As a solo/indie dev who's currently early in building a product, I've been keeping a journal of "ideas" for content in a txt file in the codebase as I hate context switching and want to build this up before I get to it.
Here's what I've done:
- At the top of the file I've listed my audience, 3 personas
- My content has to be useful to one of those
- If I see an interesting post/take on social media I hold the link and write an idea for my own spin/take (takes 30 seconds) - log it
- If I have a problem/issue that I resolve that would be useful to my audience - log it
- If I have a key product/design/UX choice that took some time to think through - log it
- If something takes me much longer than I thought because there's more to it (iceberge effect) - log it
I've been doing this for about 6 weeks now and I've got 100 ideas for pieces of content.
One of the best pieces of advice I read is that when you're solo, many times people/community rally around you. You are the product too so you have to share what you're doing, it's interesting to many, not just your customers. They care about the advice you give, the input you have, the way you build things. You are a subject matter expert in this domain, so you should structure your content with this in mind.
"You escape competition through authenticity." - @naval
I have a paper notebook next to my keyboard entitled 'sleep deprivation induced fever-dreams'. It is an excellent collection and useful tool so I dont let my ideas runaway with my attention.
Often when I return to what I write, about 60% I look back at with the novelty gone, and reassess from a more suitable eye and cross them off the list.
I get the same whenever I get my daily walk in. Pure unbounded epiphany of ideas and experiments, surging with creativity. I'll revisit them a few days later and for 90% of them my immediate internal response is "that sounds like a really sh*t idea".
Yea 90% is a more realistic fail rate of my 2am ideas which seem great at 2am, but then terrible a few days later with good sleep. If GP is batting almost .400 for insomnia fever ideas, that sounds pretty stellar to me.
And, if you're like me, you notice sometimes that you've been rediscovering the same interesting thought over and over again, and should really give it some structure and start building on it, rather than rewriting it again and and again, years apart. That's on the list of things I think that LLMs could help with.
Of course that's also an opportunity to combine the best of all of those iterations together, and still toss out a bunch of paper (or archive a bunch of bits.)
> Often when I return to what I write, about 60% I look back at with the novelty gone, and reassess from a more suitable eye and cross them off the list.
That is a perfect name for a notebook like that. I have one in my head and it never lets me sleep. Maybe I should keep one like yours to dump mine into it. btw 60% is incredible.
> If I see an interesting post/take on social media I hold the link and write an idea for my own spin/take (takes 30 seconds) - log it
Not quite the same thing, but a perspective to be aware of...
For example, I used to be on a semi-private forum, where some people would lurk without participating, and then seemed to "arbitrage" ideas from there, to blog and social media posts, to promote their brand.
Ideas generally should be shared, and I wouldn't say that this "arbitrage" behavior is wrong, but it can sometimes seem a bit like leeching off a group without contributing.
I suppose this is more noticeable in smaller groups that are closer to "communities". Maybe no one would care if it's just more conventional social media posts where there's no community, and most people are just playing their own promotion games.
(For example, probably no one cares if someone else also forwards around the same LinkedIn inspirational leadership image post, which they themselves took from someone else. Because usually no one at all cares about those, not even the sender.)
I do this on paper, with each page dated with the date I started filling the page. The goal is to check off most of the improvements before or shortly after starting a new page.
I personally enjoy reading about the journey most solopreneurs take, and that includes the mistakes they made, their thought process etc. So definitely start sharing instead of waiting.
True. 99% won't care, but that shouldn't hold you back. You get outsized returns from even a handful of people caring - feedback, amplification, motivation, moral support etc.
>"You escape competition through authenticity." - @naval
Except none of this is authentic. Its just another form of marketing and it should be illegal to go around spamming posts advertising a product. Or the accounts should be marked as sponsored or promotion accounts so they can be filtered out accordingly.
> Its just another form of marketing and it should be illegal to go around spamming posts advertising a product
I think this is the dogma that holds a lot of devs back, the belief that sharing your work, the product, the thought process, the journey, the mistakes, the wins etc is “spammy”. Would save your rhetoric for those who actually spam - ai slop generators, bots, link farmers, paid shillers etc. Not indie devs on HN trying to build something for the world.
I'd consider cold DMs to be spam. What if every business did this? This b2b call center stuff happening on peoples social media accounts. Its gross and I dont like it. Please keep advertising within advertising channels. You arent authentic by spamming people's DMs.
Yes, by all means, build and promote your product.
Planning out interactions according to 3 fake personas is still fake though. Not that I have any better ideas, we all have to engage with this nonsense and waste our lives producing it. It would be nice to somehow not have to.
The whole parasocial aspect of it is what feels fake, distasteful, and icky.
The very idea of gaining power in the modern world is through parasocial relationships. Think Taylor Swift: her fans follow every single one of her updates even though they are highly scripted to engage exactly their "user persona", and present a Taylor who has nothing to do with the real one, another persona. Whoever can be at the top of this pyramid (i.e. make enough people believe that an Instagram-mediated relationship with a fake media persona is real) - wins the game.
I don't claim to have an answer, however, consider this. A few years ago it was considered impossible to win the battle against Big Food. They would continue to shove increasingly fake food simulacra down our throats and we'd be doomed. There was a backlash. With parasocial relationships, I feel that AI has tipped the scales into "enough is enough" category and people will demand real connection over personas.
And maybe we are just talking past each other. Maybe.
They create a fake story about a new feature to promote the app. And then they work out how to create fake text messages. I don't like the approach they used. Get real users to provide a real testimonials instead.
Welcome to promoting your product baby. No one cares if it's fake or not except the little voice in your head.
If you can post fake messages today that promote your product and will start getting you users, why wait for real users to provide real testimonials that align with what you want to communicate to do the same thing 3 months from now?
