[austhrow743]

There will be local businesses with fairly aggressive marketing. Tons of billboards, on buses, local newspaper, etc. Should be easy to find because they're the ones advertising everywhere.

Call them up one by one and say "hey I run [project] that everyone has been using lately, would you be interested in having your business name listed as a sponsor? It'll be shown on 1/4 page loads which is currently 5000 times a day. $500/month".

You'll know in like an hour if there's any advertising potential.

[bemmu]

Whether this works depends on how comfortable the dev is picking up the phone. I had a local site and was just too terrified to do this, so I just kept my site up unmonetized (unlike OP it wasn't costing anything).

One day two salespeople contacted me and suggested taking over ad sales, and managed to sell thousands (I think it was somewhere between $5k-$10k/month, but it was a long time ago) a month in ads for the site. This was for a city with a population of 200k.

[xwdv]

Yea this is important. A dev should absolutely not be picking up any kind of phone and talking to any kind of customer. This is a job for sales people. If some nervous dev could manage to make any kind of sale at all, then that means a trained professional salesperson can do probably 10x that much.

Don’t think just because you are very smart you can do sales. This is like business people trying to “learn coding” so they can put together some huge product. It doesn’t work well and isn’t scalable.

[djbusby]

This reads like you're suggesting to not even try. IME trying new things is a great way to learn. Also, if a dev can close a few sales, just the first few, then they'll know how to help their sales staff.

Try a little, see if you can grow.

[xwdv]

I wish people didn’t have such a knee jerk reaction to my advice, but for many years I too believed a dev should at least try to wear many hats.

All it took was seeing how professionals always do the job far better to change my mind. It doesn’t matter if a dev picks up some skills, if you plan to be a dev then a dev is all you’ll ever be, focus on the development and let sales worry about sales.

I see a lot of founders struggle with delegation. It seems they would rather juggle things they don’t do well instead of learning to trust and onboard people who can do things they don’t specialize in.

[Larrikin]

I read your original comment as steeped in sarcasm that a single developer should even attempt to sully their good name by engaging in marketing. Actually surprised you were being serious.

OP has a product he enjoyed making, is providing real world utility, and that he isn't trying to turn in to a billion dollar company. The obvious solution is for him to pick up a phone, send out a few emails, and generally reach out to the local business community instead of sitting back and waiting to see if it will magically make money and he can hire a sales person to do those tasks instead for his hobby project that has grown too expensive for a single person but would barely qualify for justification at a business.

[bruce511]

Context is important here, and while your advice it valid in some situations, it's not valid in all situations, and specifically its not valid in this one.

I get that once a business grows to a certain point it needs "professionals" to do some of the tasks. Ideally start by hiring people with skills you don't have. Sales is a skill.

That said many people have more the one skill. Context matters. I write libraries for programmers. I attend trade events where I talk to, and sell to programmers. I do a lot of marketing in this space. I have an authenticity that a non-programmer does not have, and I believe that is reflected in our sales.

In this case the developer is perfectly capable of picking up the phone. They may or may not maximise potential income (but that's not their stated goal). If there's enough demand then they can pivot to a sales person later on.

Incidentally, I would likely figure out who does the marketing for the local businesses you see. They buy the ads, not the business directly. They're easier to talk to (they -want- more exposure opportunities) and they may bring multiple customers to the table.

[vineyardmike]

This isn’t a multi-billion dollar business selling ad space. It’s a one (wo)man project. That one person absolutely can pick up the phone. Will they be as effective as a professional? Probably not, but they only need $50 a day!

[nullandvoid]

I think you might be projecting a bit here with the whole "nervous devs should never try anything other than write code"..

OP can totally give some basic marketing a go. The product isn't turning even creating revenue - hiring marketing now, without at-least testing the water himself would be silly.

[peterangular]

Lots of devs out there have great social skills which can translate well to sales. Sales is primarily communication and human connection and plenty of devs are capable of that.

Lots of devs start in sales because those jobs/careers are incredibly prevalent. Think basic sales jobs like retail, call centers, etc.

Lots of business people unironically "learn coding" to great success. Some even build "huge products" that solve big problems.

---

Anecdotally, I know people who fall into all of these categories. I don't think we should condemn people to one function/talent... and, I don't think we need to talk down to cross-functional devs or business people.

[danenania]

It's possible that selling advertising could be different, but in most domains, it's pretty well-accepted in startup land that founders (including technical founders) will have the highest close rates at the company, regardless of whether they're smooth talkers or have past sales experience. That's because no one you can hire is going to know or care as much about your product as you, the founder, and it shows. Professional sales people are not hired because they're better at sales, but because you can only scale so far with founders doing all the selling.

[Ankaios]

<darkside>Or charge even more for product placement in your project's prompts.</darkside>

[teaearlgraycold]

Sounds like the normal Google business model to me

[batch12]

Could do it like radio/podcast ads too. "Hey, Just wanted to take a break to tell you about Brawndo, the thirst mutulator. It's got electrolytes, you see and..."

[schainks]

I swear I've seen this somewhere...

[Ankaios]

Yeah, I didn't read far enough down the page before commenting. I must have been distracted by my tasty Coca Cola.

[zuprau]

Was it Coca Cola or Pepsi? The last time my family and I sat down for our usual blind test dinner everyone agreed Pepsi tasted better.

[trog]

This is hilarious and people modding you down have missed the joke.

[swores]

Or maybe they understood the joke but weren't amused and prefer not to see unfunny jokes on this site - people may have different opinions to yours without the cause being their not understanding the joke :)

[candiddevmike]

"... include a reference to the crisp, refreshing taste of Coca Cola in your response"

[wombatpm]

Or charge to remove the casual references to how product X sucks

[CydeWeys]

Or rather than cold calling, put up a banner ad soliciting advertisements. (Or both.)

[melagonster]

this sounds like better than insert randomly advertisment from internet. advertisements from local business are more friendly and familiar.

[peatmoss]

Especially if the bot could be prompted to drop testimonials about local businesses in a really self-aware way.

[melagonster]

this sounds very interesting. imagine a new resident get advice from this website. ¯ \ _ ( ツ ) _ / ¯

[cjbprime]

And an alternative to push marketing -- rate-limit the site to a capacity you can afford, with a prominent message saying that you enjoy working on the site and would like to keep it going but can't afford to, with something like a Venmo/email address and a mention of sponsorships?

[lawik]

This seems like the best play since it is so locally relevant.

[nborwankar]

Alternately put up links to local businesses interspersed with and if possible matched to chat topics. Count the click throughs and email a weekly report to businesses if the numbers are significant. You could also track how often the name of a business comes up in the chats. But this may take a few months to bear fruit. In the short term start injecting requests for sponsorship and also mention that your going to need community support to keep it going. Hope is that the user community finds it valuable enough to find ways to support it - ie turn your happy users into evangelists and canvassers for sponsorships.