I’m a software engineer by trade (25 years). If you were to ask me the best way to level up your game as a software engineer, I would tell you to go to some website like Loom.com and try to recreate the application. While this would not be a recipe for business success, you would learn so much about development by doing that.
I often think how valuable examples are in learning. Learning to play an instrument, for example, is often best done by following examples.
And so what is marketing’s example for developing skill? Let’s say I just installed HubSpot. Let’s say that I wanna build a web-based screen recorder like Loom with some differentiation. What would I do to get started (not development-wise but sales-wise)
Thanks!
Hi @HubBubDotXYZ,
Great question! Coming from your technical background, I’d recommend approaching this in a similar way that you dsecribed: by studying working systems, deconstructing them, and rebuilding your own.
If we’re looking at Loom, I’d start by looking closely at how they brought their product to market. Sign up for their product, go through their onboarding, watch how they communicate via email, and pay attention to what content or ads brought you to them in the first place. Just as you’d inspect a network call or UI pattern, treat every marketing touchpoint as a clue.
Once you’ve seen how a successful company structures its marketing, try rebuilding a simplified version of their funnel for your own product. You’re not aiming to copy – you’re aiming to understand the strategy behind their choices. Maybe Loom used a waitlist and referral campaign to build early momentum. You could create your own version using HubSpot to manage contacts, a basic landing page, and some incentive for people to refer others. This process teaches you not just what tactics exist, but how they fit together to move someone from visitor to user to advocate.
The final and often most overlooked step is putting it into practice at small scale and adjusting. Marketing, like coding, is iterative. Launch something basic, measure response, and refine. If you’re running a small email campaign, track open and click rates. If you’re writing a landing page, test different headlines. Over time, you’ll start to build intuition – not unlike debugging code – about what works and why.
Hope this helps!
Hi Karsten, @karstenkoehler
Thank you so much for the detailed response. I really appreciate it! It’s nice to be in a community where people are so helpful right off the bat. I didn’t expect that.
I’m gonna request for more concreteness. For example, I could tell you, “If you wanted to learn to develop, to go look at their landing page, try to deconstruct it, see how they have all of their CSS classes organized into tokens and semantic tokens and so on. See where they’re getting their fonts from. Which font registry? And then determine how they implemented their responsive layout and how they shared components between layouts or how they organized their component architecture.”
I think my naivety to marketing would blind me from these touchpoints and even noticing that I’m being introduced to them. As a programmer, I want something procedural, some structural method I can follow. Something I can begin doing using the software using HubSpot. For eg., go here and collect emails. But I know that kind of cold outreach is very difficult when it comes to marketing.
So, I’m gonna take your advice and I’m going to try to build something more concrete out of it that I can go and apply. But in the meantime, if there are any direct things you suggest I can do with the HubSpot software, (and that might be an escape hatch or a cheap way out, of which I am sorry), let me know.
@HubBubDotXYZ I think the HubSpot Marketing Hub Software Certification does a good job of walking you through the potential touchpoints: https://academy.hubspot.com/courses/hubspot-marketing-hub-software
The challenge with marketing is that it’s a bit more abstract and emotionally driven, but there is structure underneath, and tools like HubSpot are built to operationalize that structure. So if you’re looking to get your hands dirty, here’s something concrete you can actually do inside HubSpot that mirrors how a dev might prototype a component or system.
Start by creating a simple lead capture funnel – think of it like your first “Hello World” app, but for marketing. In HubSpot, set up a landing page using the CMS tool. Make the page explain your product idea clearly and include a compelling call-to-action (“Get notified when we launch”). Then create a form that collects an email address and automatically adds it to a list. Hook up a basic email workflow so that anyone who submits that form gets a follow-up email thanking them and maybe asking one simple question (“What would make this tool most useful for you?”). You’ve now built a small system – acquisition, engagement, feedback loop.
Once that’s working, you can begin iterating: experiment with different headlines, collect replies from early users, and analyze how people interact with the page. This is your sandbox for learning. You’ll start to feel where things click.