marketing but good-noncoercive tho
- the canonical intro by Rob Hardy
- Rob clearly sees how it's just one way into the whole meta-protocol / cultural platform puzzle
- > find the people for whom them paying you money for your offering is a win-win, and discover together that that is the case
7 linked references
April 4th, 2023
notes on Books/The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker › > This modesty is related to a desire not to seem like yo… › but then I'm thinking about MARKETING
- specifically marketing but good-noncoercive tho
November 20th, 2022
- scraps from marketing but good-noncoercive tho / marketing with the garage door up blog post
- way to bring my relationship to marketing into the open—to make it really obvious that however I'm approaching marketing & business growth can't involve anything that compromises my principles and instead
- What my marketing strategy has been
- A lot of it has been basically hoping that Complice will somehow get picked up by someone with a really popular productivity blog, they'll write about using it, and then that'll bring in a huge influx of new people without me having to do anything. That may yet happen, but I'm done banking on it.
- Prior to that, one of the main elements of my growth strategy was using my strengths as a coder and an interface designer, and building three different integrations into Complice:
- The Beeminder integration allows people to commit to using Complice regularly, and it also allows using Beeminder through the Complice app, easily tracking anything that you can set intentions for, tracking numbers and time, tracking reviews, and so on. I'm friends with the Beeminder folks, and I've written a few blog posts for them, which have also brought in people. A lot of the most consistent Complice users came from Beeminder, which is no surprise given that Beeminder is about consistency!
- The WorkFlowy integration allows people to do project breakdowns or weekly planning outside of Complice, somewhere where it can safely go stale without building up inside Complice. I built this in part for a friend and myself, but many users have come to use it as their primary workflow for setting intentions. I hoped to get a bit of publicity out of it too but that didn't really happen... but there've only been a handful of people who've arrived this way, mostly via the userstyle I wrote to make it prettier.
- The Less Wrong Study Hall was an online chatroom where people did pomodoros together. I built a wrapper for the video chatroom that kept track of the timer and what actions people were working on, and then eventually built my own video system to replace the flash-based applet. This meant that other groups could now create their own video coworking rooms. Last summer I added some new features, including the option of having audio during breaks or all the time.
- Beyond that, most Complice users came from people clicking through from my blog or from word of mouth, either direct or via others' blog posts. I haven't really had many other sources.
- I periodically tried doing things like recording podcasts where I mentioned it, or pitching my writing to various outlets, and those might have worked if I'd had hits at enough scale, but the podcasts had limited reach and the writing never really got picked up anywhere. I may yet do more of this.
- other stuff
- , particularly one like Complice, while being
- < something around struggles with motivation that are more related to feedback loops & efficacy >
- There are a lot of other resistances that I've found when I investigated. I'm planning to write another post shortly exploring these and how I've integrated them.
- I'm also planning to write another post exploring what my new strategy is going to be.
- thoughts November 20th, 2022
- #meta okay, going meta for a bit, what's going on with this post?
- I actually feel like I've written a pretty good collection of thoughts on why/how writing about marketing strategy in public can be in service of doing marketing but good-noncoercive tho
- I'm dangerously close to the post turning back into me opining about a topic rather than just sharing my own process
- which I guess is also fine
- I'm also somewhat close to having the whole post fall apart due to not knowing what it wants to be
- I have other posts I want to write on related topics:
- what my blocks have been towards doing marketing
- sketch of my marketing strategy as of Nov 2022
- at some point maybe I need to write about the gym membership thing, in order to really come into alignment
- ...I initially thought I was going to include those in the first one
- but I feel like they'll be richer if I do them separately
- so what does this first one want to be?
- I guess it wants to be essentially an intro to the series.
- the series will include these 2 related posts, and potentially lots of future posts
- so it's kind of a question of what needs editing down, or whether something wants to be in a different order
- I think I want to drop the sequel-ish title
- nobody will get it
- nobody will even remember it had that title by the time they get to the other one
- it's a decent place to start but idk if I even need to mention the older post
- I guess that's a good way to moderate expectations maybe
- okay, so one thing I could actually do is split the 2 sections of this post as WELL
- that's not a crazy idea, hmm
- the first one now stands alone pretty well. it's just like "I have this goal"
- the 2nd is... nah, I think it wants to be part of this. because it's not just the stating the goal, but WHY I'm stating the goal, that's what I'm trying to say here
- thoughts November 26th, 2022
- okay, 3h showtime. 3h should be enough to get a bunch of stuff laid out here, especially since I basically already have an outline
- and I want to be 100% focused that entire time on just things that move towards getting this published
- basically I am setting the intention to let this go live in 3h whatever state it's in (as a showtime should!) unless there's something like an emergency that keeps me from working on it
- more stuff from 2nd post resistances to growing Intend
- Broadly my resistance can divided into two categories:
- resistance to making more money
- resistance to doing marketing
- There was a small amount of resistance here that was simply about having more money and the idea that that might cause people to treat me differently in some way I wouldn't like (like try to get my money). But overall I like being generous and I expect that if I suddenly had a bunch of people trying to get me to contribute to their things, I'd do a good job of figuring out how to manage that.
- Most of my money resistance was a lot weirder. As far as I could tell, if I imagined Complice's revenue increasing substantially without me doing anything in particular (eg it gets picked up by a huge blogger or podcaster) then that seemed good... the resistance was more to the idea that I would have a good enough grip on the relevant levers that I'd be able to intentionally make the number go up. Weird.
- Marketing is only one thing to call this. This was resistance to taking intentional actions towards growing my business by getting more people in the front door. (Growing the business by making a new integration with another app like Beeminder or whatever has been comparatively easy for me.)
- Learned Helplessness
- Part of what has discouraged me from working more on growth is how aware I am of various ways in which the product could be improved, and as a one-man company (approximately) I've sometimes felt like maybe I need to work on those first. But there are lots of people who love the app as it is, and fewer than 15k who've ever tried it, so clearly there's lots of room for finding and onboarding more customers without major changes to the system.
- okay it's time for a third blog post
- but I only have a few minutes to schedule it
- I'm going to just make SOMETHING
- okay, it's called "my current rough plan for growing Complice"
- I guess an additional post could be something more about my existing userbase:
- or a more general situational assessment, that would also include stuff
November 15th, 2022
- I want to have a positive return on every bid for your attention I make
- for everything that I'm demanding, I'm already providing the value
- it's not about coercion it's about expected value
- strategy:
- provide value to begin with that is relevant to your other offerings
- then have easy ways to get more offerings
- M > huh, and like, what if I make a bunch of videos & articles about how to implement Complice on paper or in text files... as if it didn't even exist as software!
- principles
- no bombardment
- no hurrying
- for attention, go by what a coherent agent would want
- no exploiting loss & regret aversion (fake scarcity)
- transparent reflective equilibrium
- imagine a scenario where you're marketing to X and if X knew everything that was going through your head, they'd be okay with it
- I exist in a state of transparent reflective equilibrium with all the people that I'm trying to reach out to
- kinda like open source
- skill framing: "one challenge you're not prepared for"
- not "one shortcoming you have"
November 11th, 2022
- "gentle marketing" or "authentic marketing"
- George Kao has a bunch of courses on "authentic business" etc
- Marketing for Hippies
- Tad Hargrave
- (kinda woke)