4 Reasons Why Developers Have A Hard Time Doing Marketing For Their SaaS Side-Projects

Developers generally have two loves: their programming language of choice and working on their side-projects.

However, 99% of them suck at marketing their projects. Here are four reasons why:

1. They are accustomed to instant feedback.

As a developer, every line of code provides feedback. You write a line; you can test instantly if it worked or not. Conversely, marketing is the exact opposite of that.

You might spend 2–3 months making marketing efforts with no results, and in the 4th month, all of those efforts will pay off.

2. They are accustomed to predictable outcomes.

As a dev, you have a pretty solid idea of where your code is heading. The end product will differ from what you had in mind when you started, but it won’t be far.

Doing marketing means going into the unknown and presenting your projects.

You don’t know what might happen: people might not like it. It is uncomfortable, so many devs prefer to stay in the comfort of over-engineering their product.

3. They constantly feel the product is not yet ready.

Developers will tend to perfect the project even after it is perfectly usable.

Because they know the project in and out, they see where the compromises were made. But these changes will not be visible to the end-user.

4. The classic “Build it, and they will come” mentality

This has become a joke in the startup ecosystem, yet many still believe it true.

Developers will believe that if the product is excellent, people will flock to use it once it is perfect.

This has never worked, and if we look at examples from past startups, all of them have invested at least half their energy into marketing to succeed.

I hope this essay will help you while you build your next side-project to invest more time into marketing as that will be the only method for getting people to use it.

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