In all seriousness, I’ve gone from a perspective of dreading the “marketing” aspects to really enjoying them.

Why the shift? A big part of that was learning that marketing isn’t a big mystery, but has a formula that can be used with success nearly every time. I’m still refining that formula for myself. But having that kind of basis to work from is far more rewarding that just starting from scratch and fumbling around in the dark.

Like you said, when you start out not knowing what you’re doing, it often leads to dead ends, which leads to frustration, which leads to dislike.

But imagine instead if you had been able to quickly and easily have success with one of your early software marketing efforts, and you raked in a bunch of money from their sales? Wouldn’t you have been more motivated to continue doing the same?

I think it is the same thing in science. I had no clue how to do it, and so my efforts often failed. It was a negative feedback loop that had me not wanting to do any more of it!

For me the difference is knowledge – understanding the principles of marketing and applying them systematically.

And that’s why I’m hard at work on a book about it – to help other people understand those principles as well.

Marketing takes a different kind of tenacity than science. Both require a lot of discrete efforts, most of which are not successful, but require a stick-to-it attitude. However, whereas science and programming are fun, marketing and promotion are tedious. If you could help us find the same joy in marketing that we find in mathy tasks… well, that would be amazing.

Aside: Maybe your software would have taken off if you’d released it under the GPL and called it “FreeBase”? No? Okay, I’m bad at this.