Last time I discussed my journey at Linvo and becoming open-source.
Today, I want to explain why I chose to work for Novu :)
Being a senior developer and a team leader in the past, I am getting a lot of job offers, and I can basically pick almost everything I want.
In my previous startups, I wrote a lot of code - I mean, come on, I am a single developer working on Linvo. A backend, frontend and a bot are running in the background. It's a constant development of over two years alone 🤩
I didn't work for any company and worked only for my startup.
I had some savings, and I looked for a cheap country/place to live so I won't waste too much on food, so I chose Georgia, Batumi - I was renting this for $250 😍
After around six months of writing code, I had a problem - The product was good (at least, I thought), but nobody was using it.
I was definitely going for the "build it, and they will come."
At that point in time, I thought about closing everything, but instead, I did something that I never thought I would do - MARKETING.
When I started, for me, marketing was ads and sleazy people.
But after doing like millions of tutorials on human psychology, I have begun to fall in love with it.
I took a break of around three months from writing code, except for bugs, and I got about ten subscriptions.
I was kind of amazed to see that nothing had changed, but the product started to make money.
At that moment, as a founder, I understood the power of marketing.
I have realized that you can give me develop almost everything from A - B, and there is a big chance I can do it, but it doesn't mean people will use it.
I love this phrase from one book that I read.
"You have never heard of a startup failing because they didn't have a product."
But I do love coding. I can sit for hours without standing writing code.
I had to find a bridge between the worlds.
When I met Tomer and Dima, the founders of Novu, They loved talking about code, but they understood the power of marketing and knew that the two things must go together in parallel.
Furthermore, Novu is an open-source product, which means everything revolves around code and architecture. My kind of thing 🥰
Instead of doing the same thing as everybody else did, they told me to come and help us boost Novu to the sky as Novu's growth manager.
And I am so happy I did. Running things like HackSquad and Novu's community heroes is just pure fun, and I enjoy every day of it.
If this post passes the 200 likes, I will make another post on what I am doing day-to-day at Novu 😛
I just love this community. Thank you for reading it.
P.S I love writing stuff on Twitter, so please come a follow me, and I will follow you back 🙏🏻
https://twitter.com/nevodavid
I have also lately start to teach How to get GitHub stars
Top comments (15)
Nicely said but:
As a former consultant I can tell you about quite a few startups that failed to have a product. Raised a ton of money on an idea and failed to deliver. Obviously a marketing person wouldn't hear about such a startup since... They failed to have a product.
But yes. You are right. People sell PLG a lot but they forget that marketing is the butter that smooths out the PLG process.
PLG need a starter :)
Nice article. I was guilty of exactly that with my last startup. We've spent years coding without any marketing.
I think it's a common problem with developers who starts their own products. We code every day for someone else and think "I could do that, but on my own". But we think only about tech and see programming as everything that is needed to build a successful startup. It is simply not true.
Good advice: "start marketing the day you start coding" - quote by Rob Walling.
I agree, Today I even suggest doing marketing before intial release :)
Hey, that's my line:
Haha no toilet breaks!
Great points.
I was just like you.
I thought I disliked marketing but what I actually dislike is sales.
Sales != Marketing
Sales is optional, marketing is not
Sales it's the last thing happening to acquire users, in some PLG platforms, sales are transparent, and you complete the sale yourself, and in other companies, there are salespeople; this is where things can get ugly.
Exactly. That's sales and it happens at the very end
Marketing on the other hand happen way before that.
If you have a good project that to few people use, you have a marketing problem.
If you don't define who your audience is and what their real needs are, you have a marketing problem.
If you attract the wrong kind of people you have a marketing problem
If you want to be everything for everyone you have a marketing problem
And your marketing problem don't be fixed by adding new features and merging even more pull requests.
💯
🤗🤩
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Oh I know this dude! So you're back from Thailand?
Sorry your company didn't succeed. Oh well, at least you learn from it! I wish you lots of success for the future!
Hi Elior! Let's go back to CodeOasis 🤣
I'm in Thailand, flying to Spain soon in 1 month :)
160 likes to go 🤩