Stats for nerds
3recommend
6mentions
5people
2011–2020years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I read Launch by Jeff Walker (https://amzn.to/2xoLNav). I would say it's a great book for starters like me, which didn't even have a mailing list yet.
- What kind of business role do you want? If it's sales pickup books like Spin Selling, Launch (by Jeff Walker), and Predictable Profits Playbook.
If it's more general finance you want to learn coursera should be fine.
If it's leadership qualities, start with the book How Google Works.
- There are plenty of books on market research, customer development, and internet marketing (real books and serious ebooks/classes) that go much deeper into the topic. Have you been reading those, or just blog posts?
Blog posts are by nature superficial, and more importantly, if you're reading blog posts by people in the tech world about marketing, you're probably picking the wrong teachers to learn from.
As a biz book nerd, who reads probably 30 biz books a year (for the last 12 years), I've never found one or even two resources that are end-to-end adequate. What I've learned, I've pieced together from hundreds of sources, including some meant for enterprise (and adapted for my needs), like _Pricing with Confidence_, and taking vague hand-wavy inspiration (_Purple Cow_) and looking for specific, real-world actions to make it concrete.
That's why I created my "30x500" course: to be a super-concise, super-specific crash course for nerd types (like me) who want to create their first product and want to do it with as little risk of failure as possible. I teach systems. I'm not gonna really pitch it here, cuz it's neither the time nor the place, but to say that I know what you're talking about -- and the stuff IS out there.
It either takes digging and work to piece it together into a strategy, or a willingness to shell out for something accelerated. My course is not the only one where you can learn how to do market research -- but you're going to be hard pressed to find it in one book, or two books, or 10 books, because the strategies and techniques to reduce risk are very valuable. And they take a LOT of work to create… I've spent hundreds of hours on building my course, doing research, tweaking the teaching methods & order, the metaphors, the workbooks, the homework, the supporting materials.
You'll rarely find that level of energy and diligence put into a business book, unless it's a byproduct of "workshopping" (like the GTD system was a workshop long before it was a book). Teaching workshops is vastly more profitable, and in a lot of ways more emotionally rewarding, than selling a book. So as blog posts are to books, books are to live classes & workshops. There's no equivalent reward for selling a $20 - $30 book with that kind of information in it... unless you can turn around and sell something more expensive, and leverage fame, like David Allen did.
That aside, there are courses & workshops where you can learn a lot more about step #1 -- other than mine! I've found these two to be excellent at the "figuring out what to sell" side of things: Presell Formula by Clay Collins, and Product Launch Formula by Jeff Walker.
Laugh if you must, yep it's internet marketer slumming, but they're really good at what they do. A person who wants to succeed won't sneer at any source of workable knowledge.
- Jeff Walker has been making money off email since 1996 and showing others how. His stuff is basically the foundation of all the spammy content we see today.
Search for “The Launch Book” and you’ll find how to use email to sell.
- Here's the thing with marketing: it is its own unique field that encompasses a large skill set. Copywriting, conversions, media buying. Product launches, if you're into that. Social media marketing or SEO/SEM. Guys who are good at it spend years learning it. Just like good engineers take years to learn their crafts.
If a marketer came to you and said hey, I can market like a champ, but I need a quick way to engineer a killer product by myself on a razor thin budget. Can't start marketing until I've got the product ready, and I also don't know much about product design or what to build. How do I do it and succeed? Same chicken-and-egg problem.
You can hire a professional who is GOOD, but then you're going to pay a lot of money for it. The better quality you want, the more you will have to pay. Or you can learn to be good YOURSELF, but then you're going to spend a lot of time to do it (and possibly still a lot of money).
In marketing, you cannot usually just hire talented marketers for low dollar amounts. If a marketer is any good, he knows how to make hundreds/thousands of dollars a day marketing any number of different things. He can affiliate market something off Clickbank, or take advantage of any of a number of other affiliate channels. Or he can debut his own product and market it himself and keep 100% of the profit. Or he can work for a beefy startup with lots of equity and high upside, or if he's risk averse take a high paying salaried job at an ad firm or mega corp.
So at the lower end, you get a bunch of aspiring marketers who are either brand new or just plain suck. (a few diamonds in the rough here and there, but they're few and far between and they don't stick around in the rough for long)
Best path if you're bootstrapping and have limited funds:
1.) Do your own marketing until you find a few okay-enough channels to get business from. This part sucks at the beginning because it's slow going and most of what you try doesn't work.
2.) Look for free ways to market until you have more cash to spend on marketing. The average paid media campaign takes somewhere between $5K and $50K of experimentation before it reaches profitability. That's $5K to $50K down the drain before you're making money. Don't go for paid until you can afford to absorb the upfront cost of creating a profitable campaign.
3.) Once you have a few okay marketing channels in place (could be search traffic, a popular presence on Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter, or maybe you have a higher dollar offer you can leverage networks and do direct sales for), you'll get more money coming in
4.) Once more money is coming in, you have a few options how you spend it. Hire professionals to boost the conversions of your sales funnel; hire professionals to experiment with new or better marketing campaigns; or hire professionals to train you on these things and make you the expert
Not fun (at first, anyway) and probably not the fast/easy way you might wish you could find. But when you don't have the skill yet, and don't have investment money or high enough sales already to pay for high skill professionals, you've got to grind it out yourself for a bit.
If you'll study marketing, I suggest you pick up a copy of Jeff Walker's Product Launch Formula. It's an effective way to get an initial burst of sales and designed for people with low/no marketing experience.
- Awesome, thanks for the answer.
It is a great way to make some money for live and launch ideas.
I already read something about courses to sell (video/ebook) in the book called Launch (Jeff Walker).
I am living in a country from Latin America, so I will try something for here. Thanks again. :)
