Business attitudes differ between marketers and developers
I’ve found two main business attitudes in preparing to launch my online business. I’m quitting my job on Thursday. My main goal is to travel for a while, but the thought of having some time off to work on something fun and start building my own assets and revenue streams is very appealing to me.
Although I was initially excited about the opportunity to just work on personal fun tech projects, the marketer in me is going to feel like a failure if I can’t bring in at least some money from this process. So I do exactly what I have done ever since I discovered computers: procrastinate, and learn a heck of a lot in the process.
This procrastination leads to research that wobbles between marketing and tech. For those trying to start their own online-based businesses, I’ve noticed two general business attitudes. Both are of course imprecise generalizations, but I do think they reflect a fundamental philosophical divide between online business owners.
Attitude 1:
“I built this cool thing. There’s gotta be a market for it.”
I started with this attitude. I was going to build a program to make flyers for a band easily. I remember having lots of fun making flyers when I was in a band as a teenager, and I thought that making a simple band flyer program would be a good starting point for business.
I started building it. I learned about every 2D graphics toolkit out there, tried to decide between vector and raster graphics, looked for images with suitable licensing terms, and so on. I implemented some basic scripts to do a few of the operations.
Mostly I was looking into the technical side of the product, with a little lip service paid to the marketing side of things. I thought if I made a good enough product, the buyers would come. Maybe that’s true, but I eventually lost motivation because I became increasingly convinced that it would be very hard to make enough money off of it to make it worth my time. I am not at all dismissing the product-first approach — I am more naturally inclined to it, and numerous very successful businesses have started this way (Balsamiq is a great example). The more I read, the more I came across the second attitude.
Attitude 2:
“I don’t care what the heck I’m selling, as long as it makes me money.”
Running into
this attitude was a byproduct of learning about how to get my cool band flyer project into the search engines. I ran across sites like warriorforum.com, wickedfire.com, and digitalpoint.com. The overriding concern on these forums is making money. The customer comes first, the product comes second. I learned about sales funnels, key
word research, and other marketing concepts.
It was through these channels that I found a new hobby: obsessively seeking out niches. I explore this concept in much greater detail in my next post, but the idea is to look for:
- Terms that have demonstrated demand
- Terms that are closely related to a product you know you can build
- Terms that don’t have a lot of competition.
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