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independence4 unconnected · 2 more authors in those circles
standing

contested · 8 claims against 1

applies to

b2b and consumer, no audience needed

this one failed

confidence

high

evidence

9 claims · 9 articles · 4 receipts

window

2020-08-01 → 2024-06-18

4 builders who never spoke to each other · contested

Write the promotion plan before you ship

Budget effort and money for getting the word out as deliberately as for the build, since infrastructure keeps getting easier while distribution keeps getting harder. Treat reaching people as a skill to study on purpose, and work the launch as a list of separate unknowns rather than one event.

Where this splits

Marketing effort is argued to belong in the plan from the start, and separately treated as procrastination during the build itself.

8 claims against 1

Andy Goldschmidt · Corey Haines · Harry Dry · Jakob Greenfeld · Justin Jackson · Preetam Nath

Budget and plan promotion before you build

  1. 01Budget resources for promotion as well as building and launching, and treat runway as a competitive factor rather than an internal detail.
  2. 02Budget your effort for the marketing side: tooling and infrastructure have got easier over the past five years while growth and distribution have got harder.
the objection · 1 claimJustin Jackson

Marketing during the build is just procrastination

During a build, treat posting, email and analytics tinkering as procrastination - the only activity that moves the launch is the build itself.

  1. 03Treat getting the word out as a skill you have to study on purpose, because a perfectly built product that nobody has heard of is worth nothing and you have no budget to buy attention.
  2. 04Don't pour all your hours into making the thing and leave promotion as an afterthought - that imbalance is why most creators go unheard.
  3. 05Write the promotion plan before you ship. Marketing a product is hard with a strategy and close to impossible without one.

What it returned

  • Justin's comparison: three months of runway against a rival launching something similar with three years of cash puts you at a disadvantage.

  • He put marketing alongside ideation and software development as one of the three skills his self-directed year would cover.

  • ABBY took nine months to build and went out with no launch strategy at all.

  • He names the missing plan as one of four reasons the projects he watched were doomed from the start.

Sources

the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

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More in other

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the second source

Three plays a week, for the phase you are in

No roundup of links, no news. Three tactics more than one builder arrived at separately, with the numbers each one returned and the disagreements left in.

963 corroborated plays to draw from · 3 a week

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