I hate marketing. Here are six things I did anyway.

Six short pieces from my notebook this month, all about marketing. I have shipped a small iOS app by myself for about fourteen months, and marketing is still the job I schedule last and finish worst. These are not tactics. They are the notes I wrote to myself after each attempt, so that next-me would stop making the same face at the word.

The word is the problem, not the work

I kept freezing on the task called "marketing." So I renamed it. Now my calendar says "tell one honest person one true thing," and I do it without the dread.

The rename mattered more than any tactic. "Marketing" carries a picture: a funnel, a growth curve, someone louder than me winning. "Tell one person one true thing" carries a different picture, which is just a message I already know how to write. Same activity, on most days. The difference is that one of the two framings makes me open the laptop.

I think the aversion a lot of builders feel is not to the act but to the costume. We imagine we have to become a person who says "growth hack" without wincing. We don't. The work underneath is closer to writing a good commit message: say what changed, say why it matters, keep it short. I can do that. I could never do the costume.

What counts as marketing when you hate the word?

For a week I logged everything that touched a stranger's awareness of the app, and then sorted it by whether it felt like "marketing" or not. The results embarrassed me.

Answering a question in a forum, honestly, without linking anything: felt like being a person, counted as marketing. Fixing a confusing sentence in the App Store description: felt like editing, counted as marketing. Writing a plain post about a bug I caused: felt like confession, was probably my best marketing all month. Meanwhile the thing that felt the most like Marketing, a scheduled promotional post, did approximately nothing.

The lesson I wrote down: the parts that work rarely feel like marketing, and the parts that feel like marketing rarely work. If a task makes me feel like a salesperson, that is weak evidence it is worth doing. If a task just makes me feel useful to one specific human, that is where the signal has been.

The launch is a coin, the habit is a wage

I have launched loudly and I have shown up quietly, and I finally sat down to compare what each actually returns.

The loud launch is a coin flip: sometimes it lands, mostly it doesn't, and either way you learn little because the crowd that shows up for launches is not the crowd that keeps a tool. The quiet habit is a wage. It pays badly per hour and reliably over months, because each honest post or answer sits there and keeps getting found. I have stopped hoping for the coin. I show up for the wage.

Say the boring true thing before the clever one

My best-performing sentence this year was not clever. It was: "It sends the note as an email and there is nowhere to file it." That is the whole product, stated flatly.

I spent months trying to find a clever line, an angle, a hook that made a note-to-email app sound like a movement. Every clever line I wrote made the thing sound like more than it is, and people who arrived on a clever line left disappointed by the honest reality. The boring true sentence did the opposite. It set an expectation the app could actually meet, so the few people it drew in stayed.

I think clever marketing is a tax you pay later, in refunds and churn and one-star reviews that all say "not what I expected." Boring-and-true is the cheaper long game. Describe the thing so plainly that the only people who come are the ones it will actually fit.

Does talking about the work count as marketing?

I was not sure, so I ran a small test: for a month I wrote publicly about the mechanics of building alone, with no pitch attached, and I watched what happened to the app I never mentioned by name.

What happened was quiet and real. A handful of people found the app by following the trail of posts back to the person who wrote them. Nobody bought because of a call to action, because there wasn't one. They bought because they had read enough of my thinking to trust that the tool was built by someone who thought about the problem the way they did. I wrote more about that trade-off in an earlier note on what building solo takes from you.

So yes, talking about the work is marketing, and it is the kind I can sustain, because it does not require me to sell. It only requires me to be useful in public and let people draw their own line back to what I make.

The part I still get wrong

I under-market, and I know it, and knowing it has not fixed it. I will build a feature for three weeks and mention it once, quietly, on a Tuesday, and then feel obscurely virtuous about not being pushy.

That is not humility. It is a comfortable way to avoid the discomfort of repetition. The honest truth is that most people who would like the thing have not heard of it, will not hear of it once, and will not remember it the first time even if they do. Marketing that hates repeating itself is just a hobby that produces posts. I am trying to say the same true things more than once without feeling like a fraud, and I am not there yet. If you have made peace with repeating yourself, I would like to know how.

A few questions I had to answer for myself

Do I need a big audience for any of this to work? No. Every good outcome I traced this month came from one person reading one thing, not from reach. A small trail that the right person can follow beat a big spike every time.

Isn't "just be honest" naive advice? It would be if honest were easy. It is not. Saying the plain, unflattering truth about a small product takes more nerve than saying something clever, which is exactly why so little marketing does it.

What would I do first if I were starting over? Write the one boring true sentence that describes the product, put it everywhere, and stop reaching for the clever version. Then answer questions in public until people know my face.

I will keep writing these next month. There is a seventh piece already forming, about the difference between being visible and being findable, but it is not done thinking yet.

I'm a solo developer, and Simple Memo is the little iOS thing I make and, it turns out, have to market: one tap turns a thought into an email you have already sent. I write here every few days about the awkward parts of doing every job alone. It lives here.