* No Money *

You have to invest time. On all new projects I start here, even if I have a budget. That is because you can learn a lot more by "being on the ground" so to speak.

Here are some activities you can do:

- post on news aggregator sites like hacker news (there are lots of different ones that are niche specific)

- post on social media. This will require you to build up your social media in the first place. This takes a lot of time if you are starting.

- guest content for other peoples platform

- finding similar, non competing people in your niche and create for them, link back to you.

- Spend time writing and re-writing really helpful stuff. This helps with word of mouth.

- hardest one - actually making friends. I have made many online friends over the years by taking an interest in them. Some of them are now massive. They sometimes distribute the things they like of mine

- CRITICAL: a lot of people will read the above and think "okay, but he has a network...that is why it works", and they would be correct. But, and this is key, building a network is a skill. Learn it.

When I said I spend 2-4 hours per day sometimes, these are the things I'm doing above.

* With Money *

- SEO - seo is very expensive. backlinks, promoted content, optimization

- paid traffic to content - can start the budget low but need to be skilled in paid ads to make this work.

- Paid media buys - for example paying for your content to be featured in someone else's newsletter. If they have a list of 50,000, as an example, you might pay $1,000 for that placement. If that same list was in the finance space, you might pay $30,000. It's contextual.

Even though these paid strategies are paid, they still take time.

This is false.

It's more accurate to say that "no one will visit your website if you do not properly setup a distribution ecosystem".

It's hard work. But it works. All of my companies have been built by writing online --> distribution --> people finding my/our stuff.

Your experience of 'doing it for decades' reveals that publishing, in of itself, does nothing. And if all people do is publish (without the distribution engine), then, I agree it's a waste of time.

I write 1 hour per day. I spend about 2 hours working on distribution. Sometimes, I spend 4 hours on distribution.

source?

The point above was about prioritizing something above the principle one still keeps.

I work in marketing, nothing black and white about it.

I agree even strongly with what you just said: "if you'll violate your principles for a cush job, they aren't really principles you have."

The reality is, I don't think people really understand what a deeply held principle is. It's often a non-negotiable.

I have a friend exactly like that. And he has being doing it so long that he cannot even respond to a discord without asking AI "what do you think? what should I say? what do you think they mean?"

Full NPC mode, and it's really sad and scary.

You lose the ability to think. You lose all differentiation.

So much DDD-this, Clean-that, CQRS-this, architecture-that.

I get all that stuff is for enterprise with bigger teams. But there wasn't much content/guidance on how to build apps 'quickly' for startups.

I am sure experienced .NET devs know this, but less experience .NET devs don't.

I ended up dropping it because I could work faster in PHP.

Nobody ever found craftsmanship or pleasure out of lighting up gas-powered street lights. But there are a lot of programmers that value "doing" programming because it's their craft or art-form.

I have never had a programming job. But I program all day to serve my customers for the products I created. Because it's my art-form. I love "doing" it (my way!).

It will get done. I just want to be the person to do it.

The question "why would they trust me to deliver?" is a good one. And there are two answers:

1. How you sell will determine their trust level. In my sales deck, I have testimonials, case studies and the outline of our full process. By the end of the presentation, when I tell them the price, they expected $10,000, but it's only $4,000. I ask them to pay the 4k now. Or, pay 2 payments of $2,500.

2. If the prospect asks us to do ALL the work first, then invoice, I say the following: "if we do all the work first, it means that you have no skin in the game. In the past, that hurt my business because people would disappear after my team spent 300 hours working. For that reason, it's not our policy to do all the work first. We have 2 options."

Then, i end off by saying: "if that's a deal breaker, I understand and I will happy send you the plan for what you should do next if you want to go at it without our help"

I have customers, but no tech problems.

These days I pick products based on their support levels.

I have been a "business co-founder" for many years. I learned to program at a professional level 5 years ago. Today, i spend most of my time as a "tech-co-founder".

Now that I am on the tech side (and argubaly, product development side), my value is through the roof. Here is what I mean:

- The business co-founder types will convince you that "selling" the product is the main thing. They are right. But sales starts with WHAT you build. That is, with product development. What you decided to build and what you are able to build is very much a part of the marketing. - Selling a well positioned product (where position starts during product development) is much easier that 'force-raming' your product to people who do not want it. 'force-raming' is the main marketing skill most people have. - Ideas mean absolutely nothing. - Marketing is important but it's not hard to learn the important parts. In fact, I can give it to you right now: (1) start your marketing at product dev time. Decide which specific problem you will solve, then solve it, (2) Find a community to share your finished MVP to them. Don't just spam the community, join it for a while, make friends, chat, add to the conversation and (3) refine the early product with the early users from said community. Then supercharge marketing with some ads (FB or Google).

^^ this is the 0-1000 user plan. And developers can do this without a "business co-founder"

You have highlighted an even scarier issue... enterprise software deals, if they all work like this, are scummy and the "way it works" isn't okay.

I have a lot of friends who build tools in book shops, martech, payments and other niches.

There are so many markets people. Most of them are unknown, and therefore, low comp.

weird.

What kinda things did you automate?

People clicked because they want to know why you left.

Three paragraphs in... I have no idea.

sigh