Derrick Reimer
speaker
327 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard 15 Sep
Derrick Reimer’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Sep 2026 with 1.
Appearances
if you recognize where you are in that, and I think a lot of makers are like, joy and skill. We're very good at building products and we love doing it, but the business probably needs more marketing. I think that's the story for maybe 90% of indie hackers and people who come from the angle of developer founder.
And maybe you have the resources to bring in marketing help, maybe you have to roll up your sleeves and do it yourself, but like,
even just being aware that like okay even if you don't find it that joyful joyous to do that work like it needs to be done so you got to force yourself to do that and maybe there's you know in the course of wearing many hats maybe you do also spend some time doing the stuff that you really love like I don't think you should maybe I don't think you should give it all up you might
Find yourself burned out and delegate when you can to bring in help so that you don't feel like you're just failing at marketing and not getting anywhere. But I think just being cognizant of the traps of focusing only on the stuff that you enjoy and that you're skilled at, but not missing that key component of what does the business need.
Yeah, I mean, I think my own story is a little bit of an outlier case, in part because I could find, because Corey Haynes was available, who's like a very good generalist, marketer, founder-minded person. So a lot of times people have this type of person on their co-founding team. And Corey happened to be available.
a collaborator for me to work with because I was, at the time, didn't have a developer, so I was just building product day and night, but also we were getting it off the ground and trying to do launches and figure out how do we get SEO engines rolling and how do we, kind of working through the strategy.
So we collaborated together on developing the strategy and it was just helpful to have an extra mind to think about these things. And then he did a lot of the delegation of, okay, we want articles, we're going to We're going to sub these out to a freelancer. Or a pool of freelancers. So he was in charge of building the spreadsheet of the keywords.
It was all very collaborative between the two of us, but he was just basically in that role of the boots on the ground project managing marketing stuff. And so that worked well for us. I don't know how many generalist marketers are out there available to do that type of work as a contractor. Almost no one. I probably wouldn't have been able to hire full-time a marketer.
It perhaps would have been too expensive at the time.
Yeah, I mean, I think just in general, these are a lot trickier in practice than they look, I think, oftentimes. So many times, I think partnerships are fraught with kind of the dynamic of if someone is much larger than you, do they feel like you're getting more of the benefit than them or vice versa? What do you both have to bring to the table?
Early on in SavvyCal, there was one particular partnership attempt with a company that was related and made sense for us to explore building an integration at a deeper level than just our baseline integrations. It ended up being a pretty big waste of time in the end because they felt like they were so much larger and
Ultimately, they were afraid to drive too much traffic to us because that felt out of balance. I think going into any kind of partnership, it's important to have a deep understanding of... what's the vision for how you're actually better together? Why bother doing anything at all?
Because if there's not a foundational story that we can all agree on, then these things are going to either quickly or very slowly crop up and kind of taint the whole endeavor.
Sometimes it's like getting your product in the hands of their customers helps drive retention or fill in a gap in functionality where they're losing sales because they can't provide this thing and your product can fill in that gap. So it's that question of how do you both win with whatever it is.
It could be as simple as we're going to build an integration and email our customers both about that. Those are oftentimes pretty simple, especially if they have an API or you have an API depending on the direction that the integration needs to go. A lot of times they can be pretty simple and the main benefit is it's helpful for their customers.
Maybe you get a backlink from their website on their docs and there's kind of a good little... good little link together. And other times, you know, when it's when it's deeper, I think the big thing is like looking for, are they actually willing to invest in this? Or is it just sort of like a transactional sort of thing?
Like, I've had outreach from larger companies that are almost like putting me through kind of a BDR process where they're like, you can tell they're reaching out to a lot of companies asking for integrations, because they have some some random person in their partnerships department who just is working the long tail of trying to get their service integrated with a bunch of other people.
And those are not super high value. I don't have any evidence that their customers actually want to use my product. They just are looking for another backlink and another notch on their list of integrations to be able to say, we integrate with thousands of tools. So I think it's trying to make sure, is there an actual case here?
Have you actually heard demand from your customers for something like my product and vice versa? can we develop something meaningful here? Or is it kind of just this transactional, like we're hoping to get a quick win on some traffic?
Yeah, I think that's the majority of, well, we have our integrations with the big players, but the smaller players that we integrate with, a lot of that came from some degree of warm connection to the point where I could reach out, ping them and DM them or email them and make the case like you talked about. We're hearing a lot of customers mention wanting to
Showing 281–300 of 327 · page 15 of 17
← Previous
Next →