Don't Think About Marketing Your Side Project
Tags: sideprojects, marketing, startup
Published: 2020-09-14 16:58:03

---
title: "Don't Think About Marketing Your Side Project"
published: true
description: "Marketing is at least as important as your product. I had been spending probably 90% of my time on product and 10% on marketing. This was completely out of balance, and I realized that I needed to be closer to 50-50 if I wanted to build a side project that actually made money."
tags: sideprojects, marketing, startups
canonical_url: https://www.indiehackers.com/@karlhughes/dont-think-about-marketing-your-side-project-445c413521
cover_image: https://storage.googleapis.com/indie-hackers.appspot.com/articles/R7E8roaFsYTIKIfiBstiKAWyWbJ2/@karlhughes%7C445c413521/marketing-checklist.jpeg
---
I have started at least a dozen side projects in the past five years. As a software developer, it's almost too easy to spend a weekend hacking together something that _could be_ the next big thing, and I would usually do it without even thinking about marketing, sales, or growth. My typical pattern was to build the project with a minimal feature set, buy a domain name, and then post about it on my Facebook and Twitter page. Sometimes I'd try to cold call a customer or publish a blog post, but to be honest, **I had no idea what I was doing when it came to marketing.**

If you've been reading Indie Hackers for a while, you know that [this is pretty common](https://hackernoon.com/indie-startups-the-ingredients-of-success-74531fe3a019). Many of the founders interviewed mention that they spent way too much time building, and not nearly enough time marketing their products. After I started reading their stories, I knew I was doing the same thing.


## **Rethinking Marketing without Thinking**

The two things I gleaned from reading Indie Hackers over the past year were:

1. **Marketing is at least as important as your product.** I had been spending probably 90% of my time on product and 10% on marketing. This was completely out of balance, and I realized that I needed to be closer to 50-50 if I wanted to build a side project that actually made money.

2. **It takes time. **The other thing I observed was that many of these projects were a labor of love that the founder had toyed with for years before they finally took off. I was barely sticking with my projects for 3 months, so of course they never got any traction. This whole side project thing is a marathon, not a sprint.

With these two realizations in mind, **I set out to build a marketing formula that I could use for my side projects** that wouldn't require a ton of mental energy. It needed to be repeatable and it needed to be something I could stick with for years, not just a few weeks.

## Compiling a Marketing Checklist

I started compiling all the marketing strategies I had tried before. I read books (Justin Jackson's _[Marketing for Developers](https://devmarketing.xyz/)_ is a good one), I paid attention in marketing meetings at work, and I read a lot of blog posts.

After toying around with the format for a while, **I finally launched [the Side Project Marketing Checklist](https://www.sideprojectchecklist.com/), and [within a month it took off](https://www.karllhughes.com/posts/side-project-checklist)**. I used the checklist itself as a marketing plan, and after a successful run on Hacker News, I had a project with hundreds of email subscribers and [thousands of stars on Github](https://github.com/karllhughes/side-project-marketing).

## Why did the Side Project Marketing Checklist Resonate?

The [Side Project Marketing Checklist](https://www.sideprojectchecklist.com/) is a comprehensive, chronologically ordered list of marketing tactics and ideas that you can use to market a side project. The list is free and open source, so it's constantly changing, and I'm now expanding on each item in the list in [weekly blog posts](https://www.sideprojectchecklist.com/blog/).

The reason this checklist took off is that **it lowers the mental energy required to market a project**.

For me, the hard part of marketing was thinking of new things to try every week because there isn't a single marketing formula that works for every project. I wasn't really tracking what I had done, and I wasn't keeping an organized list of things to do next. The Side Project Marketing Checklist provides exactly that, and it gives anyone who's not an experienced marketer a foundation to start with.

I've written about [how I use the checklist](https://www.sideprojectchecklist.com/2017/how-to-use/), and now that thousands of people have downloaded it, shared it, or contributed to it, I'm looking to get your input! What can I do to make The [Side Project Marketing Checklist](https://www.sideprojectchecklist.com/) even better? Submit your ideas on [Github](https://github.com/karllhughes/side-project-marketing/issues) or [find me on Twitter](https://twitter.com/karllhughes).