Hello everyone,
My name is Nazar, and I wanted to share my story about becoming a marketer in a tech startup.
Here are some interesting facts about me:
- I used to be a lawyer several years ago.
- I have a Master of Law degree and worked for the government for over two years. It was quite an experience, to say the least.
- My wife is a senior software developer. While she was enhancing her coding skills, I pursued a career in law and eventually marketing. Needless to say, she has a lot more experience in the tech industry than I do.
- My first marketing job was in events. We organized various conferences and small events for software developers, managers, designers, game developers, and more.
So, let’s mix it up a little.
Law period
I don’t really want to talk about this period of my life because I feel like I wasted about 7–8 years. While I gained some experience, knowledge, and good friends, I wasn’t happy with the learning or work. I hated being in the university and most of the work felt hard and confusing. I’m not sure if the problem was me or if others experienced the same thing.
However, I had always dreamed of being a lawyer or even a judge, due to my strong sense of justice and equity. To achieve this, I studied hard to obtain a scholarship. During my education, I even received some job offers but declined them to fully concentrate on my studies. Looking back, that was not the best decision.
My future wife was studying to be a software developer, and I saw that as a different world. She didn’t have to study for 16 hours a day, could skip some lessons, and was happier overall. After university, this tension only grew stronger.
When I finished university, I faced the harsh reality that nobody cared about inexperienced law students like me. It was impossible to find a job that paid enough to cover my rent. In contrast, my wife easily found a well-paid job as a junior software developer. I tried for two years, but nothing worked out. Meanwhile, I witnessed a beautiful, fun, and modern world of developer friends through my wife.
I started to look for something different and found my passion for marketing. I thought it was similar to development, as I didn’t enjoy coding but had good persuasion skills and some creativity.
I took courses from platforms like Hubspot and learned as much as possible before seeking a job.
Honesty is important to me, so I couldn’t fake it. After completing many courses in about a year, I found a part-time job as a social media manager in a small startup that made a platform for fantasy cybersport disciplines. After a few months, I realized I was making more money than I did as a lawyer.
Thanks to my future wife’s support, I became a freelance marketer. It was scary, but I did it.
EdTech and first full-time marketing job
After freelancing for half a year and completing some projects, I realized that I wanted to grow professionally. I found a job at an event agency that organized a lot of events for the IT world. It was a great match — being a marketer and working in the IT industry.
I worked there for a long time, and during that period, I grew as a marketer, manager, and team leader. It was a lot of fun, and we were a young team.
We learned a lot and had fantastic times at conferences and after-parties. The after-parties were especially fun because we, as organizers, had the freedom to do anything.
We got to spend time with some cool people like our speakers and successful, interesting guests. I believe in the rule that you are an average of your ten friends, so I started to grow there.
This is me with Jorge Sebastian — CTO Eco-System Huawei Technologies
But there was also the fun part — huge parties at cool locations with free food, alcohol, and fun. As the organizer, you were like a king, and everyone thanked you for such a great time. It was an amazing feeling.
After a few years, I hit my ceiling there. I started to hate the quality of the products we made and decided to leave. Many of my team members left too.
Fortunately, our “main enemy” (who is now a good boss and friend of mine) saw this and asked me to join his company. I said yes because I saw the quality of his products and because he had a great idea with his new partner — an educational project for owners of IT companies. It was a new field for me.
The team was fantastic, and there were high demands for quality and revenue generation. I had a lot of creative freedom and brought many of my ideas to life. In a few years, we made almost $1 million in revenue, which was a huge achievement in this small market of IT business owners in my country.
I grew more as a leader there and eventually became the COO. I met some great people in my life and found the next step for me — a tech startup called MarsX.
Everybody hates marketers in the tech world
Being part of communities of developers and owners of IT companies (mostly service outsourcing) made me think that I understood their world well. But the tech startup world is something different. During the first few months, I felt lost in this maze of tech terms, messy startup people, indie developers, the world of investors, and a whole bunch of new, strange things in my life. And I realized that nobody in this world likes marketers… really, they hate marketing. I was shocked… LOL…
The first blur in this new life was a startup I started working with: MarsX. I didn’t know what it was. Was it an IDE? A programming language? A framework? Low code? No code? High code? I couldn’t even explain it to my wife. Just try to imagine LOL. To be sincere, for the first few months, I couldn’t explain MarsX to anybody.
Me with my wife at Everest Base Camp after 80+km of hiking.
It was because John (the founder of MarsX) had imagined and created some kind of tool that could be all of the above. Yeah, it’s an all-in-one platform, and there aren’t even any good, successful examples in the startup world to compare it to, really.
So, if you’re a marketer and you’ve worked in marketing for a long time, you’ll understand that you’ve been hired by a company that doesn’t have any positioning, target audience, realistic goals, or even a product with limited access that you can’t try yourself.
Ohhh, that was a challenge. Especially to accept that nobody likes your methods and wants something “less marketing”, and of course, to understand something about this platform.
But after almost a year, we finally figured out who our audience is and what MarsX is. It’s a low-code tool with plenty of micro-apps that can make the development process much faster and more effective. And we just added AI to our platform!
I’m still trying to understand MarsX better. There are no limits to this platform. To be sincere, I don’t think that even John Rush fully understands all the opportunities for the world of software development that our product can bring.
Of course, I still have some patterns of marketing from my past experience, but I’ve learned new ones from the startup tech world. During this whole period, we made some great decisions. I had to kill part of the marketer in my head because, as I mentioned before, people in this world hate marketing tricks. I had to start doing my job.
If you are transitioning to tech marketing from another niche or profession, here are some recommendations that may help you.
First, learn as much as you can about software development by reading resources like hackernoon, dev.to, hashnode etc.
Secondly, understand that the tech world does not love ads, so you must learn how to communicate with your audience without relying on huge marketing budgets or being the "white shirt guy".
Finally, focus on building a community rather than selling something. This can help you gain credibility and trust with your audience, which can lead to long-term success for your product or service.
And I think this transition from being a classic marketer to a tech startup marketer is even harder than the transition I made from being a lawyer. It’s true.
I’ll tell you a little more later about our ideas that worked or failed.
I hope you found my journey interesting.
Thanks for reading.