sign up to a mailing list and follow your journey
You want a reliable way of reaching out to the audience that you are building.
Social media is definitely not a very reliable communication channel.
Due to the different algorithms in place, you rarely get more than 10% of your...
Email marketing is different.
It’s a very low tech and flexible medium.
It’s very personal and gets higher reach than social media.
Start growing that mailing list straight away.
Most people who discover your startup are not ready to buy straight away.
They need time and may need your product only in the future.
You have many WordPress plugins that allow you to insert various calls to action on your content asking people to sign up to hear from you.
This is also something you can experiment a lot with trying to find the best copy, the best offer and the best location for your call to action.
On the other hand, I’m happy to experiment with messages that show up depending on how long a user has been on site, how deep the visitor has scrolled down the page
Get used to being ignored. You have put a lot of time and effort into something be it a product or a blog post.
You release it into the wild but get no feedback whatsoever.
The Internet is a great place for people to join a community and passively observe.
There’s no obligation to respond or interact.
You almost certainly have more people paying attention to you than what you see in your engagement numbers so do beware of that and keep pushing your project.
It’s extremely difficult to get any attention these days.
There’s just so much content and everyone has so many options for what they want to spend their time on.
It helps that you think like the audience you’re trying to reach, that you’ve had a similar experience, been in a similar position and that you can be in their shoes.
Who are they?
Where are they spending their time online?
What questions do they want to get answered?
What issues do they face?
What are their pain points?
Publish content that ranks, gets views and shares.
What makes you different from the other sites in your industry.
The common angle of looking at a topic is no longer of any real interest.
You should add an angle on an angle.
Can you make complicated things simple?
Can you make intimidating solutions painless?
Will you be visiting every country in the world and sharing your journey?
Will you be building your app or product in public and broadcasting it on a live stream?
This can take a long time and may need a lot of testing and experimentation.
Talk about your day-to-day work as a developer or a founder.
Share your journey with the audience.
How are you going about building your product or running your team or your company?
What’s working? What’s not working?
What are the plans for the future?
What are people searching for on Google that’s relevant to your industry and things you know a lot about?
There’s no reason to try and reinvent the wheel.
Use tools such as BuzzSumo to research relevant content that’s shared the most in social media, or to find the content that works best for the competing...
Publish original research.
Look at the data you have access to that others don’t.
Do surveys.
Use industry data.
Or even Google trends or keyword trends.
Speak to your customer support and see what are the most frequently asked questions they get or topics that users struggle with the most.
The goal of your content marketing is to drive brand awareness and business growth.
This means not just publishing content and driving traffic, but also converting blog visitors into subscribers, leads and paying customers.
Fewer but more targeted visitors is much better than masses of irrelevant people who will visit and bounce back within a few seconds.
Keep that in mind.
It’s quality over quantity.
Create content for each of the stages, educate your potential customers, enlighten the prospect on what makes you different from the competitors and sell your product to them.
Don’t forget to also target the newly acquired customers by helping them maximize the value they get from your product.
"Blog and pray” does not work. Promote your work proactively
It doesn’t work like that.
You need to have a marketing strategy ready for things to do after you publish a new piece of content in order to drive awareness and traffic to it.
The organic opportunities on established social platforms pretty much don’t exist.
Ignore them.
Do this instead:
Introduce them to your product, get them to try it (maybe with a free trial or even a free subscription) and eventually add it to their list too.
There will be some similar sites in your specific industry too.
Take the time to look for them.
Syndicating your content to larger, established sites with broader reader bases works in your favor in several ways.
You get your message in front of a large audience that is interested in what you’re doing.
It might give you some clicks and visits to your site, some subscribers to your mailing list or some followers on your social media channels.
These can be considered as low hanging fruit and are a great place to start in your outreach efforts.
Indie Hackers
LinkedIn Publishing Network
Business2Community
Business Insider
Buzzfeed
Entrepreneur. Com
Fast Company
Harvard Business Review
Huffington Post
Inc. Magazine
Mashable
Moz
Social Media Today
TechCrunch
ReadWrite
SitePoint
Social Media Examiner
Journalists, bloggers and other influencers already have built their audiences and have access to platforms that can extend the reach of your messages too.
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He also open-sourced his entire curriculum, templates and all. Here's a link 👇

The Mochary Method Curriculum ➔ https://t.co/A8J51IzYhz
My recent conversation with @mattmochary where we talk about fear, anger, innovation, how to lay people off well, and his coaching practice ➔
Also in podcast form ➔
For more from Matt, buy this book
THREAD:
https://t.co/8EmLYHHbLo
9-5s aren\u2019t the problem
— Hustle Smarter \U0001f4b8 (@Hustle_Smarterr) September 26, 2020
Letting them be your only income stream is
https://t.co/aMyO7K3IbM
The biggest asset you\u2019ll ever have is yourself
— Hustle Smarter \U0001f4b8 (@Hustle_Smarterr) September 26, 2020
Invest in it wisely
https://t.co/xv7QK5mdvD
18-25?
— Hustle Smarter \U0001f4b8 (@Hustle_Smarterr) September 27, 2020
Now is the time to take risks and improve
Don\u2019t waste this time
https://t.co/Ww2s97Kw5x
What would you say to someone who feels \u201clost\u201d?
— Hustle Smarter \U0001f4b8 (@Hustle_Smarterr) October 7, 2020
🎬 https://t.co/JAhXqsuu6h $0
🌍 https://t.co/BrNUAhfiIT $0
💡 https://t.co/ZWcLfOH4aI $0
🐞 https://t.co/aghOxYEcPI $1.99
👍 https://t.co/2JhJLe27pW $3,025 in 10 days.
