2 builders who never spoke to each other · contested
Decide how much promotion each piece deserves
One camp treats distribution as the cheapest return on the board: ten more minutes on a piece that took three days, and months of unglamorous pushing before anything moves. The other deliberately drops promotion on lighter posts so the overhead never blocks publishing, then finds in hindsight that the restraint quietly cost sales.
Where this splits
Some treat promotion effort as the cheapest return available, others cut it on purpose so the overhead never stops them shipping.
4 claims against 1
Cory Zue · Harry Dry · Justin Welsh
Spend the extra minutes promoting every piece you publish
- 01Budget ten extra minutes on the distribution mechanics of a piece you spent days writing - the ratio makes it the cheapest gain available.
- 02Do not over-correct toward politeness during a sale; holding back on social media probably costs you sales you never see.
Skip promotion on light posts so publishing stays cheap
Deliberately skip promotion for your low-effort posts, dropping them in a couple of social places and moving on, so the promotion overhead does not stop you publishing.
- 03Assume good work will not be discovered on its own and promote it daily, because nobody has the time to go digging through the profile of a stranger.
- 04Treat virality as something you cause rather than something that happens: expect to be the person doing the unglamorous promotion, for months, before it moves.
What it returned
- $50M
Welsh had just taken a SaaS business from nothing to $50M of recurring revenue in four and a half years, and found that no one knew who he was.
Author's framing: three days on the article, ten minutes on the share.
Zue names promotion overhead as one of the mental costs he removed in order to publish more frequently.
In hindsight Zue judged that he had optimized too hard against annoying people and likely lost a sale or two by skipping social promotion.
Sources
- Nobody knows you exist. Now what?Justin Welsh · justinwelsh.me · Nobody knows you exist. Now what? · 2024-04-27
- The marketing genius of Lil Nas XHarry Dry · Marketing Examples · Part 3 · undated
- 6 keys to sharing content on TwitterHarry Dry · Marketing Examples · Summary · undated
- Lessons from Running a Sale that Earned 3 Month's Profit in a WeekCory Zue · coryzue.com · Notes · 2020-12-09 · dissenting
- Lowering the bar to writing onlineCory Zue · coryzue.com · Lowering the bar to writing online · 2024-10-09 · dissenting
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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