I Hate Marketing My Business — Here’s How I Motivate Myself to Do It Anyway
Do yourself a favor and just get started ASAP
When it comes to building my business, I’m passionate about a lot of things. I’m passionate about building a user experience that makes creating branding basics a breeze. I’m passionate about using my graphic design skills to create new fonts and color variations that will inspire others when designing their logos. Heck, I’m even passionate about fixing bugs to make my product work better.
What I’m not so passionate about is marketing my business.
I know I’m not alone in this sentiment. Whether it’s SaaS entrepreneurs like me who love refining their product or creators who want to focus on producing content, many solopreneurs struggle to determine how best to market their work and motivate themselves to spend time on it.
Unfortunately, no company will succeed without marketing, and a lot of it. The common rule of thumb is that 80% of building a business is marketing it, and I’d argue that’s even higher when you’re just getting started. Solidifying product-market fit early on is so crucial that some schools of thought argue that you shouldn’t build or create anything until you’ve started to market your idea and ensured it has plenty of interested buyers.
Moreover, marketing your business when you don’t have a marketing background is incredibly overwhelming. There are so many channels to master, so many potential strategies to pursue. Instead of figuring out where to get started, it feels so much easier to revert back to your area of expertise, whether that’s creating content, designing product features, or perfecting the back end of your site. After all, that’s your real job, right?
My first piece of advice is to shift your mindset: Your real job as a founder is to make sure your business succeeds, and that means marketing it. Most of the time, my job as a product-focused founder is to not work on my product at all.
Next, you can try some of these simple strategies that have helped me ensure I’m dedicating enough time and energy to marketing. All of them are incredibly easy to implement, and they’ve made a measurable impact on how much I’m sharing my business with the world — and, in turn, on my businesses’ success.
1. Create Buckets for Each Task
I’m sure you’ve heard the advice before to put time on your calendar for the tasks you don’t want to do. As simple as it is, blocking a significant chunk of my workday specifically for various marketing tasks — like LinkedIn or Twitter outreach, answering customer questions on AppSumo, or working on the long path of SEO — has worked as a forcing function for me to spend time on them.
It’s helped even more to give myself buckets of space for what I really want to be focusing on — building the product. Yes, this means time on the calendar: knowing that I get an hour to work on product improvements after my four-hour marketing sprint is a nice little carrot to get me through it.
But it also means creating space to stash all the product inspiration and ideas that pop up throughout the day, so that I don’t get distracted by them. This is kind of like the advice for people with insomnia to keep a notebook by your bed to jot down any thoughts that are keeping you awake. My version is having a bunch of different folders on my desktop for collecting fonts I love, color palette inspiration, and other ideas for my product. It helps me stay focused on marketing in the moment because I know these thoughts aren’t going to get lost. Then, when I do have limited time to work on product, I can get more done, faster, because I don’t have to do the research — I’ve been collecting it over time.
2. Find Multiple Systems of Accountability
Accountability is often critical in getting yourself to do something you don’t want to. For me, it’s been important to build multiple streams of accountability — big and small — to help me stay dedicated to all the different marketing tasks on my list.
On the bigger end of the spectrum, joining an accountability group has been so valuable. I’m part of one called SaaS Camp, which is a coaching program that teaches you sales outreach. Each week, we meet to share the marketing tasks we achieved and the results we saw from them. Obviously, this incentivizes me to do enough every week that I won’t be embarrassed to tell others what I achieved. But hearing about what’s working (or not) for other people gives me benchmarks for my own marketing results and plenty of new ideas for strategies to try.
… say, I want to DM 50 people on Twitter about my product — I get that many Q-tips and place them in one pen holder on my desk.
But even the best accountability group can’t be looking over your shoulder every moment of the day. That’s where I rely on a trick a friend taught me, that’s so simple it shouldn’t work (but it does). When I have a long list of marketing tasks to do — say, I want to DM 50 people on Twitter about my product — I get that many Q-tips and place them in one pen holder on my desk. Then, as I complete each task, I move one Q-tip to an empty pen holder next to it. You could use any item that you have a lot of around the house (toothpicks, M&Ms, etc.), but the idea is this: When you have such a high number of small tasks to do, it helps to physically see yourself making progress.
3. Stay Close to Your Feedback Loops
Paying attention to the results of your marketing efforts is obviously important for understanding which strategies are best serving you. Especially as a founder who hasn’t gone through actual go-to-market experience many times, every strategy I try is somewhat of an experiment. I need to understand how each trial is performing so I know how to most efficiently allocate my limited time.
For instance, I found that Google and Facebook ads took me too much time and money to get working from an ROI standpoint — I couldn’t find an easy win doing it by myself, so I put that strategy on hold. Alternatively, LinkedIn outreach has proven incredibly valuable to me. Connecting with potential customers one-on-one may seem inefficient, but I’ve found it’s the fastest way to understand their pain points, figure out my messaging, and find product market fit.
Staying close to the data has a second benefit, too. Seeing the positive results of a task you don’t love doing always makes it easier to keep doing that task. (See: Why every exercise program in the world has you track progress.)
When it comes to marketing, an uptick in customers and sales is obviously the goal, and I’ve found it helpful to check in with those numbers and celebrate gains at the end of every month. I like to share these updates publicly for yet another level of accountability.
But I also think it’s motivating to find more immediate feedback loops. For me, more marketing equals more customers, which leads to more customer feedback. As a product-focused founder, that feedback is golden. The positive reviews make me proud that what I’m building is actually helping people, and the critical ones give me ideas for product updates that can feed back into improving my business.
Ultimately, the best advice I can give a solo founder who’s wary of diving into marketing is this: Do yourself a favor and just get started ASAP. The sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll learn by doing, reducing some of the anxiety and overwhelm that can come with marketing. The sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll find the habits and wins that will motivate you to keep going. And, the sooner you get started, the sooner you’ll gain enough customers that you can get back to working on what you love the most.