Of course you want to seek out real testimonials from satisfied customers and share those as much as you can; you don't want to lock yourself in a bubble where you post how amazing your app is while emails of dissatisfied users pile up in your inbox; but it's not an OR situation, it's an AND situation.
You might also be surprised to hear that the family laughing together while drinking Coca Cola in those video ads isn't a real family, they're not really having fun, and they're not really enjoying Coca Cola for the sake of it - they're on a filming set in front of a green screen paid by the hour.
For me it’s just that I just don’t want to lie to make money.
Commercials are on their face a work of fiction unless stated otherwise — for customer testimonials in commercials that are fake (in the US anyway) there has to be text saying as much. Because otherwise they’d be lying…
The sad reality is that many others have no such qualms and you will lose to them in a competition, many of the largest YC companies used deceptive practices to get to their level of success
“Technically you could figure out I was lying” is a great haven for liars. The whole reason this strategy works is because there are many people who won’t notice that contact name and assume it’s a real conversation, otherwise they wouldn’t have used the chat format.
It’s like saying “it’s ok to call the car ‘full self driving’ because one could figure out it’s not really full self driving.” But obviously, not everyone will realize that and you’re benefitting from the deception otherwise you wouldn’t have done it.
I’m surprised the owner of Lagree didn’t sue you for the name of the app, he’s notorious for that. I also recommend hiring smaller creators, they can be amazing if it’s the right person
I have been doing something similar for years. My website helps immigrants settle in Berlin. Recently, I've been writing a lot about health insurance.
For the last few months, I've been monitoring all health insurance topics in some communities, and actively answering questions. It gave me a much better sense of what confuses people, down to tiny details like "I was given two documents by my insurer, and there is only one upload field in the visa application system". Another couldn't buy the insurance I recommended them because the options in a dropdown did not match his situation 1:1. No one addresses these blockers; they only cover things at a high level.
Every time I couldn't answer a question with a link to my insurance guide, I updated the guide. I rewrote some guides 2-3 times this year.
On the other end, I was in constant contact with the health insurance broker who answers questions from my readers. That's 5-6 questions per day. Again, I tried to learn from each of those.
I think you have to stay close to your users. You might notice tiny details that make a bigger difference than the superfeature you're thinking of building.
I think the hidden lesson in Field of Dreams is that “they will come” happens because of word of mouth. Shoeless Joe Jackson tells the other dead baseball players to come hang out. The townsfolk tell about baseball field to save the farm.
But really “build it and they will come” in product development is pitched as if “they will come” because they are searching for it. Which is not really true if people don’t know your thing exists.
or they will come if they search for it, but u need to be in the place they land on after they search for it (whether it's google search results or chatGPT)
I recently made a small game for iOS/macOS and basically every non-development part of the process between setting up the App Store stuff and trying to promote it have been a lot more work than I expected. Not even including the game design, which is really separate from the actual game development.
Have you noticed the different roles that make up successful small businesses? You must anticipate and learn to wear several hats in turn if you're doing it alone
It's one of those things where I intuitively understand the roles when it comes to my normal job, but in doing this as a side project I foolishly thought it'd be more straightforward.
This post and the discussion is great!!! Brings me back to 2 different projects/products that I developed that never made it to market (2009 and 2014). I also kept a log of ideas most of which withered in the light of day but a few persisted. And for each project I went off to live in a cave and code for a year (not recommended). Looking back I absolutely should have shared what I was working on and found support from a community (highly recommended). All of these ideas are excellent. Thank you for sharing them.
Right now we're totally bootstrapped so it's a combination of:
- Davinci Resolve (free)
- Epidemic Sound (for music and sound)
- ClearAudio.ai for VO processing
I then give myself the whole week to produce the video and honestly that has increased the quality by 10x. I'm not rushing it and can properly spend 2 days putting the video clips together, and another day on just the voice over alone.
Wow, that's a really nice thing to say. I personally don't think so but that means a huge amount to hear. Thank you. One thing I did before jumping into making the video was to look, like really look at other YouTuber's videos. Kind of what I assume the author of the original article did. Look at how other successful people are doing something and copy as much of the execution as possible.
Just watched your video, really love the style and openness.
My only suggestion is niche it down a bit. The SQL tutorial guides and features sound great, but the functional list feels a bit like a laundry list. Even here you describe it as a tool for "developers/founders/teams".
Try targeting a specific domain, tech stack, database type, or developer segment (e.g., large B2B teams, small B2B teams, indie devs, or funded startup founders) to stand out. If you pick a clear niche, you can build a stronger SEO strategy around long tail keywords and tailor both the product and the messaging and work out what order to build out features. Even if long term you plan on wanting it to be a tool for all databases, segments etc.
It's much easier to produce content with this in mind, e.g. if you were targetting getting the most out of Postgres you could easily produce a bunch of content for PostgreSQL 18 which formally came out of beta a few weeks ago and has native support for UUIDv7 etc.
Fwiw I’m doing a ton with SQLite atm as a solo dev. If your landing page had said "THE VERY BEST TOOL FOR SQLITE MANAGEMENT TO HELP SOLO DEVS AND SMALL TEAMS MAXIMIZE SQLITE PERFORMANCE AND PRODUCTIVITY" there’s a good chance I would have signed up for updates but atm it felt a little generic, some of the features I might use, some I definitely would not.
People who code for mobile development, like OP, is IOS development their full time job? Because as someone who does web development, to learn the in and out of Swift programming language and using XCode feel major vendor lockin and prefer say React Native due to its interoperability.
If you want to develop mobile apps and you want to have users, there is no way around vendor lock in and walled gardens. By supporting Android, too, the only thing you’ll achieve is that you’ll be the abused in two abusive relationships instead of one.
Adding more abstractions on top will not significantly improve the fact that you are at the whims and mercy of companies that don’t care about you, so I don’t see RN as an improvement.
If you want to avoid vendor lockin, don’t do mobile apps, go to web. Then, you can also just switch RN to React simply or any other framework.
