3 genius marketing tips for software engineers

Practical ideas your team can implement right now

If you want to keep your product and company alive - you need to start thinking like a marketer.

5X more startups are shutting down in 2024 (vs 2021). As

Gergely Orosz

wrote, a ‘startup purge event’ has arrived.

Source: The Financial Times

Even if your product is technically brilliant, it won't succeed if people don't know about it or aren't engaged.

Today’s article is a guest appearance by

Tom Orbach

, who writes

Marketing Ideas

(and works as head of growth at Wiz, the startup that said no to a $23B deal from Google). The best practical tip I can give you is to just subscribe! Trust me, it will transform your career.

Today we’ll cover:

1. Practical tips your team can use right away

2. A cool marketing feature I’m working on right now

4 Practical marketing tips for Software teams

TLDR:

1. Toggles for your home page

2. The Art of ‘Visible Labor’

3. The hottest trend in 2024 - mini-games

4. Build something something totally unnecessary that makes people smile

1. Toggles for your home page

Full Marketing Ideas article here.

Homepage toggles can be a game-changer for user acquisition.

Here’s how it works: Dedicate a section on your homepage to list your features, and place a toggle next to each one. On the other side of the screen, display a product mockup that changes based on the user’s toggle selections.

By switching toggles on & off, visitors can clearly see how your product fits their specific needs — as they remove all irrelevant features and visualize their ideal version of your platform. 🖼️

Bonus side effect of toggles:

1. 🎮 Fun to play with, keeping visitors on your site longer

2. 📈 Longer visits = better SEO = more organic traffic

Source: BetterMode’s homepage (but the actual source is Tom’s article)

Instead of having UI feature toggles only for your real app (which is a great idea by itself!), let potential customers play with your homepage.

2. The Art of ‘Visible Labor’

Showing what your product is doing “behind the scenes” → will satisfy people. Humans LOVE seeing how hard people or machines work for them. They will overvalue your product thanks to it.

Update your users on what is happening after they buy your product. Domino’s Pizza’s order tracker is the best example of operational transparency:

Another option, is to add ‘fake friction’.

When I led growth marketing at the startup Mine, we had a nice feature showing our customers ultra-specific info about their incoming privacy requests. We called it ‘evidence’.

However, data showed that people skip the evidence and never use it. Some even asked us via the support team if such evidence existed.

So we added some artificial friction and hid the evidence behind a button. 🙈 Users had to click “Search for evidence” to see it. We even implemented a fake progress bar that took 3-4 seconds to complete.

It was technically completely unnecessary, but it worked! People clicked it like crazy and used the evidence drastically more because of that little change.

We added a fake button for searching for evidence (even though no search was needed)

The article blew my mind, I highly suggest reading the full one. Using this approach you can completely transform the experience of slow-loading parts! Instead of a boring loader, think about how you can spice it up.

Note: users are not stupid, if you are not careful, it can have the opposite effect. Recently my bank introduced a new version of the ‘AI-assistant’. Every response takes ~10 seconds, and during that time I see:

‘Ella is initializing… Ella is calculating… Ella is analyzing…’ in an endless loop. The words don’t make sense, the timing doesn’t make sense - DON’T be my bank 😅

3. The hottest trend in 2024 - mini-games

This one is the most complex to implement, but my favorite. In the article, Tom shares how to create simple and viral mini-games.

Even if you do a very simple and ‘lean’ game, if it’s specific to your customers and niche it can go a long way.

I wanted to check how well he implemented it in his own company (Wiz), so I went ahead and tried to play it (link here). Very similar to the Chrome Dinosaur game, but instead you need to collect only real cloud services, and escape fake ones (like Azure Infinity Stone 😂).

I found a simple ‘cheat’ - just don’t collect any services, which gave me a score for the fake ones I missed. This sparks a curious thought about using the cloud 😂

Once I reached over 500 (the goal), I was told I was qualified for some prize, and it offered a 1:1 demo. I’m definitely not Wiz’s ideal customer (I work at a small startup who don’t have any cyber products yet), but the brand will stay strong in my mind after playing this game.

I’ll probably recommend it to some friends as a funny idea, and maybe one of THEM will be a customer. That’s the amazing benefit of doing things people will talk about.

4. Make people smile

Jaryd Hermann

shared this great tip in his article:

Try to build something totally unnecessary into your product that does nothing but make someone using your product smile.

It could be an animation or some variable reward. I left my first Amazon review yesterday and I saw a little thing saying “Leave 5 more reviews and we’ll tell you a joke”. It's so random, but fun and unique.

I wonder if the joke will be good?

My idea for a marketing feature

After reading Tom’s articles for a year, I wanted to do something in my startup too.

I work as a Director of Engineering in Taranis, an AgTech (Agriculture Technology) company. We fly drones over fields, analyze the images with AI, and provide insights to growers.

One of our challenges is that our product is used mostly during the growing season (April-August). When the time to renew comes, months have passed since the last usage, and this can hurt retention.

I came up with a simple idea: “A drone pilot photo competition”. I thought to myself: “If the drone pilots are already in the field, maybe instead of only ‘practical’ images, they can also take some breathtaking ones of whole fields?”

Then, we could use the photos! My thought is to print the best 20-30 ones on a canvas and send them to our customers during the off-season. Farmers are attached to their land, so if the images are truly amazing, they might hang them on the wall, having a constant reminder about Taranis.

We got tens of amazing images, and right now our employees are voting on the winning one, which will get that pilot a prize!

An example image, chosen because of privacy reasons

It may seem like my idea was totally ‘out of my responsibility area’. But that’s just a PoC, done with Google Drive and manual work.

Since uploading images is under my group's domain, if this PoC proves a success, it may become an official part of our product.

What I enjoyed reading this week

1. An Underrated Growth Lever: Don’t Delegate to Your Users by

   Aakash Gupta

2. First Year as a Solopreneur. Here's what I did: by

   Orel Zilberman

3. My Annual Birthday Check-In: 11 Lessons From 33 Years on This Planet by

   Polina Pompliano