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Comment by peterburkimsher | Hacker News Reader

"you do the job of at least five people. You have to be creative; you have to be a writer, be a performer, an editor, a director, a marketer."

This is my problem. I keep building things, both hardware and software, and post them to Hackaday and Show HN, respectively. Cool things, like a magnetic audio connector or a big data project of 20,000 restaurant menus translated from Chinese.

But I can't do the marketing. I have no idea how to make money out of this. Finishing a project and posting it is exciting, but then I'm always let down by the fact that nobody cares.

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I'm a senior marketer. The short answer is yes, you can market without spending. The slightly longer answer is that time is money and those forms of marketing often take lots of time, and take time away from building the product.

There's lots of free info out there, but it can be hard to separate the signal from the noise. Noise in this case often being gurus and blogs trying to get you to buy info products or make a purchase via affiliate link.

Start simple by making a site to sell your product and add a way to monetize it. Get engaged in communities that have problems your product solves. You can then reach out to people to get product feedback and maybe a sale.

But to be honest, at some point odds are you will need to spend money. If the issue is you simply cannot afford it, that's fine... bootstrap with non-paid channels.

If your issue is that you don't want to pay for anything on principle, you're going to have a rough time. There reality for most businesses is that it takes money to make money.

If you have any specific questions or want to chat, feel free to contact me via my profile. While I charge a consulting rate for hands-on work or analysis, I'm always happy to answer general marketing questions, point people in the right direction to reputable resources, etc. for free without any pressure to consult.

Thank you for your thoughtful reply! And thanks for not using an affiliate link, unlike some commenters below.

"add a way to monetise it" - do you mean Google ads? Affiliate links? The same thing we just said is "noise"?

"don't want to pay on principle" is part of it. I have a maximum wage - my visa and work contract do not allow me to do other paid work. I'm not allowed to have any revenue, so I want to minimise my costs. My "portfolio" feels useless if I can't find anyone else to use it though, so I know I need to do marketing, I just don't know how.

That's an interesting challenge--I've never encountered it. Monetization can occur through a variety of ways. Ads and affiliate links tend to be fairly low margin. Personally, I'd focus on productizing your offering, and trying to find a way to sell it as a service for recurring revenue.

That said, I don't know how you can actually make a business if you're not allowed to have any revenue. Can you clarify on what your end goal is? I might be missing something with that.

My end goal is just to make my work useful to someone else.

I do these projects because I want to. I'm going to keep building stuff, because that's what I enjoy. I just feel useless when I think how much time I spend on it, and then nobody cares.

Existing Chinese textbooks don't have colours for tones, pinyin, and literal translations. So I decided to make my own software to do that. I can sit back and judge the textbook authors (saying their stuff sucks), but that doesn't help anyone. So I made my own better one! But the only person who is helped by my work is me. It's not going to change the world if I'm the only person who uses it. Do I have to be a business in order to give stuff away for free?

That helps me understand a bit better. I'm not clear on the legalities of your situation, but it seems like you might benefit from looking into educational institutions and other community resources to see if they could make use of your work.

If you are giving stuff away for free you don't need to be a business, but if what you are giving away has costs associated with that, you need some way of covering those. If not by yourself, then with the help and sponsorship of another org.

Am [well, at least currently] a CMO - reach out if you want a basic intro in marketing stuff, looking at forming it into some sort of guide/course to sell, but ping me a list of questions and will try and pass on some tips and links to get you cracking.

But as others have said, if you're wanting to gain traction for something, it doesn't start with "cool project" it starts with "solves a problem". Cool is great, and amazing and the personal satisfaction is priceless - but if you want to price it, it's a different approach.

Question 1: Can I do marketing without spending money?

If the answer is no, then I'll move on. If the answer is yes, then yes, we can talk.

Of course you can market something without physical cash investment, the flipside is then obviously a time investment.

All advertising is a form of marketing, but not all marketing is advertising. Marketing tactics usually fit on an axis between cash-poor/time-rich and cash-rich/time-poor. Pick which on you can optimise for.

