True. As a developer I could make any thing but don't know how to sell. People lik e peter levios can earn millions with a single index.php and SQLite by reading tutorials. And now gpt would make non programmer more free from devs.

Making a product, certifying it and making sure it’s safe is also hard.

But marketing is extremely important and it’s just a very different skill than tech.

I make these epaper calendar displays.

https://shop.invisible-computers.com

I have invested thousands of hours into making them as good as possible. You couldn’t tell from my website :D

I would probably profit much more if I just stopped improving them and focused on marketing. But I just feel much more drawn to improving the product.

That's great! Some small things about your website:

- "Contact" page says "Kontact" in en-GB locale

- Do you need a shopping cart for one product? Just have the "buy it now" and leave the cart out?

- Do you need a search? There are only a couple of pages.

- The Contact page might want to highlight to the user that there is a chat feature in the bottom right, if they prefer that to email.

Other than those little bits, the site looks pretty good to me! Payments seem slick. Have you done things like ProductHunt?

Oh, wow, thanks for the feedback!

No I haven't done ProductHunt.

I am not sure if I can disable the cart on shopify?

I think I need better pictures, and I need a better shopify theme.

I think the pictures are pretty good already, but yes, perhaps.

If you wanted to dive into more feature work, possibly the next thing is thinking about CEOs who might want a) Outlook integration, and b) a way to shade off their calendar for privacy somehow. Another thing could be to stick more with consumers and have a way to display recipes on it? Maybe if there's a recipe service you could partner with that has a decent API?

But in general I reckon you should market the Google Calendar stuff, which already exists and looks awesome!

A nice application for this might be places that have reservations that would be helpful if displayed. For example, tennis courts, squash courts, etc. People make the reservation online and, when they get to the facility, often don't remember which court they've reserved. Having it on a display would avoid having to look it up on the phone.

Those sorts of places also might have a budget for something like this.

That's a good point - outdoor places would appreciate screens like this that you can see in the sun.

I'm a software engineer, and the most concerned about marketing in my circle... and I still suck at it and promoting my stuff. How do I get better? I would love to work on actual marketing projects with experienced marketers as a side project.

> But marketing is extremely important and it’s just a very different skill than tech.

I once watched my father sell a single christmas lightbulb to another guy on a garage sale in the middle of july. "I convinced him he needed it" After that day I paid attention to sales. Some people just have that knack for it. They naturally know all the techniques and when to use them and how to properly use them. There used to be a very nice wikipedia article that broke most of them down but it looks like that page is gone (or I can not find it).

Seeing that you're German, too, I would suggest that you try to reach out to some newspapers. I know that's extremely old school, but it worked well for us. newsaktuell.de/ots is a service where you can send in a press release (and pay) and they'll distribute it to newspaper reporters for you. Also, they offer "Native Advertising" which is basically that you write an article about yourself and they'll pretend as if it was objective news written by them.

And lastly, did you know that you can contact your local IHK and they will report about you in their membership magazine? You probably already pay for the IHK and you probably already get their magazine. A calender seems like something that other CEOs would want to hear about, so this might actually be great content for their magazine. And just like you, every other company owner is also a mandatory IHK magazine subscriber ;)

Yes, your website has two user hostile features which immediately make me want to click away

1) Sending cookies to track me, and then a big lie about how you "value my privacy" while trying to track me and sell my data to your "partners"

" ► UpPromote Affiliate Marketing [Application] - Running..."

2) A cookie banner, which you completely ignore as you've already set 7 cookies before your javascript craps out ("TypeError: a.R is undefined"). At this point I haven't done a single thing on your page worthy of even a session cookie.

3) Once you "decline" your banner (which doesn't stop those cookies - including cookies you have set for 12 months in the future), you get a "chat" window with a red notification icon

I think your complaints are valid. For starters, I turned off that affiliate marketing thing, I wasn't using that anyways.

Simone Giertz (the video's creator) is what you could call a professional DIYer. She has an 8 year old Youtube channel dedicated entirely to making weird or beautiful stuff. She happens to also be good at a specific flavor of marketing, but just because the maker part appears easy when she demonstrates it I wouldn't conclude that anyone with the right idea could have reached the same end result. There is a lot of skill and experience still involved.

Marketing is only important if your product is equal to existing or worse.

For example, if you find a way to make some product two times cheaper (like Uber), you won't need much marketing.

That is not true, at least not for all types of products.

I make an e-paper calendar. There is nothing like it on the market. Regularly, I have customers who say "wow, I have been looking for this for years!".

Some of these customers have googled for such a product before mine existed, and found that none exists.

Without marketing, how would these people learn that the product they've been looking for does now exist?

How do you expect to face competition from general-purpose, high-resolution E-Ink displays appearing on the market now? They are getting to the point where it would be within the ability of an average computer hobbyist to mount one on their wall along with one of the many 'HDMI stick' computers.

Your product looks very polished already, and is considerably cheaper than such general purpose displays right now. However, the E-Ink display market is (finally) becoming mainstream, which makes me wonder where you'll go from here.

No problem if your response would be too sensitive to share in public; good luck with your business in any case!

Uber's initial rates were way below a sustainable rate. Pure marketing combined with lots of media work to make them known.

Low prices don't help, if nobody knows the product exists.

> To me, this really shows that marketing is now the most crucial skill. It has become easy and affordable to design products,

Um, did you see how many prototypes she went through? And also, 3 years - it's in the title.

Designing products that kinda-sorta work might be easy and affordable.

Designing products that work well and don't have annoying edge cases is still hard.

Unless you think that Simone Giertz is unusually bad at this sort of thing?

The sweat equity of 3 years and dozens of prototypes only contributes to 5% of the product's success. Marketing will drive 95% of the return.

Damn, with that kind of math, it almost doesn't seem worth investing the time and effort to ensure that the product works well!

I hope people who think like that are happy with their buggy-as-shit computer games on release day. Because they deserve to be.

EA, Bethesda, Activision-Blizzard, etc all release broken shit and rake in millions and millions. I don't know what you think your point is. The vast majority of the market responds by whining on social media and then giving you 80$, plus whatever you ask for for literally new textures.

Just look at No man's Sky and Cyberpunk! They basically advertised games that didn't even exist, released something basically unrelated, and now the market rates their products highly positive and earnest people will tell you to give them more money!

America hasn't rewarded sincerity in a hundred years

This is something I’ve come to appreciate much more recently - how hard (or at least unnatural) marketing / sales is. A social media following (upon the right audience) is turning into a new metric for economic power, and it’s a skill in it of itself to self-promote tactfully.

What’s the best way to learn marketing skills? Books, courses? I feel like there’s a lot of trash to sort through here.

I have a product I’ve been working on that is nearly ready, but I’ve told only a few people. Would it be better to learn by getting someone who is great at marketing involved, and learn from them?

You will need to dive in, hit road blocks, fail and regroup to learn sales. Books/ courses can give you motivation, but you will learn most of the art through "the school of hard knocks."