Usually, yes. The overwhelming majority of mobile dev jobs are platform-specific, or are specifically for a framework like React Native.
With native mobile dev, lock-in is less of a problem career-wise, because it's a duopoly, so your chosen technology is unlikely to become unfashionable like it would if you were specialised in a particular web framework.
Even if using a framework like RN, solo devs would be putting themselves in a precarious position if they don't understand the underlying systems and frameworks. Without that knowledge they won't be able to effectively debug and figure out if issues are stemming from the cross-platform framework or the native platform/framework and subsequently will be entirely dependent on outside parties for fixes.
So if they're learning the native frameworks anyway, they may as well use them. These days with Swift and Kotlin most logic code transfers pretty cleanly and most apps can be LEGO'd together from UIKit/SwiftUI/Compose components, so the workload isn't as high as one might expect.
Aside from that, early on it's usually better to start with one platform, nail the UI and interaction, and then once the app is proven worry about the other platform.
Yup, I know that but my reason to ask was that if most people who develop for IOS also know web development, as in full stack development.
or are they usually IOS developer fulltime.
Even with RN I've had to learn Swift and also often need xcode for configuring targets and such. RN helps in some ways but native apps are so much better in the long run.
RN libraries are so often buggy and disappointing in my experience.
It doesn't really make sense to call it vendor lock-in when you're learning a platform's native API and idiosyncrasies.
That would apply more to React Native since you are stuck with its vendored abstractions and you can't just swap out React Native once you've built with it.
I think you're commenting on how iOS development is a less portable skill than a toolkit than runs on all platforms. Or that your iOS app is stuck on one platform. That is certainly true. But don't overlook the value of expertise in a native platform instead of just one set of abstractions that run on top of it. There are things you can do on the native platform, like optimizing performance, that you can't do using something like React Native.
> That is certainly true. But don't overlook the value of expertise in a native platform instead of just one set of abstractions that run on top of it.
This applies to the web, too. A dev who has a good grasp of of the fundamentals (HTML, CSS, JS), the DOM, what does and doesn't trigger a repaint, etc is going to be able to take a React project a lot further than a dev who only knows how to use React.
highly recommend focusing on just tiktoks/reels rather than stories that expire every 24 hours. They will pick up more views beyond your audience, especially if you "warm up" your account by engaging with content just on your niche. Look forward to the next experiment!
Enjoy this - I really really struggle marketing as someone that sits a lot in the creative technology space, it always feels quite dirty, so it's nice to read someone's perspective from it
No trying to minimize the efforts of people who do this as real jobs or influencing - you do you. However, generating fake message screenshot, sending unsolicited messages etc? And the winner is the one who gets the biggest rise from the consumer, authentic or not.
Distribution is hard, I get it. But isn't this the equivalent of everyone just rocking up to the village square in the most outrageous costumes and screaming into the megaphone?
The alternative is to build the audience first, then sell things to it. If you don't command an audience, you must use someone else's, usually at a cost.
You don't have to be the loudest and most outrageous if your product is great and you speak the right message to the right audience.
I’ve been working on promoting my seating chart app for teachers, Shuffle Buddy, on social media. I had a 1M view pop on TikTok when I first launched and have now been clawing along to try for continued engagement.
It’s reassuring to know that social media posts are hard for everyone and that it isn’t supposed to be easy. I keep looking for ways to create content that is genuinely beneficial to teachers and also convinces them to try my app, but it’s hard.
As a solopreneur I'm dreading the gutting of US TikTok... Things are going to get much harder for organic promotion if there's a separate US app under a non-TikTok name that only Americans can use.
Personally I just message a lot of people directly myself and get lucky with friendly responses because creators like my apps enough that they use it themselves (edtech market makes this easier as the apps are genuinely and wholesomely bettering). Then I convince them to start new accounts focused on my app promo, in addition to less frequent commissioned promo on their main accounts.
For doing it yourself you need to get multiple devices and multiple accounts going, there are tools to help with that too. You can also post the UGC content that you pay others to produce for you, onto your own accounts. It's too difficult to consistently go viral without more frequent rolls of the dice. Focusing on a single branded account made more sense before current social media algos which don't care about your followers and won't even show it to them if the content isn't engaging enough to go viral beyond your following.
The post screenshots in those links are… uh.. hey I look forward to all of the free time everyone will have to do more productive things than “organically” shill for attention on behalf of commercial interests.
It's just an industry term with a particular meaning. You don't need to rage at me about people getting paid for doing ad work because you don't like the jargon and don't like marketing.
People who do UGC work get paid enough to not have to work full-time if they don't want to, giving them more time for other things in life than most jobs. Typical jobs care more about exclusivity over your entire working day than the value of your output (hence why we have more of a "laborer" market than a "labor" market), let alone sharing that value back to you as is typical with UGC contracts. It's disappointing to see that kind of elitism here.
edit:
When you pay for ads/boosted content instead, all contemporary platforms have tried hard to make the paid ads look convincingly like “organic” content for long enough for the content’s hook to land - just look at X, Reddit, TT etc.
At least with “organic” promo, established accounts have a reputation to preserve or foster when they choose what promo work aligns with their audience and their values. As a consumer I can usually evaluate how much to trust a creator too by how scrupulously they choose their promo.
With paid ads I know I am just seeing it because they were the top bidder for my attention and that the only reputation protection from the platform is to avoid particularly criminal or other extreme content.
100% agree. Plus ”organic” is an important term that has real meaning when you try to grow a product. Diluting it with paid advertisement just makes it harder to communicate clearly. Plus we already have a word for it, paid sponsorship.
The term is used to differentiate content that end users see because it was boosted or a paid ad that the platform shows them due to payment instead of via engagement algorithms
Paid sponsorship is fine logically but isn’t usually used to describe UGC marketing. These are accounts that are set up to promote one brand, without any existing following, and without boosting the content - leaving it to be discovered organically.
