Pablo Fernandez

For the past few weeks I’ve been talking to entrepreneurs, trying to help with their problems. I’ve heard both of these statements repeated a few times:

Marketing is easy, but coding is impossible.

Marketeers

and

Building a thing is fun, but then I have no idea how to market it.

Coders

It’s frustrating to hear both this things at the same time. Even within each of the communities, inside Indie Hackers, Microconf, TWiST, we seem to have subgroups of techies and non-techies that talk among themselves but not to one another and they are both wondering where the other ones are.

Please: start talking to one another, you need those connections, your idea need those connections.

If you are either a marketer or a coder and want the other one to join your team as a non-paid co-founder you are asking them to make an investment. A huge investment in terms of personal wealth. A person might be able to start 10 startups in their life, so, you are asking them for 1 tenth of their resources. Act accordingly. Put the effort, show traction, show results. I see people put more effort into talking to an investor that will invest only 1% of their resources.

The second thing a lot of us should do, and this include me, is not focus so much on our own ideas and try to work on other people’s ideas. Build someone else’s thing, market someone else’s thing. Don’t chase one idea, chase the outcome of a successful startup and accept that it might not be your idea.

If you are a developer, know this: whatever idea you come up with, it’s an idea that another developer is likely to have, and likely to implement to compete with you. That’s why there’s so much out there in terms of Twitter clones, issue trackers, cryptocurrencies thingies, etc. A non-coder idea has the value of less competition. A CRM for a niche you’ve never heard of might be the best SaaS ever!

If you are a marketer, know this: even in a crowded space, you can make a difference because there are a lot of companies out there that have a great product and are struggling with marketing. I often find a market need, like, “Private teachers need booking systems” and in my market research I find that the perfect booking system exists and nobody is using it. Lending your superpowers to a developer that’s charging ahead with building yet-another-whatever might be the best SaaS ever!