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Comment by jgmmo | Hacker News Reader

I dislike this list. It's too much, and does not discern between effectiveness. It's like they are equally weighted tasks. This is absolutely not the case.

Half of this is common sense, 'make an about page, make a contact page', that is basic...

Then there's a ton of stuff here that is hypothetically cool to do but practically speaking will not be productive.

As a marketer I can tell you that there is some pareto optimization that can be done here. It's likely, I think, if you did this whole checklist that you'd find 20% of your efforts ended up bringing in 80% of your conversions. The trick is finding what that chunk of extremely lucrative marketing activities are for your product/industry.

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It is intentionally too much. My goal with the list was to make something exhaustive. The hard part - the reason companies have whole marketing departments - is to prioritize and execute on it.

There's definitely some common sense stuff here, but for devs who are marketing their first side project, it might be helpful to have more rather than less.

Finally, I welcome PR's on the project! It's open source and I'm looking for collaborators to help improve it. I'm a dev, not a marketer, so I'd love an industry pro to improve it.

I like it. I'm in the process of putting together a marketing strategy for my SaaS product (https://usebx.com) right now, and this gives me some really good ideas to pick and choose from. Thank you :)

It's a great list. And I love the little inspirational quotes above each section. I think the "common sense" items should stay, since what is common sense to one is not always common sense to another.

But akin to what others have said, it's not a checklist! I think I'd need 2 additional full-time staff on my side project working on nothing but this to implement it.

To make it more specific to side projects I think it could use a preliminary strategizing paragraph. E.g., if you only have 2 hours / week to devote to marketing, here's how to use this list...

I really liked the tools listed for each task. Usually I encounter a nice logo, newsletter, landing page, etc. and wonder how such things can be made without being distracted from the main product.

This is basically the advice of Traction[1], which is the best book I've come across on this topic. They recommend experimenting with acquisition channels until you find one or two that produce great results, milking them for all they're worth, then continuing to experiment in order to find the new channel(s) that will get you to the next stage.

That said, there is still value in seeing many potential channels laid out in one place, so that you can consider all of them, weigh them against each other, and potentially try out a bunch before zeroing in on the best ones.

1: https://www.amazon.com/Traction-Startup-Achieve-Explosive-Cu...

I don't view it as a 'do everything on the list' checklist. Instead, I see it as a list of options and you check the those that apply to your project. From this you generate your own tailored project checklist.

If nobody knows which 20% of tactics gets you 80% of the results for any given product, then it's good that the list covers all the possible things. By definition of that rule, you can't generally weight any of the items above the others. If I'm misreading, and you are saying you know the best 20% of tactics in general or the quickest meta-strategy for finding the 20% for a given a product, please share. That would be the hardest part, especially for the target audience of this: non-marketers/new marketers.

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