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Marketing your side projects.

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Staff Software Engineer [Lead MTS] at Taro Community5 months ago

Hi All,

Provided one is working full time it might not be possible to market your product or side projects on professional networking sites like LinkedIn mainly because it may ring a bell and other obvious reasons.

I think other social platforms like Reddit and Twitter can work and are relatively safer in terms of getting noticed my your manager or company folks.

One option I can think of is to ask your friends or hire a marketing person to do this for you but it will cost me.

Curious to know the opinion from others. Thanks,

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Discussion

(2 comments)
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    Engineering Manager at Mistplay
    5 months ago

    If you do hire other people to work on your app that sounds pretty serious. If you really plan to scale a business on the side and quit your job then I agree that’s not ideal LinkedIn material yet.

    In general though, having a side project is very common and helps engineers with having a product mindset. It’s a given that you are not taking company time or money to work on this, and the fact that you are also doing impactful work after hours is not only OK but potentially a highlight and reason for continued growth and success.

    Personally I had a fear when launching an app of “oh no what will happen when I get a bunch of users”. Not to worry though, that hasn’t been an issue for me at least. (Also Alex has a ton of users and I believe chatted with his manager about it as is required at Meta, and had no problems.)

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    Tech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
    5 months ago

    This starts with an understanding of your user.

    • Where do they live on the internet?
    • What solutions (if any) are they using for this problem?
    • How do they describe the problem? What terms do they use?

    Without a clear answer to these questions, marketing is very difficult.

    I definitely would not hire a marketing person. As the creator of the project, you have the best understanding of the problem being solved and who could use it. What worked for Taro is to share high-value content consistently over a long period of time (years) on YouTube and LinkedIn. That's how the majority of people discovered us.

    Very relevant:

Reddit is an American social news aggregation, content rating, and discussion website. Registered users submit content to the site, which is then voted up or down by other members. As of 2023, Reddit ranks as the 10th-most-visited website in the world and 6th most-visited website in the U.S.
Reddit8 questions