How I'm Learning to Market my startup from Justin Jackson's book

Hrishi Mittal

Hrishi Mittal

I've been reading Justin Jackson's new book Marketing for Developers and finding it extremely useful to plan the marketing for Learnetto, a marketplace for courses on learning how to build and sell products online.

These are my notes:

First things first - I'm not reading this book cover to cover. I'm using it as a hands-on how to guide to do specific things. I've read lots of books and blog posts in the past but never really used the lessons. So this time, I'm focusing on doing stuff rather than just reading.

Things I've learned and implemented so far:

  1. I put up a landing page with a Mailchimp mailing list signup form. 
  2. One thing I'm working on next is offering a free course as an incentive for signing up.
  3. I've been promoting the landing page on Twitter (using both my personal and business accounts).
  4. I made a Twitter card. FINALLY. After trying and failing 10 times, I did it. Twitter makes it unnecessarily hard to do this. So I had just given up on it. But Justin lays out the process for doing this clearly in his book. Most important thing to remember: you need to add a credit card to your account to use this feature, but you won't be charged unless you run an ad campaign.
  5. I've started sharing my process - in this very note you're reading now!
  6. I've added analytics tracking using Segment. Again, Justin describes how to do this in his book very clearly. With Segment set up, I was able to start sending my analytics data to Mixpanel and Intercom.
Some more things which I have learnt from the book and want to do over the next few days and weeks (leading up to a launch) are as follows:

  1. Submit the site to directories - Betalist, Startuplist and more (listed on Submit.co)
  2. Email my personal network asking to share the site on social media leading up to the launch.
  3. On launch day, submit Learnetto to Product Hunt. Justin offers one very specific tip: "Increase your chances of upvotes by posting at the right time (7am – 12pm EST) and having a great title."
This is my first note on learning marketing. As I learn more from Justin's book and other resources, I will share more of my learnings so that you can also learn along with me.

If you'd like to get my notes in your inbox, please join the Learnetto mailing list. In addition to notes, I'll also be providing access to our first courses on professional skills through that list.


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