Favors.dev
The short answer
A founder marketing routine is five recurring jobs, publish, distribute, talk to users, maintain listings and measure, set into fixed weekly blocks. Pick the budget you can hold on your worst week, two, five or ten hours, run the matching schedule below, and know in advance which jobs you drop first when the week goes wrong.
"Spend half your time on marketing" is advice you will hear from nearly everyone, and it has never helped anyone plan a Tuesday. It tells you a proportion and withholds the part you actually need: what to do, in what order, for how long, and what to do when your week falls apart on Wednesday.
This guide is the plan that advice leaves out. It is a weekly routine in blocks, at three time budgets, with an explicit order for what to cut. If you have two hours, there is a version for you. If you have ten, there is one for that too.
Why does the 50% rule fail in practice?
It fails because a percentage is not a schedule. Fifty percent of a founder's week is twenty hours or more, and nobody who is still building the product has twenty spare hours. So the rule gets applied as guilt instead: you feel behind all week, do marketing in scattered scraps when the guilt peaks, and finish nothing.
Two other things go wrong. A percentage says nothing about which marketing. An hour spent redesigning a logo and an hour spent talking to a customer both count toward the 50%, and they are not remotely the same. And a percentage collapses on your worst week, because it has no answer for what stops first.
A routine fixes all three. It names the work, fixes the hours, and decides ahead of time what yields. If you want the larger plan this routine sits inside, the 90-day startup marketing plan covers the quarter, and the go-to-market guide for solo founders covers the strategy. This post covers the week.
What are the five recurring jobs?
Almost every task a founder calls "marketing" falls into one of five jobs that repeat every week. Naming them is what lets you budget time, because you can finally say what an hour is for.
| Job | What it is | Done for the week when |
|---|---|---|
| 01Publish | Make one thing that did not exist on Monday: a post, a demo clip, a changelog entry, a comparison page. | One finished piece is live at a URL you can link to. |
| 02Distribute | Put that piece in front of people who did not already follow you, in the places they already read. | It went to at least two places, and you replied to everyone who answered. |
| 03Talk to users | Hear from a real person who has used the product, or who should have and did not. | One conversation or one answered email that taught you something you did not know. |
| 04Maintain listings | Keep the profiles, directory entries, reviews and old posts that already send you traffic accurate and alive. | One listing or old post is fixed, updated or answered. |
| 05Measure | Write down what happened so next week starts from facts instead of a feeling. | Five lines in a log. Nothing more. |
Notice what is not on the list: choosing a new channel, redesigning the site, rewriting your positioning, trying a new tool. Those are real jobs, but they happen monthly or quarterly. Letting them into the weekly block is how a week of "marketing" produces nothing a stranger can see. If you are unsure which channels deserve your weekly hours at all, the channel scorecard for indie hackers ranks them by effort and payoff.
What does the weekly schedule look like at 2, 5 and 10 hours?
The same five jobs run at every budget. What changes is the size of each block. This table shows the minutes each job gets, and every column adds up to its budget.
| Job | 2 hours | 5 hours | 10 hours |
|---|---|---|---|
| Publish | 60 min | 120 min | 240 min |
| Distribute | 25 min | 60 min | 120 min |
| Talk to users | 20 min | 60 min | 120 min |
| Maintain listings | Monthly | 30 min | 60 min |
| Measure | 15 min | 30 min | 60 min |
| Total | 120 min | 300 min | 600 min |
Two design choices are worth explaining. The publish block is the biggest at every level, because it is the only job that creates something to distribute, and it needs the longest unbroken stretch. Paul Graham made the case in his essay Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule: people who make things prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. The same holds for writing a post. And the talk-to-users block never shrinks to zero, even at two hours, because it is the one job that cannot be faked later.
Here is how each budget lays out across the week.
2 hours a week
A job or a family holds the rest of your week. This is a real routine, not a lesser one.
- Tue · 60 minPublish: one piece, written start to finish in a single sitting.
- Thu · 25 minDistribute: post it in two places and answer every reply.
- Fri · 20 minTalk to users: send three short emails, or reply to one existing thread properly.
- Fri · 15 minMeasure: fill in the five-line log.
5 hours a week
Roughly one evening plus a weekend morning, or an hour on weekdays.
- Mon · 30 minMeasure: update the log and choose this week's one piece.
- Tue · 120 minPublish: one longer piece, or two short ones.
- Wed · 60 minDistribute: post it, then comment in three places where your buyers talk.
- Thu · 60 minTalk to users: two conversations, scheduled in advance.
- Fri · 30 minMaintain listings: update one directory entry and one old post.
10 hours a week
Marketing is half of one full-time week. Protect the blocks or they get eaten.
- Mon · 60 minMeasure: update the log, review last week, write the plan.
