I’m bad at marketing products that I created. Just today I had to shut down Codebase Health Check, because I couldn’t get enough customers in the last six months. Apparently it’s not so easy to build a profitable business as a side project. Fortunately, you have a chance to be much better at marketing than me.

I’m excited to share that my friend Jack Kinsella has published his book about marketing for programmers. Jack certainly knows what he is talking about - he runs a profitable online business and he did all the marketing. This book is aimed at programmers and Jack is also a self-taught software developer.

What I really hate about other marketing books is that they are theoretical and you don’t get any rules which you can immediately apply in practice. “Entreprenerd: The Busy Person’s Primer on SEO, Paid Advertising, and Conversion Optimisation” is different. It literally consists of real life stories and actionable pointers.

After a couple years of experience building software products, I now strongly believe that only 20% of your success comes from building a great product and the remaining 80% is sales and marketing.

We - programmers - tend to think that if we build a perfect product people will come on their own. But that’s not true! They will definitely not come unless you spend your time on reaching out to them. That’s why I recommend you to skip learning about the latest JavaScript framework and instead read this book and get better at marketing.