🗞 What's New: The perfect building to marketing ratio

As a founder, should you spend more time on building or marketing?

• Ah, the age old question: What's the perfect building to marketing ratio? Below, we dive into various things to consider when trying to strike this balance, including company stage, validation status, and more.
• Hiring and motivating a remote team can be difficult. These tips can help you hire effectively, using a combination of interviews and assignments, and build a healthy, fun remote work culture.
• Founder Ryan Caldwell abandoned his project just 36 hours after launch, after receiving some pretty harsh feedback. Here, he breaks down exactly what happened, and why he considers the entire experience a win!

Want to share something with nearly 115,000 indie hackers? Submit a section for us to include in a future newsletter. —Channing

⚖️ The Perfect Building to Marketing Ratio

by James Fleischmann

Many indie hackers prefer building over marketing, but we all understand that marketing is necessary! So, how much marketing is the right amount?

Read on for more about hitting the perfect building to marketing ratio.

Methods for splitting building and marketing

Here are a few approaches from founders!

- Yongfook's 50:50 weeks:

Jon Yongfook alternates weeks; one week of coding, one week of marketing, and so on. He likes this approach so much that he created a free tool for it. As he tells it, his 50:50 split is simple and realistic, and it creates a good flow. This is due, in part, to the fact that coding gives you plenty to talk about.

Since the 50:50 split is week by week, context-switching is kept to a minimum. It’s astonishing how much time we can waste when switching between tasks, particularly if those tasks are very different from each other.

Interestingly, Jon doesn't believe that this split should change according to your product’s maturity, even if you're pre-launch.

- Dorsey's daily themes:

For Jack Dorsey, every day of the week has a different theme. Here's what he had to say about it:

More building

Focusing only on building can work for certain products. Kyle Nolan says:

I have a bad habit of spending 99% of my time building new features, 0.9% of my time worrying about the fact that I'm not doing marketing, and 0.1% of the time actually doing marketing.

After validating the idea with version 1.0, the main thrust of my efforts has simply been to make the product so dang good that, eventually, people in this space can't help but take notice. Maybe that's finally working a little bit.

More marketing

Some folks are focusing almost completely on marketing. (Ironically, their comments are less verbose!) Sebastian Hovv says:

99% on marketing.

Shridur says:

Being a techie, I have to be careful with this. If I am not, I end up doing 100% development. Currently, I am 100% marketing!

Daily splits

You can, of course, split up your hours in whichever way works best. Building in the mornings and marketing in the afternoons is a common strategy. The benefit is that you can stay on top of everything each day.

The drawback is that this requires a lot of context-switching, which is inefficient. Also, since you don't get much time for each task, you're probably going to change directions before you've even finished what you're working on.

Shooting from the hip

Lots of folks just work on whatever is most urgent in the moment. If that’s your preference, here's how to decide what to work on!

The stage-by-stage approach

Then, there's the balanced, flexible approach of shifting your focus according to your product's status. It's worth noting that this is not the same as shooting from the hip. Here, you plan what you’ll do at different stages in the product lifecycle, or at certain product milestones.

The 100:100 approach

A lot of indie hackers are solo founders, but there's something to be said for having a cofounder, particularly one with a different skillset and mentality than you have.

If you're going the cofounder route and you're a strong builder, partner with a strong marketer, and vice versa.

This type of partnership is a really solid approach that allows you to focus on both simultaneously, and move twice as fast.

Wrapping up

Of course, the options are pretty much endless. The way you split building and marketing will ultimately depend on a lot of different factors. I've already mentioned that the stage in the product lifecycle is one. A few others that I saw mentioned include project complexity, stage of validation, and current audience.

Personally, I'd go with something like:

• Pre-launch: 90% building, 10% marketing (probably building in public).
• Launch: 100% marketing.
• Post-launch: 80% marketing, 20% building.
• Stable growth: 50% marketing, 50% building.

What's your split? Share your experience and helpful tips below!

Discuss this story.

📰 In the News

from the Growth Trends newsletter by Darko

🔔 Instagram has launched Reminder Ads.

🔎 Here's how six content teams measure their work.

🎓 Shopify certifications can help you gain new skills.

💻 Incorporating "the best" into your title tag may increase organic traffic.

👶 Who's responsible for how social media affects young people?

Check out Growth Trends for more curated news items focused on user acquisition and new product ideas.

🌎 Remote Team Culture and Hiring

from the Hustle Newsletter by Shân Osborn

The Signal: Interviews suck, for all parties involved. But luckily, there's a better hiring process: Setting assignments.

Seeing a candidate in action through assignment-led hiring often results in better hires, and ones that may have otherwise been overlooked. Here's how to hire using assignments!

Setting assignments

Here's how to set effective assignments:

1. Define exactly what you need a person in the position to do, and design assignments to test these skills. If you don't get this part right, you're dead in the water.

Also:

• Be clear on what the end goal is.
• Provide digestible steps for candidates to follow.

2. Keep them short: Assignments should be able to be completed in 2-3 hours. If you feel that longer assignments are necessary, consider reimbursing candidates for their time.

