I'm an backend dev and I read 10+ marketing books

About a year ago, whenever I had the chance, I talked a lot about 'data'.

‘Shouldn’t we check whether the product is going poorly based on the data?’, ‘Isn’t there a need to organize GA data?’ And so on and so forth. This is because I thought that only by becoming a service frequently sought after by customers would I be able to achieve the large-scale traffic I wanted and the backend overflowing with important and urgent requirements.

Meanwhile, I recently joined the Data TF and was given the opportunity to achieve these aspects myself. I think the short experience as a data engineer in the past and frequent references to data were the reasons.

The role of DATA TF's only data engineer was different from what I expected. The role of the data engineer at Balance Hero, 11st, which has most everything, was really only that of a data engineer. However, in a situation where no data collection was set up and no one considered the need for data collection as the main issue, the data engineer could not remain faithful to the existing data engineer role.

It was then that I realized that the data organizations of the past had been built by someone else.

And in these areas, which are still in progress, two things needed to be organized:

1. How to attract support from other organizations?
2. What should an organization that needs to grow do with data?

First, I found the answer in part of Ha Yong-ho's lecture I heard before. During the lecture, he said, 'Sales and marketing are needed for other teams within the company,' and this situation was exactly that.

Second, as I followed OMTM (One Metric That Matters) and Retention mentioned in the lecture above, I came across Growth Hacking. I looked through the history of the birth of Silicon Valley unicorns, growth hacking by Sean Ellis, Nader Sabry, etc., and GA books.

After reading, I was able to indirectly feel how famous companies such as Dropbox and Airbnb have grown.

But something was missing.

• What to actually focus on in a clickstream event
• Isn't it possible to get a more realistic feel of how traffic growth is progressing, other than from the perspective of repeating growth hacking experiments and analysis?

There were still many questions that remained.

Then I came across a book that changed my perspective. Parul Agrawal's 'The Growth Hacking Book' introduces various marketers' perspectives on growth hacking. How to turn a rookie in the music industry into a celebrity through growth hacking, and how offline book sales are intertwined with digital marketing. I felt this way after reading this book. Ah, now if you want to sell something, whether it's offline or online, 'digital marketing' is basic!

• Even if you want to sell APIs, you need strategic digital marketing.
• It is necessary even if you want to sell a freemium operation service with a high-performance open source DB.

With that perspective in mind, I looked around offline bookstores, and it was only then that marketing books arrived. From those specialized in Korea to various books dealing with offline and online... Actually, as a business major, I thought I knew a little bit about marketing (4Ps, SWOT, things like that?).

Then, the 'Aha Moment' book that I came across was Russell Brunson's 'Traffic Secrets'. After reading about what marketing is about targeting customers, how to get traffic, and how each method can be implemented in detail, I started to understand when I looked at Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube in reality.

Marketing seems to be a fairly distant job in the role of a developer. However, considering that developers create digital products, it seems like a topic worth studying and thinking about at least once if you are thinking about the customer's front end beyond the product.

Recommended books related to this

1. Russell Brunson, Traffic Secrets: I really think this is a book that anyone who sells anything in this day and age (in fact, anyone who works at it) should read.
2. Sean Ellis, Growth Hacking: It was good to understand the basic perspective of growth hacking (centered on AARRR).
3. Avinash Kaushik, Web Analytics 2.0: I was tired of reading GA books. I wanted to understand the fundamental perspective of web analysis and learn important points, but most of the books were limited to how to use GA tools. This book was a book that could fill that gap.
4. Wes Bush, Product-Led Growth: This was a book that helped me understand the overall Sticky Pricing strategy of services I actually use.