I don't see the different between marketing and customer development à la Lean Start-up. As a budding solo-developer myself (2 months in), I'm making sure to get my customers involved from day 0: speaking to as many as possible, learning about their pain points, and only building one feature at a time before reaching out again. Some of your most loyal customers will be along for the journey.
Twitter has been huge for me to find my customers. I'll just DM people who talk about relevant topics and tweet once a day about what I'm working on. I just got my first paying customer (a big one too) through someone retweeting one of my tweets. At the end of the day your customers are people too.
I agree that marketing is scary, and a good book about this is "Show Your Work".
Twitter has been huge for me to find my customers. I'll just DM people who talk about relevant topics and tweet once a day about what I'm working on. I just got my first paying customer (a big one too) through someone retweeting one of my tweets. At the end of the day your customers are people too.
I agree that marketing is scary, and a good book about this is "Show Your Work".