Finally Investing in Marketing

I have a confession: I've been avoiding marketing.

Not on purpose, really. It's more like whenever I have a choice between writing code and writing copy, I pick code. Every single time.

Need to build a new feature? On it. Need to write a blog post about that feature? Suddenly I have seventeen other things to do.

This is a problem.

Comfort zone

Here's the thing about being a technical founder: you can always justify hiding in the codebase.

"The product needs to be better before I market it." "Let me just fix this one thing first." "Marketing can wait until I have more features."

I tell myself these stories all the time. They're mostly nonsense.

The product is good. Customers love it. I've had paying users for almost two years now. At some point, "just making it better" becomes an excuse to avoid the uncomfortable work of telling people about it.

I've known this for a while. But knowing something and actually doing something about it are two different things.

What changed

I got tired of my own excuses.

I looked at the marketing site recently and realized it hadn't been meaningfully updated in months. Meanwhile, I'd shipped dozens of features, improvements, and fixes that nobody outside my existing users knew about.

That's backwards.

So I spent the last few weeks doing something I'd been putting off: actually investing in the marketing side of Glitter.

New blog categories. More content. Better SEO. A search function that actually works. Feature pages that explain what we do. The kind of stuff I should have been doing all along.

Building in public (for real this time)

I've always believed in transparency. I talk openly about the struggles of running a startup, my mistakes at Simpo, the challenges of delegation. That's what this whole Building Glitter series is about.

But I realized I wasn't being transparent about the product itself.

So I built something: a product updates page.

It's exactly what it sounds like. Every feature, improvement, and milestone I've shipped since I wrote the first line of code in September 2023. All of it, organized by date, filterable by product (web, desktop app, browser extension, company news).

You can see when I launched the Windows app. When I added multi-language support. When I hit Product Hunt. When the company got SOC 2 certified. All of it.

I built it partly for customers, so they can see what's new. But I also built it for myself. Scrolling through two years of updates is a good reminder that I've actually shipped a lot.

When you're heads down building every day, it's easy to lose track of how far you've come.

The uncomfortable truth

Marketing feels harder than development to me. I think that's exactly why I avoid it.

Code has clear feedback loops. It works or it doesn't. You can measure progress. There's a satisfaction in solving technical problems that I just don't get from writing landing pages.

Marketing is messier. You write something, put it out there, and... maybe it works? Maybe it doesn't? The feedback takes longer and it's harder to read. It requires a different kind of patience.

That discomfort is probably a sign I need to do more of it, not less.

What's next

I'm not going to pretend I've suddenly become a marketing person. I'll still spend most of my time building.

But I'm trying to be more intentional about balance. Ship a feature, then actually tell people about it. Code in the morning, content in the afternoon. Something like that.

We'll see how it goes. I'm still figuring this out.

If you want to follow along with what I'm building, check out the updates page. And if you're a founder who struggles with the marketing side of things too, you're not alone.

This is part of my ongoing series about building Glitter AI. I write about the real challenges of running a startup, the lessons I'm learning, and the mistakes I'm making along the way. If that sounds interesting, there's more in the Building Glitter section.