Chief Marketing Engineer Manifesto

Building products is hard, but selling them? That’s 100x harder. My cofounder and I often talk about how straightforward it feels to design and build a product because you can fully define the process. You plan, design, execute, and test. Even if your MVP takes a year, it’s still a relatively comfortable process—you know what you’re doing, and you can enjoy it.

The real challenge starts when you have to market your product. Marketing is an undefined task that, in my opinion, requires a lot of creativity. How do you market what you’ve built? Where do you find customers? How do you scale this process? Which metrics should you track? How do you build the funnel? All these questions are answered with experience. The problem? As a technical person, you usually don’t have that experience.

It gets even more interesting if you don’t have a marketing budget—which is common if you’re in the early stages or bootstrapping. Everyone (EVERYONE!!) uses the same marketing channels: Reddit, LinkedIn, email marketing, SEO, Product Hunt and so on. So, how do you stand out?

Unfortunately, learning how to stand out only comes with experience—by trying dozens of strategies that others have used. First, we imitate; then, we enhance and improve. That’s how we humans work.

This newsletter won’t teach you the art of marketing—you learn that by doing. Instead, my goal is to document my marketing journey and share the different experiments I’m trying, so you can see that you can try them too.

Marketing your product means stepping out of your comfort zone as a technical person. Good luck!