About
I wrote the original version of the Marketing for Developers book in 2015. The book launch changed my life. In its first year, it helped me make $66,000 in side-project revenue. The following year, I decided to focus full-time on my own products. In total, the book has sold more than 5,000 copies.
Since 2016, I’ve considered rewriting Marketing for Devs multiple times, but I never felt I had an angle that warranted a new version.
But now, in the age of AI, that’s all changed. Building software products is more accessible than ever.
“The hard part was never building a SaaS: it’s getting anyone to notice you.”
Using tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, more people are launching apps than ever before. The hardest part now is distribution: finding customers and getting them to care.
In 2026, I’m updating the book to make it relevant in this new era.
Who am I?
I’m Justin Jackson. Over my career, I’ve been a Product Manager, a CMO, and a CEO. I’ve been building and launching businesses my whole life. This culminated in 2018, when I partnered with Jon Buda to build Transistor.fm (a podcast hosting platform).
Justin Jackson (left) and co-founder Jon Buda (right)
We built Transistor on nights and weekends, and launched it in August 2018. By August of the following year, we were both working on Transistor full-time.
Twelve months after our launch, we achieved our goal: $20,000 in monthly revenue. What we thought might take us 5 years ended up taking 1 year.
In the years that followed, we’ve continued to grow. We’ve hired four employees, generated millions in revenue, and serve over 35,000 podcast feeds (including shows like Acquired, Diggnation, and Think Fast).
How I built this
I built this entire site and publishing system with Claude Code in the Claude app.
This way I don’t have to run Claude Code locally in my terminal, I just connected it to a GitHub repo and my sessions get persisted across desktop, mobile, and web. Then I just chat with this project all day. While on my phone I got it to fix a mobile rendering bug. On my desktop, I had it generate a sitemap.xml file. Sometimes I’ll update content on-the-fly while I dictate into my phone.
Here’s what the system does:
- Every chapter is a plain Markdown file in a Git repo — the single source of truth for both the free online version and the paid PDF/EPUB.
- Every time I edit a chapter and push it, the system automatically:
- rebuilds the free online version of the book,
- regenerates the EPUB and PDF from that same Markdown (via pandoc + headless Chrome),
- uploads the fresh files to storage, so anyone who bought the book always gets the latest edition, and
- redeploys the site.
It’s built with Astro, hosted on Cloudflare Pages, with the ebook files on Cloudflare R2 and checkout through Stripe.
The best part: the website and the EPUB/PDF never drift out of sync. They’re all generated from the same source, so whenever I update a chapter or write a new one, everything updates at once.