Categories: Startups
Optimizing for Humans: A Marketing Equation for Developers
It's a common sentiment among developers that it is "better to spend your time optimizing for humans, rather than optimizing for Google’s algorithms."
On one level, this seems to be a confusion about what good SEO is.
Step 1. Find what people are searching for.
Step 2. Provide content that meets their search criteria.
Result: You have optimized for humans.
But on another level, this is an instance of developers' more general aversion to marketing. What we need to realize is that marketing is just another way of optimizing for humans. Here’s how I think of it.
Time spent building your app = Optimizing for Use (by humans)
Marketing = Optimizing for Discovery (by humans)
The Equation
Number of discoverers * Fraction that find it useful = Number of Users
Examples
Scenario 1
You start off with the following:
5000 discover * 1/10 find it useful = 500 Users
You decide to work on increasing your product’s usefulness and get:
5,000 discover * 2/10 find it useful = 1,000 Users
Scenario 2
You start off with the following:
5000 discover * 1/10 find it useful = 500 Users
You decide to work on doing a better job of marketing and get:
10,000 discover * 1/10 find it useful = 1,000 Users
The Lesson
What’s the point? That both marketing and product development are force multipliers.
Once your product has reached a basic level of utility, you can get equivalent results from either marketing or further development. The question is, which can you tweak most easily?
Sometimes it is one, sometimes the other. But since developers actually like to develop things, and tend to neglect marketing, you should probably look around and see if you can rack up some easy marketing wins.
Obviously, this is very simplified. It leaves out lots of things like the friction of signup/download, whether people are willing to pay what you’re asking, and the question of optimizing for different types of users. Nevertheless, I think it is a good mental model to start from.