Coding Week/Marketing Week

This article is based on @yongfook (AKA Jon Yongfook) original article

What is This

As a startup founder, especially if you are a solo founder, it is not easy to balance growing your business through marketing and also working on the tech side of things. Often people can only manage one and neglect the other. This is not ideal and both must be done to scale the business.

The solution to this is to first practice on both. The best way to do this in my opinion is to focus 1 week on coding followed up by 1 week of marketing. Then rinse and repeat. 1 week is ideal and will not be too much multitasking to throw you off.

How do I start Coding?

Often most people don't struggle with coding their startup but to those who do, learn by doing, even if you don't know how to do it. Also don't be afraid to reach out. Usually there is a large community around it (and often times this is with Discord or Slack).

How do I start Marketing?

Marketing can take many forms, from paid adverts to a newsletter (which is what I'm doing 😳). My advice is to first focus on honest, grassroots movement to cultivate interest. A few ways to do this is (some borrowing from @yongfook)

• Tweet something of interest to your target market
• Participate in forums where your customers are
• Improve your marketing site / docs
• Create a free tool that complements your app
• Write a blog post aimed at your target market
• Write a weekly / monthly newsletter with tips / advice
• Join or start a podcast related to your industry
• Cold email clients
• Create a video to show off your tool
• Join the communities your customers are in, ie a Discord server on coding

Keeping track

I made a website where you can track which day it is here: weekly.antarcticsolutions.ca

Yes, it is literally just a website that says either It's Coding Week or It's Marketing Week with some sparkles, depending on the week. However, note that my schedule is exactly opposite to @yongfook's. (I also think my website is cooler but that's just my opinion)

I also made it open source here: github.com/Antarctic-Solutions/weekly. Here you will also find a GitHub Action the posts a webhook notification to Discord given the webhook URL is supplied as a environment secret

⚠️ Starts the new week on Sunday at midnight or 1 minute before Monday begins