(Paid sponsorship is usually used to describe promotion through someone’s existing following and is also usually communicated within the content as being a paid ad, though not necessarily. But even with paid sponsorship, it is a form of organic marketing per the use of this term when the content is not boosted and not being used for paid ads, it simply describes how the viewer is coming across it.)
I wouldn’t use the term paid sponsorship to describe how someone creates brand-focused new accounts and posts only about the brand in order to achieve organic virality, I don’t think that clearly communicates the strategy
>It's just an industry term with a particular meaning. You don't need to rage at me about people getting paid for doing ad work because you don't like the jargon and don't like marketing.
Others are raging about your use of the (very basic) term because it's the inverse of industry jargon. Putting it bluntly: that word you're using - organic - it doesn't mean what you think it means.
There's no elitism here, just more experienced people trying to tell you that you're making a fool of yourself.
I didn't know about Sebastian Lagree and Lagree Fitness, but looking him up does not leave a good impression. The press covers on is homepage look incredibly fake, e.g. a "digital cover" from cosmopolitan.ro which is clearly designed to look like he was on the cover of the real cosmopolitan. Same thing for Forbes.
His "thing" seems to be a kind of modern pilates and he sues everyone who criticises him. Seems like a real wholesome person and a community I'd really like to join /s
tl;dr Engineer discovers that sales & marketing are real jobs. Calling it “content creation” or “influencers” are just another way of minimizing a side of business development that scares you. Thanks for the story, it was an enjoyable read!
Marketing is a real job in the same way both pharmacists and drug dealers are both real jobs. Its really easy for marketing to go from providing a useful product to using dark patterns like rage bait to peddle the equivalent of drugs to the masses. Marketing gets a bad name for a reason.
I share your aversion to modern marketing tactics, but by your logic, programmers that develop the addictive social media algorithms are the meth cooks. Everyone is complicit. Modern day "tech bros" get a significantly worse rep than marketing folks these days. No use in participating in this blame game.
I agree that software engineering isn't exempt from warranting serious introspection as to the world that a given project is enabling. I do not agree that we should simply throw up our collective hands and say "Oh well, everyone is complicit." Professional endeavours causing interpersonal harm and enabling exploitative behaviour should be called out and forced to bare the reputational cost wherever and whenever they occur.
I mean that kind of tracks? I had to take a computer science ethics course in college. It mainly focused on stuff like the Therac-25 case study, but I could easily see a more modern version of the course covering social media algorithms.
I wonder if marketing courses also have an ethics component taught in them?
For someone just learning about the Therac-25 incident, what more recent cases would've worked better to foster discussion that can also be read about?
Mass surveillance and face identification by private companies for law enforcement eg https://www.auror.co/role/loss-prevention
You can't appeal it and they don't respond to requests for your records (like a government department would).
Social media and addiction to it. How this should be managed with vulnerable groups, eg children?
I'm sure there are numerous better examples out there.
I didn't know who he is and still found this blog post really interesting because the real topic is about marketing your app when you're a software developer.
As a solo/indie dev who's currently early in building a product, I've been keeping a journal of "ideas" for content in a txt file in the codebase as I hate context switching and want to build this up before I get to it.
Here's what I've done:
- At the top of the file I've listed my audience, 3 personas
- My content has to be useful to one of those
- If I see an interesting post/take on social media I hold the link and write an idea for my own spin/take (takes 30 seconds) - log it
- If I have a problem/issue that I resolve that would be useful to my audience - log it
- If I have a key product/design/UX choice that took some time to think through - log it
- If something takes me much longer than I thought because there's more to it (iceberge effect) - log it
I've been doing this for about 6 weeks now and I've got 100 ideas for pieces of content.
One of the best pieces of advice I read is that when you're solo, many times people/community rally around you. You are the product too so you have to share what you're doing, it's interesting to many, not just your customers. They care about the advice you give, the input you have, the way you build things. You are a subject matter expert in this domain, so you should structure your content with this in mind.
"You escape competition through authenticity." - @naval
I have a paper notebook next to my keyboard entitled 'sleep deprivation induced fever-dreams'. It is an excellent collection and useful tool so I dont let my ideas runaway with my attention.
Often when I return to what I write, about 60% I look back at with the novelty gone, and reassess from a more suitable eye and cross them off the list.
I get the same whenever I get my daily walk in. Pure unbounded epiphany of ideas and experiments, surging with creativity. I'll revisit them a few days later and for 90% of them my immediate internal response is "that sounds like a really sh*t idea".
Yea 90% is a more realistic fail rate of my 2am ideas which seem great at 2am, but then terrible a few days later with good sleep. If GP is batting almost .400 for insomnia fever ideas, that sounds pretty stellar to me.
And, if you're like me, you notice sometimes that you've been rediscovering the same interesting thought over and over again, and should really give it some structure and start building on it, rather than rewriting it again and and again, years apart. That's on the list of things I think that LLMs could help with.
Of course that's also an opportunity to combine the best of all of those iterations together, and still toss out a bunch of paper (or archive a bunch of bits.)
> Often when I return to what I write, about 60% I look back at with the novelty gone, and reassess from a more suitable eye and cross them off the list.
Related: "Write drunk, edit sober."
That is a perfect name for a notebook like that. I have one in my head and it never lets me sleep. Maybe I should keep one like yours to dump mine into it. btw 60% is incredible.
> If I see an interesting post/take on social media I hold the link and write an idea for my own spin/take (takes 30 seconds) - log it
Not quite the same thing, but a perspective to be aware of...
For example, I used to be on a semi-private forum, where some people would lurk without participating, and then seemed to "arbitrage" ideas from there, to blog and social media posts, to promote their brand.
