We have a couple of exciting projects—Guestbook! Yay.Boo!—that we want to share with the world. But that’s a difficult task for us because, honestly, we’re terrible not good at self-promotion. We’d rather spend time making things than talking about the things we’ve made.
We’d love it if, whenever we make something good, we could just “drop” it and millions of people will instantly show up and fall in love with it. But we’re not Beyoncé. The harsh reality is that most people have never heard of us at Good Enough, and we have to work on the marketing for people to know about our work.
So, how do we tell the world about our wondrous inventions?
Disclaimer: This is not a marketing tutorial. We’re not good at this stuff! But we’re going to learn, and we’re going to try a bunch of things. I thought it would be interesting to share our process and progress. At the very least, we’ll make some hilarious blunders along the way and this should be entertaining. 😅
The Preparation
Before we tell the world about our work, we want to make sure that we’re prepared for people to show up. So we try to imagine their experience. Will they understand our work? What if they’re confused? What would we want their next steps to be?
Here’s the basic preparation:
- Making sure the website is clear.
- Make sure people can reach us and ask questions.
- Make sure there’s a way for us to see some basic traffic information, like how many people visit the site, and which links they click on. (We use Plausible, a privacy-friendly, non-creepy web analytics tool.)
We also have to consider what we want people to do when they encounter our work. For our thermal printer project, we’d like people to:
- Draw something!
- Look at some fun drawings, even if they don’t want to draw.
- Learn about the network thermal printer that James built.
- Visit the Good Enough website, sign up for our newsletter, or maybe follow us on social media.
With that, we designed a thank-you page with the following information:
[Addendum: Our guestbook was temporarily and unexpectedly the top story on Hacker News this morning (Oct 19, 2023), and we were not prepared for the sudden traffic. Oh the irony! A follow-up blog post in the works.]
The Next Installment
Here are some upcoming topics: cold emails, social media, and newsletters. Over the next couple of months, we’ll experiment with advertising and come up with other marketing bad ideas. If you’d like to keep up with our adventures in marketing, you can sign up for our newsletter.
Let us know if you have any questions, suggestions, or comments—or if you just want to say hello. We’d love to hear from you!