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This summer marked four years of working full-time on my own business, which is officially longer than I was a professional programmer working for other companies 
Here are some of the things I believe the most strongly about making a living as an independent maker...
Here are some of the things I believe the most strongly about making a living as an independent maker...
The best way to build an audience is to simply be helpful on the internet. Give people a reason to pay attention to you, and keep your signal to noise ratio high. Better to tweet 4 good ideas per week than 10 useful ideas + a bunch of BS about how Starbucks screwed up your order.
Giving away your work for free is like compressing a spring that releases when you finally put something up for sale. The longer you do it, the more energy is released. Steve and I compressed the Refactoring UI spring for over two years. It made $1,000,000 in the first month.
Marketing doesn’t have to feel gross. Sharing what you’re working on, writing about the behind-the-scenes process, and documenting hard problems you’ve solved is all marketing, and people are *excited* to see that sort of stuff, not put off by it.
Marketing a product after it’s released is way harder than marketing it before you launch. You need to start marketing at the very beginning, when all of the exciting development is happening and you have lots of interesting things to share.
Ignoring people who are critical of your work is not “creating an echo chamber”, it’s building a community. You wouldn’t tell Slayer to write songs for the people who don’t like Slayer. Find the people who love what you’re doing and spend your attention on them, ignore the rest.
Analytics are overrated. I’ve never once made a decision that was informed by open rates or traffic sources. In fact Tailwind UI has no website analytics at all. Doing great work has always been a more efficient lever for me.
Build real friendships, not a “network”. People who want to help you > people you ask to help you. I’ve never had to ask anyone to help promote my work.
Work in public. Tailwind only exists because a bunch of people seemed excited about some boring CSS files I was using when I was live-streaming some work on a completely different project. I never would have seen the potential on my own.
Always think long-term. Early in my entrepreneurial career, I made a lot of short-sighted decisions about time-limited deals, and other urgency/scarcity based marketing strategies. It made me look like a scummy internet marketer and I will never do that again.
Pick a “business hero” and ask yourself “would they do this?” whenever you’re trying to make a tough decision about a marketing tactic. For me it’s Basecamp. Lots of decisions feel hard for me to make for myself, but are obvious when I ask myself “what would Basecamp do?”
“Early access” doesn’t have to be cheaper, in fact you can easily make the argument for making it more expensive. If I wanted to early access to the unmastered recordings of a new album I was looking forward to would that be cheaper?
A landing page is the last step in validating an idea, not the first. Put your ideas out there as tweets, articles, videos, conference talks, etc. first and see what people are excited about. A landing page takes you from 90% confidence in an idea to 95%, not 0% to 100%.
Compete on quality. There are tons of people writing blog posts, making screencasts, open sourcing libraries, etc., but very few people making stuff that’s really *great* from end-to-end. Forget the 80/20 rule when it comes to putting out projects. Go the full 100.
Stand out by doing the hard work that everyone else is too lazy to do. For example, @reinink was the 1000th person to write a tutorial on the Eloquent ORM, but he was the first person to bite off the really *hard* problems and do the grueling work to come up with good answers.
Learning is more important than your ego. I ask for help about dumb shit on Twitter all the time, no one thinks I’m stupid and I have grown 100x as a result. I literally started a podcast just to get people to explain things to me that I didn’t fully understand.
