Minimal Viable Marketing
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8-Week Bootcamp to Acquire The Skills That Turn Great Developers into Successful Entrepreneurs
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Building is easy, but marketing is hard
You start out full of hope.
You have a wonderful idea that nobody has thought of before.
You build it to perfection.
With a beautiful product in hand, you launch it on ProductHunt to the deafening sound of… silence.
You post about it on Twitter, but only get a couple of likes and even those are from your friends.
You write an excited post about what you’ve built on Reddit and get instantly banned because Reddit abhors self promotion.
You steel yourself for the predictable barrage of HackerNews hate and post it there… but you can’t even get hateful replies. Nobody cares.
You shout into the void again and again and again but the void doesn’t answer.
The entire marketing process feels like an exercise in futility.
No wonder every task that even remotely smells like marketing ends up at the bottom of the “Procrastinate Endlessly” section of your To Do list.
Worse than that, you see all those other people around you on Twitter, IndieHacker and Reddit finding users, growing their audience, posting those growing 📈 MRR graphs.
What do they know that you don’t?
And yeah, if you’re wondering, I experienced all of this myself in 2020 and 2021 when I was desperately trying to market my own creation, an app that helped me heal from depression, but that I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to market.
What you’ll learn
The skills required to get 10 customers, 100 customers and 1000 customers are very different from one another. Each is a 10x leap and each requires a different mindset and set of tools.
In this course we are going to focus on how to reach the first stage, the 10 (and up to about 50) paying customers stage.
This stage requires doing “things that don’t scale” - individually finding potential customers and selling to them one by one.
You’ll learn three fundamental skills:
➡️ How to find potential customers
➡️ How to get them to have a conversation with you
➡️ How to get them to buy your product
What’s wrong with books and videos
There are countless books, YouTube videos, and online courses that tackle the problems of marketing.
Some of them are good.
Some are really good.
And still, reading books and watching videos doesn’t - usually - turn star developers into successful entrepreneurs.
How you’ll learn here
In order to truly understand a topic you need to understand the theory behind it and then practice it yourself.
In order to practice effectively, you need to have feedback (so you practice effectively) and accountability (so you actually practice consistently).
These four pillars (theory, practice, feedback, accountability) create the perfect learning environment.
Unfortunately most books, videos and recorded courses can only deliver only one of the pillars - the theory.
In this course, you will get all four pillars.
✅ Theory
You’ll learn the fundamental principles of business that have been true for 4,000 years and are still true today even though they’ve been obfuscated by our obsession with digital marketing and the false hope that “if you build it they will come”.
✅ Practice
You’ll practice everything you learn during the live work sessions.
I accidentally discovered that the 10 minutes we spent writing and sending a single cold email during a live work session at one of the cohorts made the whole course 10x more effective.
I’m now applying this principle of “live practice” to everything we do.
✅ Feedback
You’ll get detailed feedback on everything you do - every DM you send, every conversations you have, every response you get that you’re not sure what to do with.
Most of the progress you’ll see will happen in these attempt/feedback/improvement cycles.
The feedback will come from me, from past graduates of the program, and from your peers.
✅ Accountability
The skills you’ll learn here may be uncomfortable at first.
It’s easy to succumb to fear of rejection, procrastination and analysis paralysis.
To help you overcome that, I’ll give you a gentle nudge to report on your progress on a daily basis and a stronger poke if you completely fall of the wagon.
This course runs in small cohorts and I don’t let anybody get left behind.
Make a living off your own thing
Imagine waking up one day knowing -
✅ Knowing where to find good ideas for your next SaaS or app.
✅ Knowing how and where to find potential customers for it.
✅ Knowing how to reach them, how to talk to them, what to ask.
✅ Knowing when you should push on and when you need to pivot.
✅ Knowing how to promote your products on social media without being ridiculed or banned.
✅ Knowing how to convince people to part with their hard earned $$ (honestly and ethically!)
✅ Knowing how to break free from the chains of 9-5 and live off your own thing
Granted, that last one is a bit of hyperbole, because it takes much longer than 8 weeks course to get there.
But having the skills to build a business that generates some revenue is the necessary first step.
And that is definitely, absolutely, something you will have.
The syllabus
Every week you’ll learn theory, practice with accountability, and achieve results.
Week 1 - Personal Networking - Friends and Family
Week 2 - Social Networking 1 - Engaging Effectively
Week 3 - Social Networking 2 - Publishing Safely
Week 4 - Cold Outreach - DMs and Emails
Week 5 - Conversations 1 - Handling Objections
Week 6 - Conversations 2 - Closing Sales
Week 7 - Content - Turning Insights into Products
Week 8 - Motivation - How to Always Keep Going
Note: The content and focus may change based on the specific needs of the cohort.
The format
👷♂️ Weekly live work sessions
We’ll meet every week for a 2-hour session where we’ll learn some theory and practice it.
🏢 Weekly live office hours / Q&A
The course includes an additional 1-hour slot to discuss challenges you’ve encountered and do some more practice together.
💬 Private Discord group
You’ll have a private discord group for the cohort participants to network and discuss topics related to the course.
📓 Accountability and journalling
You’ll get a daily notification to report on your progress and keep you moving along.
🎥 Live session recordings
Recordings of all live sessions will be available to all cohort participants and may be used for future courses.
Pricing and discounts
$597 all included
I offer payment plans for people from lower income countries and difficult financial situations.
Apply below or reach out to me @finereli to find out if you’re eligible.
What people say
My name is Eli Finer
I've been a software engineer for 24 years, a coach for 14 and a full-time marketer for the last 4 years.
I don't have a 8-figure successful SaaS business to show off to prove you my method works. I only have my blood, sweat and tears exposed publicly on my Twitter account @finereli to defend my claims.
After leaving my last full time job as a software engineer in 2020 and struggling for 2 years without revenue, I finally started seeing results in 2022. I went from a business that only made $200, to the next one that made $800, to the next with $3,600.
I made over $45,000 in business revenue in 2023.
I failed in every way possible, and watched closely as other people failed too. I know the pitfalls. I know the pain. I know what it feels to have your back against the wall.
I know what it's like to see your savings edge towards $0.
I know what it's like to build a business while also raising 2 little kids.
I know what failure feels like.
I know what success looks like.
I'll be your guide.
My guarantee
I've taken dozens of people through this process. Some succeeded, some failed, some gave up. I explored all the reasons people fail or give up and adjusted the methods to overcome all the possible pitfalls.
I learned that there is randomness about this process - sometimes the idea isn’t right, sometimes the market isn’t ready, sometimes (very rarely) the competition is too stiff.
I also learned that there are fundamental principles and skills you absolutely have to have - that every successful entrepreneur has - marketing, sales, positioning, communication, negotiation, (honest and ethical) persuasion, etc.
We don’t learn these things in college and we don’t learn them working as engineers - but they are essential - crucial - for success.
They are also sufficient.
Those skills plus tenacity and time will predictably get you to living life on your own term making money off your own thing.
So this is my guarantee - if you come to all the sessions and do all the exercises to the best of your ability - you will acquire all the skills you need to build profitable apps.