The first rule of finding distribution if you're an indie developer or a startup is to be helpful. After all, you're building a product that purports to help someone solve a problem they have.
So with that frame in mind, where do people go to ask questions or vent or get information to solve the kind of problem your product claims to solve? Don't go to those forums to just pitch yourself. First, be helpful. Offer insight and advice, or ask clarifying questions, anything to demonstrate that you are listening and can add value.
Later on, after you've provided some help, you can pitch your product. But the first thing is to be helpful. Offer some kind of wisdom or insight that is currently lacking.
I think that's super common among technical founders (really, everyone).
But I'd gently reframe the problem. It's not really "building vs. marketing"; it's "building vs. distribution." After all, what you're talking about is getting more people to use your products. For technical products, that looks a lot like building: a thoughtful README, great documentation, spending time in communities where your customers are and both listening and helping. And, in the process of doing that, if there's an opportunity to pitch what you're working on, then pitch.
Don't worry about building complex "marketing systems" right now. Just get out there and help people in the communities you're trying to serve, and learn from the way they frame the problem (take careful note of the language they use to describe their problem...flip that around and turn it into your website copy!)
Also FWIW, I am not a believer in automation. Yes, automation for optimizing ad spend and fixing SEO/AEO site issues. That stuff is great. But automating social media is a terrible idea. You just come across like a bot. Speak like a normal person and, truly, have fun with it. You're connecting with teh people you're trying to serve!
I love all these new analytics tools popping up. It's pretty great for those of us who want or need to be more privacy-focused with our customers. I'm expecting a proliferation of easier to use, modern marketing analytics alternatives to Amplitude and Heap any day now.
If the NFL made its data available weekly, you could probably join it with PFF data for some interesting insight. There’s a ton of power in joining time-series metrics with purely relational data.
Should add, I’m a big fan of all the football metrics providers and follow them all religiously during the season. The NFL dataset we found isn’t as comprehensive, but it’s still really fun!
I was suuuuper curious about the fastest player on the field (i.e., in full pads on game day), and the play-specific data includes acceleration as one of its data points. Miranda on our team (co-author of the post) dialed up a query to show the top 3, one of whom is Tyreek Hill. (The other two don’t play that much)
Today is opening day for most of the NFL’s training camps. I’m a huge fan of public datasets, and my coworkers and I happened upon this dataset from the NFL. We loaded it into our company’s product (TimescaleDB) and did some number crunching. We wanted to definitively answer some questions about whether or not there is a quantifiable difference in performance when playing at Mile High Stadium (there is) or if Tyreek Hill really is as fast as he seems (he is). If you’re a football fan, there’s some good data in there. At the very least, you may settle a few bar bets. Maybe you’ll even find something to help you win your fantasy league this year.
Hi, I'm Prashant. I run Developer Relations at Twitter. I want to clarify a few things here.
In the past, Twitter had little formality associated with granting elevated access. It was very much, "Hey, I want to do this cool thing!" "Okay, sure, here you go." As Twitter's platform business has matured to include many businesses building billions of dollars worth of social media monitoring and other tools, we've formalized the process to becoming a Twitter Official Partner (partners.twitter.com). Over the last six months, we've started contacting all of those API key holders with elevated access and asked them to clarify what they're doing. In some cases, we know the business and business owner and reach out personally. In other cases, like this one, the business is listed in our systems as "N/A", so we send the template mail.
In the email, we encourage people who believe their app is within the bounds of acceptable use cases on Twitter to contact us directly, and provide a link to do so. The owner of this app elected to blog publicly about the situation before contacting us, which is unfortunate. We have contacted the owner of this app and hope to resolve this situation, as we do with hundreds of other developers on our platform. We do occasionally provide exceptions for apps that are non-commercial (not-for-profit, no ads, etc.)
Note also that in this instance, the notice is NOT about shutting down this app. It merely inquires about why the developer needs elevated access, something that is typically reserved for our business partners.
None of this is related to continuing to use the Twitter API or our commitment to enabling developers to build on our platform (Fabric, Gnip, our Ads platform, and the Twitter API).
I just posted the pricing information on the site. We haven't finalized the actual price yet, but we expect to price this product in line with typical quality and load testing tools (think low four figures, USD). We will definitely offer substantial discounts to those customers who help us during our beta by submitting bugs or issues they find with Jinx itself, or by submitting bugs they've found in other software (their own or open source) using Jinx. Visit our "Report a Bug" page to give us feedback.
So with that frame in mind, where do people go to ask questions or vent or get information to solve the kind of problem your product claims to solve? Don't go to those forums to just pitch yourself. First, be helpful. Offer insight and advice, or ask clarifying questions, anything to demonstrate that you are listening and can add value.
Later on, after you've provided some help, you can pitch your product. But the first thing is to be helpful. Offer some kind of wisdom or insight that is currently lacking.
I write about this in my blog post about helping indie developers get their first users: https://www.strategicnerds.com/blog/the-indie-developers-gui...