Ideas generally should be shared, and I wouldn't say that this "arbitrage" behavior is wrong, but it can sometimes seem a bit like leeching off a group without contributing.
I suppose this is more noticeable in smaller groups that are closer to "communities". Maybe no one would care if it's just more conventional social media posts where there's no community, and most people are just playing their own promotion games.
(For example, probably no one cares if someone else also forwards around the same LinkedIn inspirational leadership image post, which they themselves took from someone else. Because usually no one at all cares about those, not even the sender.)
Incidentally, from what I saw of undergrads at Brown University, I think Lisa Simpson would've fit right in. I mean that as a compliment to both.
I do this on paper, with each page dated with the date I started filling the page. The goal is to check off most of the improvements before or shortly after starting a new page.
Same! My only challenge has been getting the product to be decent enough to the point where I start sharing these. Perhaps I shouldn't wait though...
I personally enjoy reading about the journey most solopreneurs take, and that includes the mistakes they made, their thought process etc. So definitely start sharing instead of waiting.
> many times people/community rally around you
But most of the times not a single person cares about you or your product.
True. 99% won't care, but that shouldn't hold you back. You get outsized returns from even a handful of people caring - feedback, amplification, motivation, moral support etc.
Sounds like great advice. Thanks for sharing. I'd hoped to see a blog link in your HN profile; do you have one?
How much feedback people give you on your stuff matches your 3 personas?
>"You escape competition through authenticity." - @naval Except none of this is authentic. Its just another form of marketing and it should be illegal to go around spamming posts advertising a product. Or the accounts should be marked as sponsored or promotion accounts so they can be filtered out accordingly.
> Its just another form of marketing and it should be illegal to go around spamming posts advertising a product
I think this is the dogma that holds a lot of devs back, the belief that sharing your work, the product, the thought process, the journey, the mistakes, the wins etc is “spammy”. Would save your rhetoric for those who actually spam - ai slop generators, bots, link farmers, paid shillers etc. Not indie devs on HN trying to build something for the world.
I'd consider cold DMs to be spam. What if every business did this? This b2b call center stuff happening on peoples social media accounts. Its gross and I dont like it. Please keep advertising within advertising channels. You arent authentic by spamming people's DMs.
Yes, by all means, build and promote your product.
Planning out interactions according to 3 fake personas is still fake though. Not that I have any better ideas, we all have to engage with this nonsense and waste our lives producing it. It would be nice to somehow not have to.
To be clear, the "personas" are customer/user personas. Not sure what the "fake" aspect relates to.
https://www.mural.co/blog/creating-user-personas
The whole parasocial aspect of it is what feels fake, distasteful, and icky.
The very idea of gaining power in the modern world is through parasocial relationships. Think Taylor Swift: her fans follow every single one of her updates even though they are highly scripted to engage exactly their "user persona", and present a Taylor who has nothing to do with the real one, another persona. Whoever can be at the top of this pyramid (i.e. make enough people believe that an Instagram-mediated relationship with a fake media persona is real) - wins the game.
I don't claim to have an answer, however, consider this. A few years ago it was considered impossible to win the battle against Big Food. They would continue to shove increasingly fake food simulacra down our throats and we'd be doomed. There was a backlash. With parasocial relationships, I feel that AI has tipped the scales into "enough is enough" category and people will demand real connection over personas.
And maybe we are just talking past each other. Maybe.
They create a fake story about a new feature to promote the app. And then they work out how to create fake text messages. I don't like the approach they used. Get real users to provide a real testimonials instead.
Welcome to promoting your product baby. No one cares if it's fake or not except the little voice in your head.
If you can post fake messages today that promote your product and will start getting you users, why wait for real users to provide real testimonials that align with what you want to communicate to do the same thing 3 months from now?
Of course you want to seek out real testimonials from satisfied customers and share those as much as you can; you don't want to lock yourself in a bubble where you post how amazing your app is while emails of dissatisfied users pile up in your inbox; but it's not an OR situation, it's an AND situation.
You might also be surprised to hear that the family laughing together while drinking Coca Cola in those video ads isn't a real family, they're not really having fun, and they're not really enjoying Coca Cola for the sake of it - they're on a filming set in front of a green screen paid by the hour.
For me it’s just that I just don’t want to lie to make money.
Commercials are on their face a work of fiction unless stated otherwise — for customer testimonials in commercials that are fake (in the US anyway) there has to be text saying as much. Because otherwise they’d be lying…
The sad reality is that many others have no such qualms and you will lose to them in a competition, many of the largest YC companies used deceptive practices to get to their level of success
I don't see any lies in the screenshots from the original article being discussed here.
They are a staged conversation with a contact named "Speedometer FAQ" - not pretending like it's with a real person, or real customer testimonials.
If it makes you feel better, you could put "simulated text messages" at the bottom of such images.
“Technically you could figure out I was lying” is a great haven for liars. The whole reason this strategy works is because there are many people who won’t notice that contact name and assume it’s a real conversation, otherwise they wouldn’t have used the chat format.
It’s like saying “it’s ok to call the car ‘full self driving’ because one could figure out it’s not really full self driving.” But obviously, not everyone will realize that and you’re benefitting from the deception otherwise you wouldn’t have done it.
Indeed. I would love a better post about "how to do authentic marketing without devolving into the worst caricature of a social media marketing bro."
This is the status quo. Half of Instagram is just astroturfing.
For anyone also wondering, Lagree seems to be a high-intensity workout system derived from pilates, and "Sebastian" is the inventor/guru.
I’m surprised the owner of Lagree didn’t sue you for the name of the app, he’s notorious for that. I also recommend hiring smaller creators, they can be amazing if it’s the right person
Recommendations on where to find them?
Looks like he renamed it to "4 Counts | Wrist Tempo", but the screenshots are still using "Lagree Buddy".
I have been doing something similar for years. My website helps immigrants settle in Berlin. Recently, I've been writing a lot about health insurance.