- Tue · 120 minPublish: draft the main piece.
- Wed · 120 minPublish: edit, finish and ship it. Start the secondary piece.
- Wed · 60 minDistribute: first wave, in the places that matter most.
- Thu · 120 minTalk to users: calls, support threads and one outbound batch.
- Thu · 60 minDistribute: second wave, plus answering everything that came back.
- Fri · 60 minMaintain listings: three listings or old posts updated.
The two-hour plan skips listing maintenance on purpose. You do it once a month instead, in one sitting, as covered below. If you are on that budget, your best lever is not another hour. It is getting more out of each distribution block, which is where trading favors with other founders helps: a founder who reads, reviews or shares your piece does in five minutes what takes you forty alone.
What do you drop first when the week goes wrong?
Decide this before the bad week, not during it. In the moment, everything looks equally urgent, and the loudest task wins. A written drop order removes the decision.
| Order | Cut | What to do instead |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Maintain listings | It is the only job that can wait a month without a visible cost. |
| 2 | The second wave of distribution | Post once, in the single best place, and answer the replies. |
| 3 | Measuring in detail | Shrink the log from five lines to one: what shipped. |
| 4 | The length of what you publish | Ship a short, finished piece instead of a long, unfinished one. |
| 5 | Nothing else. These two stay. | One thing published and one real conversation. If a week holds only those, it still counts. |
The logic is simple. The jobs furthest from a stranger's eyes go first, and the two that create value and information, a published piece and a real conversation, go last. A week that holds only those two is a small week, not a failed one. Our piece on marketing consistency without burnout goes deeper on why designing for the worst week is what keeps the routine alive past the second month.
Which jobs belong monthly or quarterly instead?
Some work is real but does not repeat weekly. Putting it in the weekly block crowds out the routine; leaving it off the calendar means it never happens. Give it a slot of its own.
- Monthly, 60 to 90 minutes: audit every listing and directory entry you have, fix the dead links, refresh the screenshots, and update anything that has gone out of date. The list of places to start is in our startup launch directories guide.
- Monthly, 30 minutes: read last month's log from top to bottom and write down one thing to repeat and one to stop.
- Quarterly, half a day: review your channels, decide whether to add or drop one, and check that your positioning still matches what people say about you.
- Quarterly, one hour: reread your pricing page and your top landing page as a stranger would.
The listing audit is worth the calendar slot. Directory entries and old posts keep sending people long after you stop thinking about them, and a stale one costs you the visitor it earned. The startup launch directories guide lists the ones that matter, so you know what to audit.
How do you track it without building a dashboard?
Keep a plain log with five lines per week. No tool is needed; a note on your phone works. Write the same five answers every Friday:
- What I published, with the link.
- Where I distributed it, and how many replies came back.
- Who I talked to, and the one thing I learned.
- What I fixed or updated in an existing listing or post.
- Hours I actually spent against the budget.
The last line is the honest one. If you planned five hours and logged two for three weeks running, the plan is wrong, not you. Cut the budget to two and hold it. Add one external number once a week, and only one: impressions and clicks for the pages you published, from the Search Console Performance report. For a deeper set of numbers, see the launch metrics that matter.
Resist building a dashboard. A dashboard is a way of working on marketing without doing any, and a founder with five lines in a note app and a rising impressions line is better informed than one with a dozen charts they never open. When you publish, aim to be useful to a person rather than to an algorithm, as Google's guidance on helpful, people-first content puts it. One useful piece a week for six months does more than a burst of ten.
Frequently asked questions
How many hours a week should a solo founder spend on marketing?
There is no universal number, and an honest answer depends on what you are doing. A routine that fits in two hours and happens every week beats a ten-hour plan that you abandon in March. Start with the budget you can hold on your worst week, then raise it only after a month of hitting it.
What should a founder do for marketing every week?
Five jobs recur: publish one thing, distribute it, talk to a real user, keep your existing listings alive, and write down what happened. Everything else, such as a channel review or a pricing test, belongs on a monthly or quarterly list, not in the weekly block.
Is it better to market a little every day or in longer blocks?
Blocks, for anything that needs thinking. Publishing and user calls both suffer when they are cut into twenty-minute slices. Keep the daily slot for light work like replying to comments. Paul Graham's essay on the maker's schedule makes the same point about programmers: the cost of an interruption is the whole half-day it breaks.
What should I drop first when I am out of time?
Listing maintenance, then the second round of distribution, then detailed measuring. Keep one published piece and one real conversation. Those two are the routine. If they survive, the week counts.
How do I know if my weekly marketing routine is working?
Look at it over a month, not a week. In Search Console, see whether impressions for the pages you published are rising. Across the same four weeks, count the conversations you had and the replies you earned. A routine is working if the log is full and the line is moving, even slowly.