McFilter

The Reluctant Marketer

Marketing is a new field for me. I know "we are all marketers now" and so I must have done some marketing, but this is the first time I've tried to market a product. And I've known that from the start of MCQN.com. The sales and marketing of whatever I was doing was always going to be the part I'd struggle with, the weakest link in my business proposition as it were.

I could have reduced the risk in what I'm doing by finding someone who knew about sales and marketing (which aren't as tightly bound together as that makes it sound, it's just that they're the two gaping holes in my experience and expertise) but I never considered that as a option.

Well, I suppose I did consider it as an option, but soon dismissed it because this isn't just about being successful and making money, it's about me learning new things and challenging myself in new ways. So trying to do it myself was always part of the plan. I might be useless at it and fail miserably, at which point then I can consider hiring someone, or partnering with someone who can do it, or whatever... But the trying myself comes first.

However, deciding I was going to do it myself didn't make it any easier, or more importantly any less scary. For about the past year I've been aware of that fear slowing the development of PeerBackup. Not in a big way, just a little more fuel to the procrastination - the longer I can put off finishing, the longer it'll be before I have to face this scary, unknown stuff.

As I knew it was something I had no experience of, whilst I've been developing the software I've also been trying to learn more about what marketing is. The Product Marketing Handbook for Software was a good primer to the different methods of marketing and selling software, although it's a bit out-of-date as more and more software is sold over the Internet, and The Anatomy of Buzz and You Are The Message were also quite interesting reads. More useful, however, has been reading some marketing-ish blogs - Hugh, Creating Passionate Users, and Evelyn Rodriguez. Posts I've read on those blogs have most often sparked off ideas for ways that I might be able to market my software.

So I've been amassing knowledge, and noting down random thoughts and ideas, but it's still all theory. I don't have any actual, practical experience to back up the ideas, and as usual I've trapped myself in the cycle of not wanting to get started as I've not got the experience to "do it right", but as I don't start I'm not getting the experience so that in future I might know how to "do it right".

Until Friday that it. The conversations I had with Hugh and Jim Byford, and the session with Johnnie Moore at Our Social World showed that life is for experimenting, and that it's alright not to get it right.

So it's time to stop worrying that my marketing ideas aren't any good, and just spend some time getting them to coalesce into a plan for how the marketing of PeerBackup is going to start. Then if need be I can tune them or throw them away once I've seen how effective they are. If nothing else, it'll give me more things to blog about...