For the last few months, I've been monitoring all health insurance topics in some communities, and actively answering questions. It gave me a much better sense of what confuses people, down to tiny details like "I was given two documents by my insurer, and there is only one upload field in the visa application system". Another couldn't buy the insurance I recommended them because the options in a dropdown did not match his situation 1:1. No one addresses these blockers; they only cover things at a high level.
Every time I couldn't answer a question with a link to my insurance guide, I updated the guide. I rewrote some guides 2-3 times this year.
On the other end, I was in constant contact with the health insurance broker who answers questions from my readers. That's 5-6 questions per day. Again, I tried to learn from each of those.
I think you have to stay close to your users. You might notice tiny details that make a bigger difference than the superfeature you're thinking of building.
I didn’t know people used Insta for b2b outbound like LinkedIn haha.
> Build it and they will come is a fallacy. You have to tell people about the damn thing.
Great lesson for engineering types
I think the hidden lesson in Field of Dreams is that “they will come” happens because of word of mouth. Shoeless Joe Jackson tells the other dead baseball players to come hang out. The townsfolk tell about baseball field to save the farm.
But really “build it and they will come” in product development is pitched as if “they will come” because they are searching for it. Which is not really true if people don’t know your thing exists.
or they will come if they search for it, but u need to be in the place they land on after they search for it (whether it's google search results or chatGPT)
It's basically "go where your customers are". Fitness influencers doing trendy workouts are all on Instagram.
I recently made a small game for iOS/macOS and basically every non-development part of the process between setting up the App Store stuff and trying to promote it have been a lot more work than I expected. Not even including the game design, which is really separate from the actual game development.
Have you noticed the different roles that make up successful small businesses? You must anticipate and learn to wear several hats in turn if you're doing it alone
It's one of those things where I intuitively understand the roles when it comes to my normal job, but in doing this as a side project I foolishly thought it'd be more straightforward.
We get used to peers across different roles doing their work for us and mostly unseen, at day jobs
I've always struggled to find the right balance as a solo/indie dev.
However, recently I decided to try something I'm calling the SaaS Schedule Sandwich.
Each month is split into four weeks:
- Week 1: Build
- Week 2: Market
- Week 3: Build
- Week 4: Video Journal
And so far it's kept me honest and not made me go live in a cave and code for a year.
I actually released the first video journal last week for our new product:
https://youtu.be/cSY-C8oiUU8
This post and the discussion is great!!! Brings me back to 2 different projects/products that I developed that never made it to market (2009 and 2014). I also kept a log of ideas most of which withered in the light of day but a few persisted. And for each project I went off to live in a cave and code for a year (not recommended). Looking back I absolutely should have shared what I was working on and found support from a community (highly recommended). All of these ideas are excellent. Thank you for sharing them.
What are you using to put your videos together?
Right now we're totally bootstrapped so it's a combination of:
- Davinci Resolve (free)
- Epidemic Sound (for music and sound)
- ClearAudio.ai for VO processing
I then give myself the whole week to produce the video and honestly that has increased the quality by 10x. I'm not rushing it and can properly spend 2 days putting the video clips together, and another day on just the voice over alone.
Thanks, it looks professionally done.
Wow, that's a really nice thing to say. I personally don't think so but that means a huge amount to hear. Thank you. One thing I did before jumping into making the video was to look, like really look at other YouTuber's videos. Kind of what I assume the author of the original article did. Look at how other successful people are doing something and copy as much of the execution as possible.
TLDW - whats your one sentence pitch for your product?
A new kind of database workbench for developers/founders/teams for:
- managing your database
- creating beautiful dashboards quickly
- writing, running and sharing queries (think postman but for db)
- visually building workflows to export and manipulate your database (so underrated)
- eventually building apps directly on to your database (think retool but a desktop app)
It's an all in one, modern way to interact with your database. Desktop app.
Just watched your video, really love the style and openness.
My only suggestion is niche it down a bit. The SQL tutorial guides and features sound great, but the functional list feels a bit like a laundry list. Even here you describe it as a tool for "developers/founders/teams".
Try targeting a specific domain, tech stack, database type, or developer segment (e.g., large B2B teams, small B2B teams, indie devs, or funded startup founders) to stand out. If you pick a clear niche, you can build a stronger SEO strategy around long tail keywords and tailor both the product and the messaging and work out what order to build out features. Even if long term you plan on wanting it to be a tool for all databases, segments etc.
It's much easier to produce content with this in mind, e.g. if you were targetting getting the most out of Postgres you could easily produce a bunch of content for PostgreSQL 18 which formally came out of beta a few weeks ago and has native support for UUIDv7 etc.
Fwiw I’m doing a ton with SQLite atm as a solo dev. If your landing page had said "THE VERY BEST TOOL FOR SQLITE MANAGEMENT TO HELP SOLO DEVS AND SMALL TEAMS MAXIMIZE SQLITE PERFORMANCE AND PRODUCTIVITY" there’s a good chance I would have signed up for updates but atm it felt a little generic, some of the features I might use, some I definitely would not.
well done.
For anyone like me that’s never heard of Lagree before https://apps.apple.com/us/app/lagree-buddy-wrist-metronome/i...
From his website, I learned that he is a “VISIONAIRE, INVENTOR, and PHILANTROPIST (sic)”:
https://www.sebastienlagree.com/
Maybe this is the final form of someone that permanently leaves xcode to market. Wow.
The author of the article makes a third party app that assists with these workouts, he isn’t Lagree.
lol, I didn't expect this before I clicked
It’s a kind of Pilates.
Sort of like Bikram for hot yoga.
Recently learned that Pilates is called what it is because it was invented by Joe Pilates
I never knew that.
Reminds me of the inventor of the backflip, John Backflip:
https://theyardstickagency.co.uk/blog/the-strange-but-true-s...
