Plan in hand, it's time to actually start working.
Given that I’ve identified that most of my time should be spent marketing, one could argue that I should first come up with some kind of marketing strategy. Oh boy.
I’ve been working in startups as an engineer in some capacity for 20 years now. I also tend to specialize in very small startups. Outside of one outlier, the average size of the companies (in terms of headcount) I’ve worked at is probably around 20. As a result, I’ve been exposed to a handful of marketing departments and have been exposed to marketing strategy and tactics.
The entire time, I’ve also been a wantrepreneur, reading Hacker News and avariciously following along with several startup stories. I’ve long known that selling and marketing are two particularly weak points in my skill-set - my childhood left me with a confusing inability to self-promote that I’m finally in the process of overcoming. Actually, lets put a pin in the marketing talk, and talk about psychology for a minute, because it’s vitally important. Probably the most important part of this whole “experiment”1.
Why now?
By that I mean, I’ve been unemployed before. Why didn’t I try to launch an MVP of a product during one of those times? Many pixels have been spent writing about how to go from wanting to build a startup to doing it. I won’t waste more, but I will point out that most of the advice seems to address the same root cause, over and over: fear.
Fear is what is holding me back, for sure. Fear of failure is obvious. Both the logistical fear of being an adult in 2025 with a mortgage, bills and other responsibilities that, by law, I need to follow through on, and the deeper more psychological fear of shame and ridicule by my peers. Fear of success is less obvious.
Fear of failure is natural. Those who are scared of the tiger are less likely to be eaten by it than those that are not. I’m a big believer in evolutional psychology and I can feel it’s ghostly fingers in my psyche telling me that it’s easier to convince one business to own all my work for a modest yearly fee than it is to convince many businesses to rent my work for a relatively small fee.
That fear of failure is a familiar friend though - we’ve all been laughed at on the playground for failing, we’ve all been admonished by parents or teachers for failing. We haven’t gotten jobs, we’ve been dumped, we’ve disappointed friends and loved ones. Hopefully by now we’ve developed coping mechanisms for handling the failure, healthy or not. It’s a normal part of doing something big, and by now I can definitely regulate that fear within myself.
The fear of success is a lot weirder to me. According to my therapist, this is a trait of the anxious - part of our tendency to catastrophize and ruminate. I’m not a CEO, I’m not a marketer, a customer sales rep, a dev ops engineer, I don’t actually have any of the skills I need to do this. What happens if against all odds it works? What the hell do I do if I’m suddenly crushed by demand for my product? It’s all going to fall apart. How do I handle “the haters” - not everyone is going to believe in my vision, nor agree with how I plan to implement it. I’m just a dumb code monkey, I have no authority here to back up any of what I’m doing. Oh god. Even if I succeed, I’m going to be a laughing stock in the programming community and never be able to find a job again.
That fear of success, the underlying feelings of shame and lack of self-confidence is why I’ve never seriously tried this before. It’s only been through almost weekly therapy over the last 5 years that I’ve been able to identify what underlies this fear and start to work through it. TLDR of 5 years of therapy is that during my childhood, attention was a bad thing that caused all sorts of negative feelings. I developed a strong tendency to go out of my way to avoid attention that still impacts me to this day.
Overcoming the fear of success, for me, is key to starting to go from dreaming and planning to taking action. That’s why now, at least for me. I’m ready to start believing in myself, my work and my ability to overcome obstacles.
Your fears are likely different, but the fix is the same - figure out what they are and somehow work through them.
Back to marketing.
As outlined above, I’m no good at self-promotion. To compensate, I’ve gone out of my way to learn as much as a can about marketing. Unfortunately for me, just like everything in tech, tech marketing moves fast, and things that used to work will suddenly not work. Advice that worked 10 years ago may not work today. Having said that, there does seem to be a consistent thread throughout the marketing advice through the years, and it seems to boil down to:
authenticity
customer interaction
all while, fundamentally, promoting your company and services
Specific techniques change - it used to be about social, now it’s product-led-growth and walled communities. It used to be about long form content designed to convince your audience, with calls-to-action (CTAs) periodically interspersed, now it’s content that’s easily digestible by AI. What you do changes, but the threads of truth still run through - interact with customers, be authentic about who you are as a business and promote yourself.
Fundamentally though, you go where your audience is and convince them to go to where you are. There, convince them to try your product and then convince them to give you money. Actually, you don’t even really need a product to convince them to try. The Lean Startup philosophy espouses financial commitment as a signal - just convince people to commit to giving you money, figure out what to build to justify that money later.
But you do need somewhere for them to go.
If I go to where my audience is, I need to send people to somewhere I am - and be able to capture the emails of any people who are interested. So I figure I may as well start building a marketing site with landing pages, some content, and an email capture at least to start. Get this deployed out somewhere and capable of:
having content marketing posts displayed prominently
being easily indexable by search engines and AI agents
capturing e-mail address into some kind of list
Great! Let’s fire up the code editor and get started.
Stop. Think.
The easiest, fastest way to get started would be to pick a tech stack I'm super familiar with and just write some kind of web app that writes email addresses into a file that I rsync/scp somewhere. The backend could probably be a single file.
I was about to write an entire paragraph justifying why it would be a better idea to instead think forward to the MVP, realize it needed user account support and build out an entire FastAPI server/SPA application with server-side rendering and Postgres storage to support both use cases - but that would be wrong.
I mean, it's not wrong per se, but it is retreating into the comfort of known territory and delaying something that makes me uncomfortable - marketing. The fastest way is the fastest way, even if I have to go back and change it later.
So that's what I'll do. Instead of succumbing to the call of the familiar and known, I need to stay focused. I do need to spend a little time up front building before I can market, but this is a slippery slope - it’s easy to get sucked in and start building in a vacuum. Better instead to blast through this as quickly as possible to get stuck into the actual hard stuff - marketing.
A simple static site, driven by a single file Python script that just captures emails into a CSV. That's easy, and shouldn't take more than a few hours to be honest. Most of the scheduled 5 days of upcoming work will be spent designing, tweaking, creating graphics and working on presenting a polished and informative marketing website. I'll also need to write compelling content in order to entice people into signing up to my mailing list, then get that content distributed to where my audience is.
Standup
The daily standup meeting format probably works best for what I’m trying to do in terms of reporting progress. My timelines are so tight and the risk of getting sidetracked and distracted is so high that daily reporting of achievements and goals will keep me focused.
So today, I intend to set up a local static website for hosting marketing material. I want to get the server running and responding to requests, and capable of transforming markdown documents into HTML marketing pages. It doesn’t have to look pretty, it just has to work.
Psychological hack - experiments can’t fail; they either prove a hypothesis, or disprove it.