From hacker to marketers: What you can learn in a year of work

Last Friday was exactly one year since I abandoned my eight-year career as a developer and system administrator in order to engage in marketing. At school and college, I myself closed all expenses due to my knowledge of technology, which for the most part was related to the Internet.

To do this, nothing special was required of me: prepare a mailing list or conduct an interview. Such skills are one percent of the skills of a specialist engaged in marketing and working with a large audience. This is what I decided to understand.
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During my time at Boxee, I decided that I wanted to lead my own startup. Like many other people who are building a dangerous, but definitely interesting career in this field, I held back my entrepreneurial ambitions for a long time, but after working for a chief programmer, I realized that I could make a great contribution by bringing my vision and culture to the workflow of a new company.

The fact that I absolutely did not have any knowledge in the field of sales and marketing, made me immediately begin to study this subject - the management of a company with zero skills in this area would be just an irresponsible step on my part. To start, I joined the Twilio team as an IT evangelist, which allowed me to work with one of the best marketers in the country. I continued to write code, but at the same time I was engaged in the preparation of presentations. I was sure that working side by side with experts in this field would help me develop my managerial skills.

After working for a year in this position, I figured out the "kitchen" of what is happening in the field of marketing and made a couple of conclusions for myself:

Marketing is a damn hard job.

Like many people who are engaged in creative activities, I have deeply rooted dislike for marketing. I thought that under the phrase “soft skills” there was a fairly simple job: without apocalyptic deadlines or financial responsibility for the “curve” of the project. I did not remember that the marketer was sitting next to me when I needed to backup the server or “pick up” the combat database. In a word, not work, but sitting on pants.

I quickly realized that this point of view is reminiscent of the assumption that web development is not particularly difficult if you do it on something like Squarespace . Of course, my attitude shaped bad marketing: there are as many bad marketers as there are bad developers.

As it turned out, good marketers are rarely found, and they are much more difficult to find, like good programmers - the work of such people is very difficult to notice. Good marketing, like good code, are products that need to be invested in: spend hours, work on details and use your work experience wisely.

Data wins in controversy

When my colleagues and I discuss some part of the code or a specific question of architecture, we often argue and quarrel without giving any arguments supported by data. In such situations, I prefer to test the hypotheses and provide a comparison of the results, making this or that decision much more obvious.

Sometimes I’m right, sometimes I’m not. The practice of testing hypotheses to test my instincts is my daily way of working as an IT evangelist. As it turned out, such practices are used by all experienced marketers. “Everything is tied to numbers,” people will tell me, as if leading up to the inevitable waste of time on working with tables and formulas. And then they will tell me that any formula can be adjusted to suit the desired outcome of the experiment, well, they will suggest not to load developers with examples, because they have enough ordinary documentation to figure everything out.

In practice, this approach does not work. Marketing data clearly shows the "vitality" of a particular solution, especially when work is being done on the Internet, and it does not take much effort to find the necessary information. People with technical education stand out when performing such tasks and achieve impressive results using their skills and abilities.

Planning - basic skill

In the first months of work as an IT evangelist, planning meetings was the most serious challenge for me. When I was developing, I did not even think about something like that. Usually, everyone waited for me to finish my work - people came to me themselves. In marketing, you need to act differently - to manage external forces and form the right impression, explaining your point of view to the right people at the right time. No one will wait until I finish developing the authorization mechanism or deal with bugs.

In Twilio, I had to run back and forth around Manhattan every day. The number of contacts in the notebook has increased 2 or 3 times. I have never been good at planning meetings, but when it became a vital task, I realized that I absolutely did not understand this.



Communication is the key to success

I do not consider myself a charismatic and sociable person. Despite the fact that I played in a group and conducted a decent amount of technical presentations, I didn’t feel craving for such things, and I had to work a lot on myself. In IT evangelism, these skills are key, and to my satisfaction, this is what you start to do better by constantly practicing. There are no secrets here. Ask the people what they work on, communicate as equals and be yourself.

It is difficult, as well as studying Erlang, and being mistaken, you will feel similar feeling of discontent with yourself. In the "pumping" of these skills you will only practice and perseverance.

You can influence a lot.

For a long time I believed that in order to somehow change the state of affairs, a text editor would be enough for me. With it, I can significantly affect the lives of people by developing good software. I still think that developers are the engine of any startup, but the rest of the team is not sitting still.

At one of the SXSW festivals, I met a programmer from Los Angeles named Wil. He appreciated my Twilio T-shirt and told me that he was working on an application that allows people to create disposable phone numbers to use to create Craiglist posts. His story made me want to know about the release date of the project and hurry a colleague - I really thought that such a project would be useful to a significant number of Craiglist users.

A few months later, the Wil's team released the app and announced it on HackerNews. The demand for the app was incredible, and just a couple of days after launch, it helped the guy from Portland catch the thief who stole his bike.

After launch, I received thanks from Wil for pushing him in the right direction. The right information submitted at the right time can cheer you up and encourage the team to complete a great project. A few words of support at the right time helped the team create something that they are rightly proud of and give people the right product. The sense of satisfaction I experienced seeing the team’s success on TV in the news was immense.

I have seen many possible scenarios, starting my work in the field of marketing, but I did not expect that this work was so worthwhile.

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