Don’t worry, this is false and the article says so.
Yes, that's the joke.
People who code for mobile development, like OP, is IOS development their full time job? Because as someone who does web development, to learn the in and out of Swift programming language and using XCode feel major vendor lockin and prefer say React Native due to its interoperability.
If you want to develop mobile apps and you want to have users, there is no way around vendor lock in and walled gardens. By supporting Android, too, the only thing you’ll achieve is that you’ll be the abused in two abusive relationships instead of one.
Adding more abstractions on top will not significantly improve the fact that you are at the whims and mercy of companies that don’t care about you, so I don’t see RN as an improvement.
If you want to avoid vendor lockin, don’t do mobile apps, go to web. Then, you can also just switch RN to React simply or any other framework.
Usually, yes. The overwhelming majority of mobile dev jobs are platform-specific, or are specifically for a framework like React Native.
With native mobile dev, lock-in is less of a problem career-wise, because it's a duopoly, so your chosen technology is unlikely to become unfashionable like it would if you were specialised in a particular web framework.
Even if using a framework like RN, solo devs would be putting themselves in a precarious position if they don't understand the underlying systems and frameworks. Without that knowledge they won't be able to effectively debug and figure out if issues are stemming from the cross-platform framework or the native platform/framework and subsequently will be entirely dependent on outside parties for fixes.
So if they're learning the native frameworks anyway, they may as well use them. These days with Swift and Kotlin most logic code transfers pretty cleanly and most apps can be LEGO'd together from UIKit/SwiftUI/Compose components, so the workload isn't as high as one might expect.
Aside from that, early on it's usually better to start with one platform, nail the UI and interaction, and then once the app is proven worry about the other platform.
If you browse job listings, you will find titles for 'iOS developer' and 'Android Mobile Developer'
Yup, I know that but my reason to ask was that if most people who develop for IOS also know web development, as in full stack development. or are they usually IOS developer fulltime.
Most are full time iOS developers.
Even with RN I've had to learn Swift and also often need xcode for configuring targets and such. RN helps in some ways but native apps are so much better in the long run.
RN libraries are so often buggy and disappointing in my experience.
It doesn't really make sense to call it vendor lock-in when you're learning a platform's native API and idiosyncrasies.
That would apply more to React Native since you are stuck with its vendored abstractions and you can't just swap out React Native once you've built with it.
I think you're commenting on how iOS development is a less portable skill than a toolkit than runs on all platforms. Or that your iOS app is stuck on one platform. That is certainly true. But don't overlook the value of expertise in a native platform instead of just one set of abstractions that run on top of it. There are things you can do on the native platform, like optimizing performance, that you can't do using something like React Native.
It's all just trade-offs.
> That is certainly true. But don't overlook the value of expertise in a native platform instead of just one set of abstractions that run on top of it.
This applies to the web, too. A dev who has a good grasp of of the fundamentals (HTML, CSS, JS), the DOM, what does and doesn't trigger a repaint, etc is going to be able to take a React project a lot further than a dev who only knows how to use React.
This whole post should teach you just one thing: indie app game is dead, and you need to spend money to make any money
are you talking based on personal experience too, or just based on this article?
Both. Selling apps has gotten very capital intensive.
highly recommend focusing on just tiktoks/reels rather than stories that expire every 24 hours. They will pick up more views beyond your audience, especially if you "warm up" your account by engaging with content just on your niche. Look forward to the next experiment!
Enjoy this - I really really struggle marketing as someone that sits a lot in the creative technology space, it always feels quite dirty, so it's nice to read someone's perspective from it
It's a nice write up.
> Build it and they will come is a fallacy.
This is true. But is this the alternative?
No trying to minimize the efforts of people who do this as real jobs or influencing - you do you. However, generating fake message screenshot, sending unsolicited messages etc? And the winner is the one who gets the biggest rise from the consumer, authentic or not.
Distribution is hard, I get it. But isn't this the equivalent of everyone just rocking up to the village square in the most outrageous costumes and screaming into the megaphone?
The alternative is to build the audience first, then sell things to it. If you don't command an audience, you must use someone else's, usually at a cost.
You don't have to be the loudest and most outrageous if your product is great and you speak the right message to the right audience.
Rooting for you! Thanks for sharing your process.
Sounds like great advice. Thanks for sharing.
I’ve been working on promoting my seating chart app for teachers, Shuffle Buddy, on social media. I had a 1M view pop on TikTok when I first launched and have now been clawing along to try for continued engagement.
It’s reassuring to know that social media posts are hard for everyone and that it isn’t supposed to be easy. I keep looking for ways to create content that is genuinely beneficial to teachers and also convinces them to try my app, but it’s hard.
As a solopreneur I'm dreading the gutting of US TikTok... Things are going to get much harder for organic promotion if there's a separate US app under a non-TikTok name that only Americans can use.
You can look into https://sideshiftjobs.com or https://playkit.xyz for scaling organic posting btw (unaffiliated).
Personally I just message a lot of people directly myself and get lucky with friendly responses because creators like my apps enough that they use it themselves (edtech market makes this easier as the apps are genuinely and wholesomely bettering). Then I convince them to start new accounts focused on my app promo, in addition to less frequent commissioned promo on their main accounts.
For doing it yourself you need to get multiple devices and multiple accounts going, there are tools to help with that too. You can also post the UGC content that you pay others to produce for you, onto your own accounts. It's too difficult to consistently go viral without more frequent rolls of the dice. Focusing on a single branded account made more sense before current social media algos which don't care about your followers and won't even show it to them if the content isn't engaging enough to go viral beyond your following.
“Organic”
The post screenshots in those links are… uh.. hey I look forward to all of the free time everyone will have to do more productive things than “organically” shill for attention on behalf of commercial interests.
It's just an industry term with a particular meaning. You don't need to rage at me about people getting paid for doing ad work because you don't like the jargon and don't like marketing.
