Marketing for engineers who hate marketing

You do not have to become a different person to get customers. You just have to be findable and clear.

There's a kind of engineer-founder who treats marketing as a moral failing. They want the product to speak for itself, which is a lovely sentiment that has bankrupted a thousand startups.

The reframe that works: marketing is documentation. It's the docs your future customer reads before they know they're your customer. Tutorials, comparison pages, write-ups of bugs you fixed — none of these are 'marketing' in the cringe sense, but they all do the job.

The second reframe: distribution is a feature. Shipping a thing nobody finds is the same as not shipping it. Set aside one afternoon per release to write the announcement properly. Post it where your users actually read.

You don't have to learn to be loud. You just have to stop being invisible.