Find Good Audience

A couple of days ago I was Krakow .NET Developer Group meeting. By the way if you live near Krakow and still didn’t forget how to code I recommend attending to those meetings (website is in polish only). Coming back to my point – there were guest speaker on the meeting - Michal Chaniewski, one of MVPs from Poland. The Group had to sponsor his travel as he lives in another city. The Group is non-profit organization, so they asked a couple of friendly companies about a small sponsorship.

Wind decided to do that, but because you can hardly call me selfless I asked a host to announce a small job advert. Just two sentences: “We look for experienced C++ developer to work close to telecommunication hardware. If you’re interested, contact Pawel, who sits there.” It wasn’t a burden for the host I guess.

It definitely wasn’t the cheapest job advertisement I could post. It definitely wasn’t the biggest target group I could reach (there were about 50 people in the room). Was it a bad investment then? No, because the quality of audience was highly above average. Most of them are still active developers. None of them are lazy – in other case they wouldn’t attend evening meeting (between 6:30 pm and 9:30 pm) where they look at Visual Studio. As far as I can judge you can meet there very high percentage of very good developers. The general quality of the audience was high.

That’s why I think the advert was a good investment. I’m not sure if it’ll be successful, but I’m pretty sure that quality of responses will be higher than from any other channel I used. Even if there won’t be many of them.

I believe in targeted marketing. I believe in ideas like Joel Job Board. If you can name and find right audience for your marketing you’re halfway there. No matter if your goal is to employ a developer, find users of your service or sell something.