You suck at marketing.

Okay, chaps, I’m about to totally rip into a lot of you, but trust me, it is not from a place of hate. Now, before I proceed, I wanna drop a disclaimer: I have nothing to promote or any links to share. I am just a guy who is sick and tired of seeing “I made $100k MRR in two weeks” posts on here. This will probably be a series of posts over some days or weeks, so strap in.

A bit of background about myself before I begin: I am a sales/business development specialist who transitioned to marketing strategy. I work for a $300M company as a market analyst/strategist for an industry-leading tech product, so I might know a thing or two about sales and marketing.

Let’s jump into it. Here’s how you suck:

Admit you suck at marketing

I have worked with a lot of talented engineers, and I know from experience that marketing is often seen as “easy” and something even a child could do. A lot of you are from technical backgrounds and live in countries not the United States (this part is gonna be important later), trying to sell your stuff to a largely American audience (that’s where all the money is, duh).

You approach marketing with all the hubris of a “tech bro” — “What’s a user persona? Some fancy marketing mumbo jumbo” — and then you take a gung-ho approach to advertising your “MVP” by pumping dollars into Google Ads. Your website, however, has shite copy, terrible and confusing CTAs, complex onboarding flows, contradicting language, verbosity, and an assumption that the audience will “get what the tool is for,” with no clear communication about why they should even care in the first place.

Get a marketer! There are tons of us on Reddit and even Fiverr, for a variety of prices. Admit you can’t do it and get someone who specializes in it. For those in the back saying, “I have no money to spend,” learn marketing for a few months. At least get a solid grasp of the fundamentals, come up with a plan, a strategy—anything but just pumping Google with ads. Let a professional review said strategy and follow it to a tee.

My God, stick to a strategy!

You might notice that I downright skipped the funny “founders” who would download a WordPress template as a landing page, tweak some things, and try to use this subreddit to get free clicks by creating “Roast my SaaS” posts.

Back to the serious founders. I know you are excited to tell the world about your exciting new product and have spent a lot of time and effort building it, but slow down. Breathe. Think about the market you want to approach and how you want to approach it.

Now, if you have someone who does strategy for you, they’ll most likely outline many go-to-market steps you should follow, depending on the type of product and the method you intend to market with. Do you wanna go organic, or do you want to start right off with paid ads? Do you want lots of leads and are happy with lower conversions, or are you targeting a specific niche of leads with a high conversion rate?

Do you want a short-term or long-term approach to customer acquisition? Are you B2C or B2B? Do you intend to build in public or not? Are you actually interested in solving real people’s problems? None of these questions are in any order, but you get the gist of it.

Different situations require different, tailored marketing plans. If you, as a founder, try to do everything all at once, you’re going to get burnt out while half-assing all of them and getting zero results. At this stage, it is better to pick a few strategies that align with your goals and go all in on them.

One example of a longer-term, underutilized form of organic marketing is short-form educational videos targeted toward users in your niche (e.g., job-hunting tips for a resume builder).

My fingers are hurting now, so I’ll continue this some other time. In the meantime, if you loved this post, upvote and drop a comment. If you have other suggestions for founders or prospective founders... well, drop them here.

Finally, if you ever get motivated to hire a marketing specialist from this post, please do not ask them to work for commissions or “equity.” That’s just not cool, dude.

(To be continued...)