I Forced Myself to Spend a Week in Instagram Instead of Xcode

From his website, I learned that he is a “VISIONAIRE, INVENTOR, and PHILANTROPIST (sic)”:

https://www.sebastienlagree.com/

It’s a kind of Pilates.

Sort of like Bikram for hot yoga.

Marketing is a real job in the same way both pharmacists and drug dealers are both real jobs. Its really easy for marketing to go from providing a useful product to using dark patterns like rage bait to peddle the equivalent of drugs to the masses. Marketing gets a bad name for a reason.

Engineer does 40 outreaches in a week and says the results are “not that amazing” lol.

If I said that I coded for 15 minutes a day for a week and wasn’t impressed by the results, what would an engineer say?

As a solopreneur I'm dreading the gutting of US TikTok... Things are going to get much harder for organic promotion if there's a separate US app under a non-TikTok name that only Americans can use.

You can look into https://sideshiftjobs.com or https://playkit.xyz for scaling organic posting btw (unaffiliated).

Personally I just message a lot of people directly myself and get lucky with friendly responses because creators like my apps enough that they use it themselves (edtech market makes this easier as the apps are genuinely and wholesomely bettering). Then I convince them to start new accounts focused on my app promo, in addition to less frequent commissioned promo on their main accounts.

For doing it yourself you need to get multiple devices and multiple accounts going, there are tools to help with that too. You can also post the UGC content that you pay others to produce for you, onto your own accounts. It's too difficult to consistently go viral without more frequent rolls of the dice. Focusing on a single branded account made more sense before current social media algos which don't care about your followers and won't even show it to them if the content isn't engaging enough to go viral beyond your following.

Recommendations on where to find them?

Looks like he renamed it to "4 Counts | Wrist Tempo", but the screenshots are still using "Lagree Buddy".

I think the hidden lesson in Field of Dreams is that “they will come” happens because of word of mouth. Shoeless Joe Jackson tells the other dead baseball players to come hang out. The townsfolk tell about baseball field to save the farm.

But really “build it and they will come” in product development is pitched as if “they will come” because they are searching for it. Which is not really true if people don’t know your thing exists.

It's basically "go where your customers are". Fitness influencers doing trendy workouts are all on Instagram.

Have you noticed the different roles that make up successful small businesses? You must anticipate and learn to wear several hats in turn if you're doing it alone

I didn't know who he is and still found this blog post really interesting because the real topic is about marketing your app when you're a software developer.

What is pilates?

I have a paper notebook next to my keyboard entitled 'sleep deprivation induced fever-dreams'. It is an excellent collection and useful tool so I dont let my ideas runaway with my attention.

Often when I return to what I write, about 60% I look back at with the novelty gone, and reassess from a more suitable eye and cross them off the list.

Same! My only challenge has been getting the product to be decent enough to the point where I start sharing these. Perhaps I shouldn't wait though...

>"You escape competition through authenticity." - @naval Except none of this is authentic. Its just another form of marketing and it should be illegal to go around spamming posts advertising a product. Or the accounts should be marked as sponsored or promotion accounts so they can be filtered out accordingly.

> If I see an interesting post/take on social media I hold the link and write an idea for my own spin/take (takes 30 seconds) - log it

Not quite the same thing, but a perspective to be aware of...

For example, I used to be on a semi-private forum, where some people would lurk without participating, and then seemed to "arbitrage" ideas from there, to blog and social media posts, to promote their brand.

Ideas generally should be shared, and I wouldn't say that this "arbitrage" behavior is wrong, but it can sometimes seem a bit like leeching off a group without contributing.

I suppose this is more noticeable in smaller groups that are closer to "communities". Maybe no one would care if it's just more conventional social media posts where there's no community, and most people are just playing their own promotion games.

(For example, probably no one cares if someone else also forwards around the same LinkedIn inspirational leadership image post, which they themselves took from someone else. Because usually no one at all cares about those, not even the sender.)

> many times people/community rally around you

But most of the times not a single person cares about you or your product.

