Funny how most people decide after one attempt if a marketing approach works for them or not. What happened to really learning the stuff before making decisions? You can be sure that common sales channels will work if you know how to do them and if you have a product that fits the corresponding market you are targetting. Use one of the known common ones (SEO, ads, social marketing), learn all that it has to offer, experiment with your product and corresponding markets (i.e. if your market is not on HN, try a subreddit, or other forum). You will certainly make some financial success if you do that well enough. Only really start to decide that something works in a context or not, after you have attempted different channels with success a few times each, and base that decision not on whether or not that brings in money at all, but whether or not that is a likely efficient approach.
For me it's often that I have to decide how to spend my time. Improving or at least working on my product or marketing. We're talking about projects that don't pay the rent or they pay the rent but nothing more, so if you spent time on it you probably want to have fun. I prefer programming to marketing and marketing takes time and often costs money. So I will mention my product when I write sometimes (it is Wokabulary, https://wokabulary.com) but I won't go and spam subreddits or HN. And I will write to journalists or blogs if I see a fit but I won't spend my weekends just doing this because it would spoil the fun out of the project for me.
Reasonable argument. Sure time value is also important. I also prefer coding to marketing, however in coding I also have to do and learn unpleasing things to get the desired result. So why not treat it like that?
I kinda do, that's why I try out stuff from time to time but with marketing it's so much harder to measure success and you never know if something does not work because you're doing it wrong or because it just does not work.
Example: I wrote a lot of journalists that published articles about education-software if they want to review our app, no responses. The mails were personal, not templates. Did I wrote to the wrong persons or were my mails not good or do they not care? Or something completely different?
Then I looked up blogs, sponsored posts but our traffic did not change so much. Did I write to the wrong blogs? Are the users not the target group? How to measure and learn?
I'm not so good with social media like facebook or twitter, I don't care enough and I don't want to share too much personal details, but now I try to work on social media marketing. Maybe that's what our app needs, again how can I measure success and how can improve if it does not work from the beginning? For me that is a black box...