People who do UGC work get paid enough to not have to work full-time if they don't want to, giving them more time for other things in life than most jobs. Typical jobs care more about exclusivity over your entire working day than the value of your output (hence why we have more of a "laborer" market than a "labor" market), let alone sharing that value back to you as is typical with UGC contracts. It's disappointing to see that kind of elitism here.
edit:
When you pay for ads/boosted content instead, all contemporary platforms have tried hard to make the paid ads look convincingly like “organic” content for long enough for the content’s hook to land - just look at X, Reddit, TT etc.
At least with “organic” promo, established accounts have a reputation to preserve or foster when they choose what promo work aligns with their audience and their values. As a consumer I can usually evaluate how much to trust a creator too by how scrupulously they choose their promo.
With paid ads I know I am just seeing it because they were the top bidder for my attention and that the only reputation protection from the platform is to avoid particularly criminal or other extreme content.
Not raging at you, the term is newspeak, obfuscatory, slapped on top of antisocial behavior.
It’s better that profits are shared than fixed. But that doesn’t change the underlying system and incentives towards dishonesty.
100% agree. Plus ”organic” is an important term that has real meaning when you try to grow a product. Diluting it with paid advertisement just makes it harder to communicate clearly. Plus we already have a word for it, paid sponsorship.
The term is used to differentiate content that end users see because it was boosted or a paid ad that the platform shows them due to payment instead of via engagement algorithms
Paid sponsorship is fine logically but isn’t usually used to describe UGC marketing. These are accounts that are set up to promote one brand, without any existing following, and without boosting the content - leaving it to be discovered organically.
(Paid sponsorship is usually used to describe promotion through someone’s existing following and is also usually communicated within the content as being a paid ad, though not necessarily. But even with paid sponsorship, it is a form of organic marketing per the use of this term when the content is not boosted and not being used for paid ads, it simply describes how the viewer is coming across it.)
I wouldn’t use the term paid sponsorship to describe how someone creates brand-focused new accounts and posts only about the brand in order to achieve organic virality, I don’t think that clearly communicates the strategy
>It's just an industry term with a particular meaning. You don't need to rage at me about people getting paid for doing ad work because you don't like the jargon and don't like marketing.
Others are raging about your use of the (very basic) term because it's the inverse of industry jargon. Putting it bluntly: that word you're using - organic - it doesn't mean what you think it means.
There's no elitism here, just more experienced people trying to tell you that you're making a fool of yourself.
You are simply out of touch. And that is not what the other repliers are raging about.
I can expand on this but you are rudely patronizing, so goodbye to that.
I didn't know about Sebastian Lagree and Lagree Fitness, but looking him up does not leave a good impression. The press covers on is homepage look incredibly fake, e.g. a "digital cover" from cosmopolitan.ro which is clearly designed to look like he was on the cover of the real cosmopolitan. Same thing for Forbes. His "thing" seems to be a kind of modern pilates and he sues everyone who criticises him. Seems like a real wholesome person and a community I'd really like to join /s
But to each their own.
tl;dr Engineer discovers that sales & marketing are real jobs. Calling it “content creation” or “influencers” are just another way of minimizing a side of business development that scares you. Thanks for the story, it was an enjoyable read!
Marketing is a real job in the same way both pharmacists and drug dealers are both real jobs. Its really easy for marketing to go from providing a useful product to using dark patterns like rage bait to peddle the equivalent of drugs to the masses. Marketing gets a bad name for a reason.
I share your aversion to modern marketing tactics, but by your logic, programmers that develop the addictive social media algorithms are the meth cooks. Everyone is complicit. Modern day "tech bros" get a significantly worse rep than marketing folks these days. No use in participating in this blame game.
I agree that software engineering isn't exempt from warranting serious introspection as to the world that a given project is enabling. I do not agree that we should simply throw up our collective hands and say "Oh well, everyone is complicit." Professional endeavours causing interpersonal harm and enabling exploitative behaviour should be called out and forced to bare the reputational cost wherever and whenever they occur.
I mean that kind of tracks? I had to take a computer science ethics course in college. It mainly focused on stuff like the Therac-25 case study, but I could easily see a more modern version of the course covering social media algorithms.
I wonder if marketing courses also have an ethics component taught in them?
> focused on stuff like the Therac-25 case study, but I could easily see a more modern version of the course
A good example of bad that can happen but damn is that just plain lazy.
More recent examples are surely more relevant and would generated more discussion.
For someone just learning about the Therac-25 incident, what more recent cases would've worked better to foster discussion that can also be read about?
I'd like to learn this too.
But off the top of my head - Facebook and the genocide in Myanmar. The various collosal data breaches that usually have token punishment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches
Mass surveillance and face identification by private companies for law enforcement eg https://www.auror.co/role/loss-prevention You can't appeal it and they don't respond to requests for your records (like a government department would).
Social media and addiction to it. How this should be managed with vulnerable groups, eg children?
I'm sure there are numerous better examples out there.
Engineer does 40 outreaches in a week and says the results are “not that amazing” lol.
If I said that I coded for 15 minutes a day for a week and wasn’t impressed by the results, what would an engineer say?
I do 40 personalized outreaches in two hours.
Edit: I shared a couple details in my other reply under this post
It sounds like you have a system. Is it effective for you? What does your system look like?
You can do this pretty easily with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It’s not complex at all and works extremely well.
TL;DR if you don't know who Sebastian Lagree is (my LA gf said "the pilates guy?") then don't read this.
I didn't know who he is and still found this blog post really interesting because the real topic is about marketing your app when you're a software developer.
it read to me more as a marketing piece itself than as a piece about marketing.
Then it's the worst marketing piece because there's not an even single link to the app.
You might not appreciate the topic, but this is definitely not an ad, just honest learning and sharing about a difficult part of the entrepreneur job.
What is pilates?