Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

Comment by plinkplonk | Hacker News Reader

But isn't this just stating the obvious? being a Developer + learning $cool_skill makes you $positive_adjective.

Well duh. Also, the sun rises in the east.

$cool_skill element_of {marketing, design, negotiation, leadership skills, design, writing ....}

$positive_adjective element_of {dangerous, rockstar, ninja , pirate, extraordinary, one in a million, cool, killer ... }

mix and match and you have a dozen or so catchy titles.

Throw in links to the top books on the topic and links to some blogs, and most importantly an ad for an ebook somewhere in the post. Profit.

Repeat a few dozen times. Landing pages for SEO. Hey you are a guru!

Maybe, I am just feeling too cynical abut such 'how to do a startup' porn. Feel free to ignore me.

OTOH HN generally has good discussions, even when the submission is spammy/low quality.

I'm with you. I feel the same way about startup porn. It's just that when I saw Wasswa's email it hit me most programmers don't work closely with good marketers and understand this. It's an unnecessary lost opportunity. I also figured there's many hard working people like him that just needed to be told marketing (or any skill in that set) is learnable that got me motivated up to write something.

you're not alone. It's harder than they make it seem.. much harder. As an example, landing pages for SEO is trivial.. stupid trivial. How to get those pages to rank for your desired keywords though is challenging, but no growth hacker wants to do that, or tell u how to do that.

In some sectors it can be as easy as it looks. It's just when the playing field is really competitive that it gets a bit tough. Ranking #1 for 'dentist in irlam' will be levels upon levels easier than ranking for 'dentist in london' in terms of SEO. Similarly the cost-per-click in paid search will probably be orders of magnitude apart and optimising your campaigns will be much harder. Choosing the best keywords for what you'd like to achieve is tricky and figuring that out only happened after I dived in - it's likely a lot of what I've learned there is niche specific too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com