But that's ok, just keep shipping! My stories👇
🎬 https://t.co/wuiBp1XsYD is the first thing I created. It's a community for indie makers. The different thing is we post updates in videos. I created it for fun as I think the world doesn't need one more text-based forum, so I make a video one. No monetization plan so far.
🌍 https://t.co/fiwjgCWho5 is a social app. The idea is from Linktree, an app to share your social links. I thought it would be cool to add more visuals to it, and meanwhile we can explore others around. I also have no monetization plan for it. Make it for fun too.
💡 https://t.co/fZfL45uvVX is a platform to connect influencers with their fans. People says it's like @superpeer. But the only difference is it's all sync. Influencers don't need to commit their time to fixed slot. Fans pay to ask questions, influencers can answer at anytime.
Continuing Influenswer... I think the product has its potential. But for now maybe I didn't find the right niche to serve. Will re-evaluate it in future.
#vc #startups #funding
2/ This means if you are an emerging manager raising a micro/nano fund of let's say $10M, then you get $200K a year for operations. That $200K pays for legal, fund admin, accounting, expenses, and your salary. basically that 2% doesn't go very far
#vc #startups #funding
3/ This is in contrast to a larger fund, let's say $100M fund where 2% is $2M a year. This is why some LPs (those who invest in funds) are looking for smaller management fee which is unreasonable for micro funds which many diverse managers are raising
#vc #startups #funding
4/ Now at RareBreed Ventures we structured our fees to be 2.5% for the first 5 years and 1.5% for the last 5 years. This comes out to the standard 2% but front-loaded in earlier years
#vc #startups #funding
5/ This means when we hit our target of $10M (if you want to be an LP our min investment is 10K and you can go to https://t.co/dm6ywrNFnU). We'll have 250K for the first 5 years giving a little more cushion for operations and allowing me to bring on a hire
#vc #startups #funding
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Always. No, your company is not an exception.
A tactic I don’t appreciate at all because of how unfairly it penalizes low-leverage, junior employees, and those loyal enough not to question it, but that’s negotiation for you after all. Weaponized information asymmetry.
Listen to Aditya
"we don't negotiate salaries" really means "we'd prefer to negotiate massive signing bonuses and equity grants, but we'll negotiate salary if you REALLY insist" https://t.co/80k7nWAMoK
— Aditya Mukerjee, the Otterrific \U0001f3f3\ufe0f\u200d\U0001f308 (@chimeracoder) December 4, 2018
And by the way, you should never be worried that an offer would be withdrawn if you politely negotiate.
I have seen this happen *extremely* rarely, mostly to women, and anyway is a giant red flag. It suggests you probably didn’t want to work there.
You wish there was no negotiating so it would all be more fair? I feel you, but it’s not happening.
Instead, negotiate hard, use your privilege, and then go and share numbers with your underrepresented and underpaid colleagues. […]
If everyone was holding bitcoin on the old x86 in their parents basement, we would be finding a price bottom. The problem is the risk is all pooled at a few brokerages and a network of rotten exchanges with counter party risk that makes AIG circa 2008 look like a good credit.
— Greg Wester (@gwestr) November 25, 2018
The benign product is sovereign programmable money, which is historically a niche interest of folks with a relatively clustered set of beliefs about the state, the literary merit of Snow Crash, and the utility of gold to the modern economy.
This product has narrow appeal and, accordingly, is worth about as much as everything else on a 486 sitting in someone's basement is worth.
The other product is investment scams, which have approximately the best product market fit of anything produced by humans. In no age, in no country, in no city, at no level of sophistication do people consistently say "Actually I would prefer not to get money for nothing."
This product needs the exchanges like they need oxygen, because the value of it is directly tied to having payment rails to move real currency into the ecosystem and some jurisdictional and regulatory legerdemain to stay one step ahead of the banhammer.
Decoded his way of analysis/logics for everyone to easily understand.
Have covered:
1. Analysis of volatility, how to foresee/signs.
2. Workbook
3. When to sell options
4. Diff category of days
5. How movement of option prices tell us what will happen
1. Keeps following volatility super closely.
Makes 7-8 different strategies to give him a sense of what's going on.
Whichever gives highest profit he trades in.
I am quite different from your style. I follow the market's volatility very closely. I have mock positions in 7-8 different strategies which allows me to stay connected. Whichever gives best profit is usually the one i trade in.
— Sarang Sood (@SarangSood) August 13, 2019
2. Theta falls when market moves.
Falls where market is headed towards not on our original position.
Anilji most of the time these days Theta only falls when market moves. So the Theta actually falls where market has moved to, not where our position was in the first place. By shifting we can come close to capturing the Theta fall but not always.
— Sarang Sood (@SarangSood) June 24, 2019
3. If you're an options seller then sell only when volatility is dropping, there is a high probability of you making the right trade and getting profit as a result
He believes in a market operator, if market mover sells volatility Sarang Sir joins him.
This week has been great so far. The main aim is to be in the right side of the volatility, rest the market will reward.
— Sarang Sood (@SarangSood) July 3, 2019
4. Theta decay vs Fall in vega
Sell when Vega is falling rather than for theta decay. You won't be trapped and higher probability of making profit.
There is a difference between theta decay & fall in vega. Decay is certain but there is no guaranteed profit as delta moves can increase cost. Fall in vega on the other hand is backed by a powerful force that sells options and gives handsome returns. Our job is to identify them.
— Sarang Sood (@SarangSood) February 12, 2020