Marketing your side projects.

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.)

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:

• How do I host and promote my side project?
• Tips to market my side project to get some real users?