Name: The 1-page marketing plan
ISBN: 9781941142998

What Hacker News says

alexellisukApr 2022

Identifying an unmet need, getting a market fit for a solution, understanding what people are willing to pay are all counter-intuitive for engineers, but essential to make money.

These are my recommendations to anyone who's here and not getting the traction they want, or are considering starting a business. The 1-Page Marketing Plan - Alan Dibb. The Right It - Alberto Savoia. Monetizing Innovation - Georg Tacke & Madhavan Ramanujam. Obviously Awesome - April Dunford

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papaver-somnambJan 2022

Founder of Vivid, maker of Vivid Trace for Atlassian Jira and Confluence. Landing page:

https://vivid-inc.net

I'd like to put this up (primarily the landing page) for constructive critique. Hopefully there is an opportunity for all of us to learn here.

While there are some people behind the scenes and many outsourcers, I have been doing all marketing by myself. Crucially, I recognize that I have a severe lack of skill in this department. I've been running this business for 8 years and have "enough" skills in value creation, customer development & support, etc. The product has traction, it solves real problems for currently paying customers. BUT after reading much Indie Hackers etc. and HN items on marketing like

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29538355

marketing feels like a gaping void to me. And that deficiency has been acting as a dis-abler to the business. So, last week, I decided to dive into the deep end of marketing.

The current landing page was completed several months ago in 2021 October. Perhaps it's a reasonable image of my current thinking and abilities. Transforming customer problems into messaging was interesting and even fun, but I still find writing to be excruciating. I believe in focusing on the desired outcomes for people, and in truthful representation of reality; so that should be on the page. The main purpose (CTA or Call To Action) is for the reader to start a 30-day free trial. The landing page content is structured to be later divided into targeted landing pages, one per profession (software dev, QA tester, lead, etc.), and also one per vertical (insurance, banking, manufacturing, and so on) where current customers are (also thinking case studies here). Each landing page will harmonize well with targeted SEO and ads.

Point of interest: This is how I have grown in terms of awareness of marketing, off the top of my head:

Early 2010s: Importance of SEO, on-page SEO (WWW), "The SEO Periodic Table", Google Webmaster / Search Console (or whatever it was called). Business Model Canvas. Customer Development (marketing materials speak in the customers' own language). Book "Nail It then Scale It" by Nathan Furr. Pirate metrics, AIDA. Customer Experience, and in particular Customer Journey and touchpoints.

Late 2010s: Features/Advantages/Benefits (FAB). Importance of positioning & declaring your niche amongst the competition, Book "Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind" by Al Ries. Jobs To Be Done. Headline writing. Tone, phrasing.

This week: Initiated Google Ads and Facebook Ads campaigns to build up high-intent top-of-funnel leads. Book: "The 1-Page Marketing Plan" by Allan Dib (pragmatic + really good so far), "Obviously Awesome" by April Dunford.

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alexellisukDec 2021

I started an OSS project to enable me and my team to receive webhooks at a big co where Ngrok was banned and so was SSH. It works over an HTTP proxy using websockets. One of the requirements I had was for 1st class container support - so it could be run inside a K8s pod and support LoadBalancers for TCP traffic as well as HTTPS. The OSS project was very popular, but drew very little sponsorship. I then pivoted to a commercial license and got some more sign-ups, but not as many as I wanted - companies were happy to pay up front for a one year static license, but individuals and home users were not.

So I introduced a personal tier that was covered for commercial use - inspired by Jetbrains and added a monthly subscription option for it. Both of those actions helped increase usage and signups with personal users. Companies still tend to want to pay for a year.

Even though this is completely self-hosted software, developers seem to like paying for tools monthly. Some abuse this by cancelling the subscription in the months they don't expect to use a tunnel, or opening the software then cancelling the subscription and waiting until the process has to restart before re-subscribing. Not much I can do about this side of it.

If people are interested, the product is called inlets and is easy to find on the Internet. I also write about my OSS and independent business work each week in a subscription newsletter using GitHub Sponsors (another side project, if you like)

Books I could recommend: Monetizing innovation, Obviously Awesome, 1-Page Marketing Plan & Minimalist Entrepreneur. I'm not affiliated with any of these titles, but consider them core reading for indie devs and for side gigs.

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bill-lumberghFeb 2019

The 1-Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dib Totally changed my view of running a business and gave me real structure and clarity about marketing is and how to effectively do it as a small business.

Highly recommend if like you are like I was - wondering when and how the next client was going walk in the door

https://www.amazon.com/1-Page-Marketing-Plan-Customers-Money...

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mattselbstDec 2018

The 1-Page Marketing Plan by Allan Dib Totally changed my view and understanding of what marketing is and how core it is to product development. No theory or fluff, cuts straight to the point.

https://www.amazon.com/1-Page-Marketing-Plan-Customers-Money...

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bdgJul 2022

I'm going through this challenge right now too. In my case I'm creating content to help improve the skills of Engineering Managers and I'm really stubborn about a few things like needing to ship the entire most-loveable-product (as I imagine it from my armchair) and not the minimum-viable-product (as proven by real customers).

I am a bit lucky to have some product skills to identify the mental biases and traps that I fall into, and some friends help pull me back too. Other commenters have pointed out some of those problems:

- Look for positive signal from real flesh-and-blood customers who will give you real money. I printed out my content and had lunch with former colleagues to pick their brains on the topic. I kept doing small tests to check one single area of the final concept.

- Downscale. Downscale. Downscale. You might conjure up 100s of reasons why you can't dare approach the market with a faint shadow of your final vision but you need to do it to test that you aren't making a huge mistake. They will not love it. You will not make money. But you also will not waste time doubling down on a fantasy. Gumroad is good for this but I'm doing it on Shopify just by reducing my product to 10% of the content and printing 1% of the order quantity I need to make a real profit (so I will lose a few hundred, but I will validate if I should spend a few thousand)

- Figure out how to market. You want to do this because this is a form of your "sales funnel" and how you will actually identify who you want to attract, how to do it, where to go, etc. I'm highly unskilled in this topic but I'm using a book called "The 1‑Page Marketing Plan" which helped me structure a lot of things that I had observed in life and start to build a proper plan in steps that was logical and connected. It's not the best book ever, but it is good enough to get oriented and do something logical.

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