Marketing issue or confidence issue?

You’ve heard the cliché: Developers hate marketing. Open source maintainers think ‘if you build it, they will come.’ Technical founders don’t have skills at marketing and therefore flub GTM.

Yes, there are definitely strategies and tactics that you can learn that will make you better at marketing. But at least some marketing problems are not a skills issue, or a time issue… they are a confidence issue.

Marketing, in a nutshell, is shouting from the rooftops ‘hey! I built something cool and you should come check it out!’ Maybe you’re doing so by with content marketing, maybe you’re promoting on social media, maybe you’re doing conference talks… the point is, you’re sticking your head out and telling the world that this thing you built is worth looking at, and even paying money for.

When you do this, you risk rejection. A vocal minority of open source users will almost certainly think your project is shit, and they will tell you. But if you don’t ever tell anyone the project exists, this is obviously a marketing fail.

The point is, if you’re not doing any marketing because you’re not sure what to do / marketing isn’t your specialty, take a moment to ask yourself if you might be procrastinating your marketing because you’re subconsciously worried about getting ripped to shreds.

Especially for open source projects, a lot of marketing issues are not because the maintainer hates doing marketing, but because they are at least subconsciously scared of sticking their neck out.