“When a program script throws an error, it's not that it didn't work. It's just that it didn't give you the output that you expected or wanted. An error is a result. It's just not the result that you wanted.”
sputnikintelligence.com
Corey Haines was explaining to developer-founders why marketing feels so unpredictable compared with code. He uses a programming analogy: a blog post that fails has thrown an error, and you keep debugging.
…I do it again? Do I not? Those are the hard parts, really, of marketing. It's not really the, do I do it or not? You always have to keep trying. What else is there to do? You have to keep trying. You have to keep doing things. It's just figuring out what to double down on. That's the hardest part.
…keep the thing to themselves, lifestyle business, never ever hire anybody. But it kind of feels to me like if you're not meant to do this or if you don't feel like you're up to it, you should hire somebody. Do you have a good timeframe for this, having done this multiple times for people already?
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And if I can just jump in with one last thought on the last point, sure. Sort of like the deterministic nature of programming versus marketing. You know, one more analogy I'll give now that I'm in the code and I'm learning all the different paradigms. I just learned a couple of weeks ago, like, well, when a programmer script throws an error, it's not that it didn't work. It's just that it didn't give you the output that you expected or that you wanted. And there's all sorts of different types of errors. And an error is a result. It's just not the result that you wanted.
That's nice. I was
like, oh, interesting. And again, marketing is exactly like that, where you're like, my blog post threw an error. That doesn't mean that it didn't work. It just means I didn't give you the output that you thought that it would have. And you have to keep debugging. You have to keep trying. You have…
Yeah, it always feels hard for me to determine who a good hire is, like what a good hire looks like in that regard, coming from a kind of opposing view. But that's kind of a trust-based recommendation. Or you just go to places that have already done it well for others, which is kind of where you…