Take a look at "Inbound Marketing[0]", it's a good book that shows you how to gain an audience using social networking tools such as Youtube, Facebook, Twitter etc. It's an old book in terms of how fast social media moves, but it's logic still applies.

[0]: http://amzn.to/2ulry7h

I see that you're trying to get me to spend money, and you will receive a cut using that Amazon affiliates link.

My question was how to do marketing without money.

Well if you can't afford to purchase some books on the subject (which are helpful in their own rights), then I would suggest spending time looking at Blogs that specialise in the subject and check out Reddit's marketing and entrepreneur subreddits. They are really helpful and you can ask what ever questions you need.

Maybe check your local library or WorldCat? It might be available there since it's supposedly an old-ish book.

Don't ever stop doing exactly what you're doing. You've created a marvelous portfolio demonstrating your skills, and employers can look at those projects and understand the caliber of developer they're about to give lots of money to make cool things for them.

Also, sometimes the joy of a project is just bringing it to completion, for personal satisfaction. Passion projects can be just that! They don't have to make money. If you are going to make money though, and you're pretty sure you have a solid idea, perhaps reach out to someone with marketing skills to help you get the word out. If it's not your strong suit that's okay! You keep doing what you're good at, and let someone else shine at the tough stuff.

Isn't that just another way of saying "you're not getting paid but the exposure is great"?

>"you're not getting paid but the exposure is great"

That's only a bad thing to hear when someone else is telling you that because they are the ones who will be getting paid for your work.

Do it for yourself. If you're doing it for the attention, that's a pretty tough row to hoe. If you get lucky enough to attract an audience, then you ride that wave!

At a minimum, producing quality content demonstrates mastery of a topic, and that increases your credibility as a subject matter expert, which may be supporting evidence that you're worth that large sums of money you ask someone to pay at a future date.

What comes out when you ask yourself whether you enjoy building things or making money from ideas?

I enjoy building things. I'm good at back-end programming and hardware hacking. I'm bad at art and marketing.

Even making a "portfolio" requires everything I do to have a pretty GUI and a nice website. For many of my scripts, that kind of thing just isn't suitable.

For my 20k Chinese restaurant menu project, I got a few likes on Facebook. One person said I should make an app. But what kind of app? Android, iOS, Mac, Windows? What is the app supposed to do that the website can't already do? Even if I make an app, how am I supposed to tell people about it?

Paying for Facebook ads or Google ads seems like a waste of money, because even if the site gets more views, it's for free, so it won't pay for itself. This also restricts the type of project I do - I can't afford to pay for a server, so I code everything in client-side JavaScript and host on Github.

One more clarifying question -- it sounds to me like what drives you is to solve problems that you find interesting and challenging, and to have a decent number of people try it out and hopefully give you props for what you've built, how useful it is, how cool it is, etc. it sounds like "money" isn't a primary or secondary motivator for you, but might be used as a proxy for what you're really interested in?

I'm asking this because imo really clarifying your desires is a prerequisite for nailing down the right path to realizing these wishes.

That's right. I do projects that interest me. I see problems in life. For example, not being able to read menus, making a map of the range of an electric bike, etc.

I build solutions: my own Chinese translator + 20k menus. An offline map program that lets me draw a circle of a given radius. I have lots of these little projects.

Money isn't possible, because I have a maximum wage. My visa & contract don't allow me to do side work. I wish that other people would benefit from my work, but I don't want to spend money to buy users, because they won't be paying it back later.

So I've had this idea for a large project that would be a great free service for people, and be great for my portfolio. Then, I read this post. It became clear that hunting for paid work would likely have a far greater return on my time.

Work with a friend that you trust! My co-founder is brilliant at using tech to optimize operations, and talented-but-indifferent when it comes to marketing. I like selling things. It works out well :)

build things with monetization in mind

or you can contact me to bake the monetization piece, which is linked to what you can do with marketing

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