I do this on paper, with each page dated with the date I started filling the page. The goal is to check off most of the improvements before or shortly after starting a new page.

How much feedback people give you on your stuff matches your 3 personas?

Sounds like great advice. Thanks for sharing. I'd hoped to see a blog link in your HN profile; do you have one?

If you browse job listings, you will find titles for 'iOS developer' and 'Android Mobile Developer'

It doesn't really make sense to call it vendor lock-in when you're learning a platform's native API and idiosyncrasies.

That would apply more to React Native since you are stuck with its vendored abstractions and you can't just swap out React Native once you've built with it.

I think you're commenting on how iOS development is a less portable skill than a toolkit than runs on all platforms. Or that your iOS app is stuck on one platform. That is certainly true. But don't overlook the value of expertise in a native platform instead of just one set of abstractions that run on top of it. There are things you can do on the native platform, like optimizing performance, that you can't do using something like React Native.

It's all just trade-offs.

Even if using a framework like RN, solo devs would be putting themselves in a precarious position if they don't understand the underlying systems and frameworks. Without that knowledge they won't be able to effectively debug and figure out if issues are stemming from the cross-platform framework or the native platform/framework and subsequently will be entirely dependent on outside parties for fixes.

So if they're learning the native frameworks anyway, they may as well use them. These days with Swift and Kotlin most logic code transfers pretty cleanly and most apps can be LEGO'd together from UIKit/SwiftUI/Compose components, so the workload isn't as high as one might expect.

Aside from that, early on it's usually better to start with one platform, nail the UI and interaction, and then once the app is proven worry about the other platform.

If you want to develop mobile apps and you want to have users, there is no way around vendor lock in and walled gardens. By supporting Android, too, the only thing you’ll achieve is that you’ll be the abused in two abusive relationships instead of one.

Adding more abstractions on top will not significantly improve the fact that you are at the whims and mercy of companies that don’t care about you, so I don’t see RN as an improvement.

If you want to avoid vendor lockin, don’t do mobile apps, go to web. Then, you can also just switch RN to React simply or any other framework.

Usually, yes. The overwhelming majority of mobile dev jobs are platform-specific, or are specifically for a framework like React Native.

With native mobile dev, lock-in is less of a problem career-wise, because it's a duopoly, so your chosen technology is unlikely to become unfashionable like it would if you were specialised in a particular web framework.

Even with RN I've had to learn Swift and also often need xcode for configuring targets and such. RN helps in some ways but native apps are so much better in the long run.

RN libraries are so often buggy and disappointing in my experience.

TLDW - whats your one sentence pitch for your product?

What are you using to put your videos together?

This post and the discussion is great!!! Brings me back to 2 different projects/products that I developed that never made it to market (2009 and 2014). I also kept a log of ideas most of which withered in the light of day but a few persisted. And for each project I went off to live in a cave and code for a year (not recommended). Looking back I absolutely should have shared what I was working on and found support from a community (highly recommended). All of these ideas are excellent. Thank you for sharing them.

Welcome to promoting your product baby. No one cares if it's fake or not except the little voice in your head.

If you can post fake messages today that promote your product and will start getting you users, why wait for real users to provide real testimonials that align with what you want to communicate to do the same thing 3 months from now?

Of course you want to seek out real testimonials from satisfied customers and share those as much as you can; you don't want to lock yourself in a bubble where you post how amazing your app is while emails of dissatisfied users pile up in your inbox; but it's not an OR situation, it's an AND situation.

You might also be surprised to hear that the family laughing together while drinking Coca Cola in those video ads isn't a real family, they're not really having fun, and they're not really enjoying Coca Cola for the sake of it - they're on a filming set in front of a green screen paid by the hour.

Indeed. I would love a better post about "how to do authentic marketing without devolving into the worst caricature of a social media marketing bro."

This is the status quo. Half of Instagram is just astroturfing.

The alternative is to build the audience first, then sell things to it. If you don't command an audience, you must use someone else's, usually at a cost.

You don't have to be the loudest and most outrageous if your product is great and you speak the right message to the right audience.

are you talking based on personal experience too, or just based on this article?