3. Include the culture fit: Obviously, assignments don't capture someone's ability to fit in with the rest of the team. To work around this, you could:

• Have a casual chat to weed out ill-fitting candidates before giving them assignments.
• Hire potential employees as contractors for a small project that is low risk for both parties.
• Add behavioral interview questions, and ensure that the assignment environment closely models the work environment.

How to keep your remote team engaged

Great, you've got your team now! But how do you foster a great culture, especially as more people move to remote work settings?

Kendall Bachman, who helps to run six remote companies, dropped some tips:

• Set core hours when your entire team is at their desks (i.e. five hours in the middle of the day).
• Trust. Don't micromanage.

*Source: Trends Facebook Group

• Set your order of operations for communication (i.e., 48 hour turnaround on email, X hours on Slack, two on text, etc.).
• Gift culture. Give everyone ~$200 per quarter to buy a coworker something nice. We wrote more on the power of gifting here.
• Celebrate people publicly. Whether it's a birthday, contribution, promotion, etc., shout them out on Slack or your chosen platform.

How to run a successful offsite

Consider getting the entire remote team together for an offsite. Rory Tyer, a professional facilitator, breaks it down:

• Define the goal: This needs to be something that people genuinely care about. Get input from the group, then work backwards. Take place, timing, size, personalities, etc. into account.
• Eliminate most (or all) pure information sharing during the event. This can be done asynchronously beforehand, protecting event time for more meaningful activities.
• Focus on relationships. Build trust with informal dinners by adding a touch of formality: Ask a discussion question, then incorporate playful activities that can be debriefed later.

*Check out the Facebook post for more tips!

How do you create a healthy remote work culture? Share below!

Subscribe to the Hustle Newsletter for more.

🌐 Best Around the Web: Posts Submitted to Indie Hackers This Week

🛠 Hacking Reddit: Self-promoting without getting banned. Posted by Nithin Jawahar.

👋 Say goodbye to fake users! Posted by Erdi Buğur.

📚 Here's how much it costs to unschool my five kids. Posted by Rosie Sherry.

🤔 To quit or not to quit? Posted by Ash Clamp.

📬 Distribution is greater than marketing. Posted by Sneha Saigal.

📈 Three product growth finds from the past week. Posted by Ben Katz.

Want a shout-out in next week's Best of Indie Hackers? Submit an article or link post on Indie Hackers whenever you come across something you think other indie hackers will enjoy.

🚪 Ryan Caldwell Shut Down His Project 36 Hours In

by Ryan Caldwell

Hi, indie hackers! I'm Ryan Caldwell, and on March 18, I posted about launching my new project, RPG Campaign Starter. 36 hours later, I shut down the website.

Here's what happened!

The product

RPG Campaign Starter was the first full-fledged product that I released; it even accepted payments! This felt great to me, even though it was just a rough MVP. I was excited to get some users and build something they'd love!

After announcing the launch on Twitter, I headed over to Reddit. I posted in subreddits that I thought would be interested in the free option that I was offering to new users. I got a tiny bit of traction in a small subreddit, leading to 12 users in 24 hours. I wanted to let the post sit for a few hours, then come back and check out the feedback.

I got some feedback, alright.

The feedback

I definitely wouldn't call the feedback "negative," but it was certainly a reality check. I built a product with a focus on RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons, Pathfinder, Starfinder, etc., but I don't actually play any of them myself. I wouldn't even call myself interested in them. I built the project to solve a problem that my brother was experiencing, then I proceeded to do exactly 30 minutes of validation on the idea before getting to work.

Based on that feedback, I realized that I made a pretty fundamental error: Most of the content most similar to my product in this community was either completely free, or way more fleshed out than what I was offering. People were writing content every day, then posting it to Reddit free of charge.

The decision

The feedback that I received from my target niche called out the fact that my product wasn't providing anything of value that wasn't already available for free, or dirt cheap.

Given that feedback, I decided to shut the website down. Here are some important learnings that I'm taking from this project:

• Be interested in the community that you're offering the product to. I was more interested in the technology, and the feeling of solving a problem, than actually solving a problem. I got dopamine hits from the wrong source.
• Research existing products in the community before deciding to pursue an idea. The questions that I was unable to answer were: Are people willing to pay for products like this at all? What paid products already exist in this space?
• If your project is clearly not fit for a given community, it's okay to abandon it.

At the end of the day, I'll still chalk this experience up as a win. I learned how to integrate payments into a SaaS offering, I tried marketing a product for the first time, and I learned what I can improve upon for the next project.

Until then, I'm looking for problems to solve in the communities that I'm interested in. This is way easier said than done, but I'm hopeful that my next project is a bit more successful than RPG Campaign Starter.

On to the next thing!

Discuss this story.

🐦 The Tweetmaster's Pick

by Tweetmaster Flex

I post the tweets indie hackers share the most. Here's today's pick:

🏁 Enjoy This Newsletter?

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Special thanks to Jay Avery for editing this issue, to Gabriella Federico for the illustrations, and to James Fleischmann, Darko, Shân Osborn, and Ryan Caldwell for contributing posts. —Channing