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Marketing #177

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@alexmojaki

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@alexmojaki

I recently posted futurecoder to reddit and the result was very disappointing. This issue is to discuss how to make future posts on other sites (e.g. Hacker News) more successful, and more broadly how to market futurecoder effectively to reach potential users and contributors. This is really critical and I'm way out of my depth here so I really need help and advice.

Here's the marketing bigger picture as I see it. There's a huge number of free online resources for learning Python for beginners. The market is completely saturated. If you google futurecoder or future coder then that works, but I don't think there's any hope at the moment of people finding futurecoder if they don't already know about it. Showing up in generic search results seems completely out of reach for now and I can't imagine what SEO would accomplish.

I don't really know how to realistically get users and recognition. One way I can imagine is to get mentioned in prominent blogs and articles like "Top 10 ways to learn to code for free" or social media posts of people with lots of followers. Similarly it'd be great if educational organisations decided to use futurecoder for teaching. So I'm hoping to generally attract attention and get people to notice and be impressed by futurecoder and hopefully a fraction of those people will be prominent figures that can help push it further.

So I'm a bit confused about my target audience. My actual users are supposed to be novice coders, but they're not really the people that I want to get talking excitedly about futurecoder. And I don't know how to find the people I probably need to reach or get them to pay attention. I want to reach people who will think things like:

  • I should recommend this over other learning resources.
  • I should use this to teach.
  • I like the vision and the approach of this project, I want to contribute to it.
  • I should share this with my friend who's interested in coding education, maybe they'll do one of the above.

An important paradox to note: While reaching teachers and institutions is good, a major goal of futurecoder is to enable people to learn on their own without needing external help. For example, users can always access the solutions to exercises, which is obviously a problem in some classroom environments.

When posting to reddit or HN, it gets more complicated still. There I think the priority is to maximise upvotes so that the post reaches the top and stays there for a while, improving the chances of it being eventually noticed by someone who might make a real impact. So I'm aiming for mass appeal. Factors in that:

  • Visitors have all sorts of interests, only a fraction care about education.
  • It's easier to engage people with something that's directly useful/interesting to them rather than an opportunity to help others.
  • Regular visitors of r/Python probably already know Python or have already picked a method to learn it. A few people may come to r/Python looking for resources to start learning, but trying to catch people on their first visit doesn't sound like a good strategy. From the comments it seems I did do that though, which was a pleasant surprise.

With that in mind, here's a breakdown of what I was aiming for in the reddit post title:

I built futurecoder: a free interactive Python course, including an IDE with enhancements useful for any developer or teacher, all running in the browser

  • "an IDE with enhancements useful for any developer": trying to sell it to all readers as something they can personally benefit from even if they're experienced programmers. Birdseye, Snoop, and the enhanced tracebacks are all genuinely useful and unique tools and the IDE makes them super convenient. I clearly failed to communicate this as a selling point completely separate from the course but I don't know how to balance that with keeping the title short. Here's how I expanded it in the 'body' comment:
    • Useful for anyone: You can have the above without having to look at the course. IDE mode gives you an instant scratchpad to write and debug code similar to repl.it.
  • "or teacher": keeping in mind the paradox mentioned earlier, the point here is that the IDE is useful in a classroom even when separated from the course, so teachers can use futurecoder to teach their own syllabus.
  • "all running in the browser": was meant to catch people's interest from a technical/academic perspective, as in "how did he do that?" and "how can I do that in my project?" even if they don't care about education or the IDE.

Questions to discuss:

  • Which target audience(s) should I prioritise?
  • Which benefits/selling points of futurecoder are:
    • Most relevant to the target audience?
    • Most exciting?
    • Easiest to explain concisely?
  • Based on the above, what would the ideal post title be?
  • More generally, what should I be doing to promote futurecoder? Note that I'm feeling a bit burned out by futurecoder at the moment and I'm finding it hard to continue investing time/energy. On the other hand, I am willing to spend a bit of money.

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