Ask HN: How do you learn marketing as a developer? It's so different from coding

What are you trying to do?

In general, marketing is not a thing that you can do alone. There are, I think, four primary facets:

1. Making sure that your web presence is optimized for search, AI, etc. This is not easy and best practices are constantly evolving. Just hire RankScience or a similar firm and learn from them. Mistakes here can be extremely costly, so you'll want to make sure you're properly set up.

2. Getting good press, interviews, etc. You'll want to learn how to write a press release (there's a proper format) and have them placed. You'll also want to do outreach to publications and venues that you think are favorable or a good fit. Either buy a subscription and use Opus 4.5 for planning and editing and Kimi-K2 for writing -- or just hire a firm to take care of it and learn from them. This is less expensive than you think. (My firm pays something like $500/month for PR services.)

3. Social media and Youtube. You may not need this, and in any case should not pay for social media services. (Always unreasonably expensive, sometimes sleazy.) Just do your own thing, post cool videos if you've got 'em, comment on other people's stuff, and answer questions. Do not use Reddit. I've never seen a company use Reddit and not live to regret it.

4. Advertising. Again, you may not need this. Modern web advertising can get very expensive, very quickly -- it's practically designed to spin out of control. My recommendation would be to figure out the prior items before considering any campaigns.

I founded and continue to run one of the largest digital agencies in the world, Coalition Technologies. I also am a self taught programmer.

I learned marketing when I started my first business, mowing lawns. I went door to door knocking and asking to mow people's lawns. Door to door sales is very hard, but you learn a lot about your customers fast.

I majored in business and my marketing classes there were a waste of time, taught by people who had never actually successfully marketed anything.

I learned a ton working at my first agency, doing web development and SEO and PPC.

I probably learned the most launching my own little e-commerce websites, including one selling digital auto gauges and another gathering mortgage leads for a buddy I partnered with.

As a developer who faced the same challenge before, I would say it is better to start with "what do you want to achieve?"

The word "Marketing" is like a non-techie saying, "I want to be a developer."

- Which type of development? Websites? Apps? Systems?

- Which programming language?

- Which cloud/no cloud to release?

If you want organic traffic, then focus on and learn SEO.

If you want to spend money, learn ads.

If you want to build a personal brand, learn social media (focus on one platform).

Pick a goal, find how you can achieve it, make a plan, and execute.

As a developer, start by learning marketing the same way you learned coding—through fundamentals, practice, and iteration. Focus on areas that align with tech, like SEO, product positioning, analytics, and user behavior. Build small projects, test messaging, and learn from real feedback just like debugging code.