Maker vs. Marketer
I built Flyletter, my AI newsletter writing tool, for myself. Then 50 users told me it wasn't ready.
I officially launched it in June and got 50 people using it. I gave them extended free trials in exchange for honest feedback, and what they told me sent me back to the drawing board for two months. I kept up some light marketing, but the rebuild took most of my time.
Now the new version is almost done, and I'm about to stop building as my main job. When Flyletter relaunches this quarter, marketing gets 80% of my time, and I don't plan on switching back.
Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham wrote a well-known essay, Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule, about how you need to allocate your time across making (aka building) and managing.
But these days, one person can vibe code a product and run an entire business around it. Even if you plan to hire, the early days are still just you. Either way, you're the maker and the marketer, and both jobs still take a lot of focus, even with AI. So you have to be deliberate about where your time goes.
The easy mistake is to keep tinkering, improving the product on your own assumptions, and never getting feedback on what people actually need.
I avoid it with the Pareto principle. At every stage of my business, 80% of my time goes to one job and 20% goes to the other. The only thing that changes is which job gets the 80%.
I'm going to walk you through the playbook I'm following, including:
- What to build first and when to stop
- Where to find real users and honest feedback fast
- How to turn that feedback into a roadmap
- When to stop rebuilding and actually start selling
Start With Something Only You Could Build
Anyone can build a product now, so a lot of people think SaaS is dying.
But purpose-built products still matter. They pack years of hard-won expertise into a tool for one specific job.
Someone could copy your code, but they wouldn't understand the essence of the job it's doing or the people it's for. They'd always be a release behind, copying last month's features with last month's messaging. Launching a product got easier, but building a real business around one is still hard.
To find yours, ask yourself three questions:
- Has someone already paid you for this expertise? A salary, a client, or a contract all count.
- Can you package that expertise into a workflow? If the steps are repeatable, you can build a product that follows them.
- Could someone build a close-enough version in an afternoon with Claude? If so, keep looking (or keep it as a weekend project).
That's how I started Flyletter. I built V1 for myself to manage my own newsletter funnel, using everything I'd learned from years of running newsletters and scaling content businesses.
At this stage, 80% of your time goes into building. The other 20% goes to chipping away at your marketing channels so you aren't starting from zero when you flip to 80% marketing.
Building around your own expertise also means your personal brand doubles as the product's marketing. You get to tell the story of why you built it, plus the background and expertise behind it. And because you're the first user, you can dogfood the product in public and become your own case study.
So while I built V1, I wrote SEO articles on newsletter marketing, because search takes the longest to pay off, and I also started growing my personal newsletter (yes, the one you're reading).
Build the product you'd want yourself, with knowledge only you have, and start telling your story while you build.
Once the product reliably does the job for you, however, stop building. Anything you add after that is a guess about what other people want.
Find Real Users Before It Feels Ready
After V1 does its job for you, put it in front of real users, even if it doesn't feel ready. As LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman puts it, if you're not embarrassed by your first release, you've released it too late.
This is about learning what people need. Retention and revenue can wait. Launch day is when the split flips to 80% marketing and you start onboarding users for feedback.
I launched Flyletter in June, then immediately left for two weeks in Europe (incredible timing). I still took sales calls all throughout the Balkans, but the itch to build never let up. Mid-trip, I posted this on LinkedIn:
I'm in Croatia and all I want to do is Claude Code. It's a problem.
I stuck to marketing anyway. From mid-June through August, I did almost no building and spent my time on LinkedIn outreach. That's where the majority of my first 50 users came from.
No other channel gets you feedback as fast. You can test a message and quickly see whether it lands. I broke down why outreach works so well in Stop Starting From Zero.
I made the trade explicit up front: an extended free trial in exchange for an honest feedback call. I recorded every call in Granola so I could go back through all of them later.
Whatever you're making, use the channel that reaches your people fastest, and offer free access in exchange for an honest conversation.
When the calls start repeating each other, you have enough feedback to rebuild from. That's your signal to switch back to building.
Let Their Feedback Write the Roadmap
Now turn what you heard into a roadmap, and build it.
To find the patterns, I set up a weekly scheduled task in Claude. It pulls my Granola transcripts, writes a feedback report, and saves it to a Notion database. Each report can read the weeks before it, so it spots the themes that keep coming up over time.
So what did 50 users actually tell me? Three things that changed the product:
- The writing agents needed to better fit how users actually write.
- Flyletter could draft social posts, but users wanted it to post them too (fair enough).
- The MCP connector (the plug-in that lets you use Flyletter inside Claude) mattered way more than I'd thought. I explained why in For the Love of God, Build an MCP.
The product clearly needed some work before people would pay for it. That's what sent me back to the drawing board, and for about two months, I've mostly been building those three things.
So the split flipped back to 80% building, and the other 20% went to expanding my SEO articles and growing this newsletter.
But don't get stuck tinkering. Once you've built what users asked for and you believe it's good enough to charge for, flip back to 80% marketing and never look back.
Build the Plane on the Way Down
Once your initial users have reshaped the product, revenue becomes the goal.
You could keep rebuilding forever, because there will always be one more thing to fix. But every rebuild pushes back the only test that matters now, which is whether people will pay for your updated version.
So ask them to. If they pay, you have a business. If they don't, even after you've put real effort into rebuilding and relaunching, that's an answer too, and it's better to hear it now than later.
From here on out, the marketing never stops. You'll keep improving the product, but only from what paying customers show you, and never pause the marketing to do it. You're building the plane on the way down.
That's where I am with this quarter's relaunch. This time, the flip to marketing is for good.
Don’t be afraid to go market it. Put yourself out there, seek paying customers, and treat your product like an actual business.
Bottom Line
You're the maker and the marketer, so split your time 80/20 and let the stage of your business decide which job gets the 80%.
What's one thing you're building right now that you think customers will pay for?
Writer, founder, and AI builder. Currently building Flyletter, previously sold Selling Signals (100k subscribers). 1 sold, 2 failed, 1 active. This post started as an issue of my weekly newsletter.