| If there's one consistent issue that plagues startups, consultants, and even large established business it's marketing. And that whole thread touches on a subject that I wish would get more traction here on HN: content engineering. Content Engineering (building tools and useful online software projects) is an incredibly effective way to build an audience and awareness by helping people instead of writing yet another 500 word blog post or dumping six figures of VC money into FB or Google ads. It honestly feels like cheating. I think tools just occupy a different part of people's brains than articles and certainly a different spot than ads. This is a hot topic for me as I was looking through the analytics for my site yesterday and found that our Subject Line tester [1] was driving about 10x the traffic of our dozen 2000+ word carefully crafted and educational blog posts [2]. F'ing ridiculous 1 - https://sendcheckit.com/email-subject-line-tester
2 - https://sendcheckit.com/blog Here's some other good examples: Clearbit's Logo API
https://clearbit.com/logo ForAGoodStrftime
https://www.foragoodstrftime.com Atom
https://atom.io/ Golden Ratio Typography Calculator
https://pearsonified.com/typography/ |
I built https://page.rest, https://screen.rip & https://pdf.cool, in the last 3 months which gave us a great understanding of our target market and problem space.
It's also a way to win trust. If you can solve a small problem well, people will trust you with their bigger problems.