On Marketing and Patience: A Developer's Journey
- 3 minsMarketing has been teaching me something unexpected about myself: I lack patience.
As a developer, I’m used to a linear process. When you’re coding, if something doesn’t work, there’s always a deterministic reason behind it. You can use logic to figure it out, fix it, and move on. You add one feature, then another, then another, and gradually build your product. Design works similarly - you add an element to your site or app, tweak it until it looks right, and you’re done. These are all linear processes where you get immediate feedback and can iterate based on that feedback.
But marketing? That’s a whole different beast.
The Content Machine
For Easy Papiro, a project I’ve mentioned before on this blog, we’re creating tons of content. We’re making short-form videos for Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts - my co-founder and I have created about 45-50 pieces of content that we publish daily. On top of that, I’m writing and managing Easy Papiro’s blog, specifically targeting our users’ use cases.
All of this content is created for marketing purposes, to reach our end users. For social media, we’re aiming for viral content. We publish and watch which pieces gain traction, which ones attract more people. For the blog posts, we’re targeting specific Google queries that we know are most relevant to our area of interest.
The Reality Check
You can do all the research in the world - study successful formats on social media, analyze what’s worked for other pages, use SEO tools for keyword research - but here’s what I’ve learned: marketing is anything but linear.
Every time I’ve thought:
“This has to work - I’ve been consuming Instagram content for 10 years, I know this format works!” or “This blog post is exactly what someone would search for on Google to find our product,”
I’ve been promptly disappointed. I’ve realized that for this type of product, I don’t actually know what hooks will work, even though I was certain I did.
The Developer’s Dilemma
I’ve been on social media for 10 years, watching new formats and trends emerge constantly. I thought I knew what worked. But it’s never that simple. It’s never linear. It’s never deterministic. As a developer, I try to model everything deterministically, but the truth is, we’re talking about masses of people. We’re shouting in a crowded square, trying to get people to notice our product, and there’s no deterministic way to figure out the best way to shout.
The Answer: Patience
So what’s left? How do you do this kind of work?
The answer is patience - something I’ve never had to cultivate as a developer. Patience that leads to consistency. The ability to keep publishing day after day, week after week, month after month - posts, content, videos, blog posts - accumulating your knowledge of what works. After maybe two weeks of mediocre view counts, that one piece of content you thought was just filler, that you never expected to become popular, suddenly takes off. And that’s exactly what happened to us.
Marketing, being not an exact science but rather a science dependent on infinite variables, is teaching me patience. It’s forcing me to cultivate it, to embrace the uncertainty, and to keep showing up day after day, even when the results aren’t immediate. And you know what? I’m starting to appreciate this lesson.
Luigi Donadel
Senior Software Engineer and Entrepreneur. Building stuff.