Somewhere right now a growth marketer with nine years of experience is being told their role is being restructured. And somewhere else, a developer who has built something genuinely good is writing a post that begins I don't understand why nobody is signing up.
These two people would be enormously useful to each other. They will almost certainly never meet.
The part of your job that went first
Let's be honest about what has happened, because the industry's official position — that AI is a productivity tool which frees marketers for higher-value work — is true in a way that conceals the important part.
Marketing roles were always a blend of two things. There was production: the variants, the briefs, the first drafts, the keyword clusters, the reporting decks, the fourteen subject lines for the A/B test. And there was judgement: deciding what to say, working out who actually cares, knowing which of nine plausible angles is the one that lands.
Production has collapsed in cost. Not improved — collapsed. A task that took a junior two days takes a competent operator twenty minutes. And an enormous number of marketing jobs were, when you counted the hours honestly, mostly production. Those jobs are going, and no amount of reframing changes it.
Judgement has not collapsed. If anything it has become the entire job, because the constraint moved. When producing a hundred pieces of content is free, choosing the right one is worth more than it has ever been. The trouble is that judgement is very hard to sell by the hour, because it looks like thinking, and nobody believes thinking takes as long as it does.
So stop selling it by the hour
Here is the situation on the other side of the fence.
The cost of building software has fallen just as sharply as the cost of making content. A developer can now assemble in a weekend what would have taken a small team a quarter. The consequence is a very large number of finished, working, genuinely useful products that nobody has ever seen — built by people who are excellent at the building and completely lost at the part that comes after.
Read those posts and you will notice something. They are not asking for strategy documents. They are asking for the thing you do without thinking about it. How do I describe this? Where do the people who need it actually spend time? Why does nobody click? Which of these two sentences is better? To you these are Tuesday. To them they are an impassable wall.
That asymmetry is the opportunity, and it is not the usual one. The usual advice to a displaced marketer is to go freelance — which means selling the same hours to more clients, with worse security and no benefits. The alternative is to stop selling hours at all and take a position in the outcome.
What that actually looks like
Four arrangements, in rough order of how much risk you are taking.
Retainer with upside
A modest monthly fee that covers your time, plus a revenue share or equity slice that pays properly if it works. This is the sane default for most people, because it keeps you solvent while giving you real exposure to the outcome. It is also the easiest to propose, because the founder is not being asked to hand over a third of their company to a stranger.
Revenue share
A percentage of what the product earns, usually for a defined period. Cleaner than equity — no cap table, no lawyer, no vesting argument — and it pays before an exit, which for most indie products is the only payment that will ever happen. The catch is that it aligns you with revenue rather than with the company, which can put you at odds over pricing and long-term bets.
Co-founder equity
You join properly, you own a real share, you are doing half the job. This is the right structure when the product has no traction yet and you are genuinely building the demand side from nothing. It is also the one people get wrong most often, by agreeing verbally, not vesting, and discovering two years later that the person who left after six weeks owns a quarter of the business. Vest it. Write it down. Do this before you start, while everyone still likes each other.
Build your own
The least discussed option. If you can produce demand and the cost of producing software has fallen this far, the case for finding a developer at all is weaker than it used to be. Plenty of people in your position have discovered that the audience they already have is the scarce asset, and the product is the part that can be commissioned.
Why the marketer usually gets the worse deal
Worth naming, because it is predictable and avoidable.
Software culture treats code as the real work and everything else as support. You will meet developers who believe, sincerely, that a marketer joining a finished product is joining late — that the hard part is done and you are being handed the easy half. This is precisely backwards for a product with no users, but it is a widespread belief and it shows up in the numbers people offer.
The counter is not argument, it is evidence. Do one small piece of work before any conversation about equity. Rewrite the landing page. Find the three communities where their users actually are. Take an honest run at their positioning and show them what changed. The developer who has watched you move a number in a fortnight does not need convincing that distribution is half the job — they have just seen it. The one who still wants to give you four percent after that is telling you something useful, and you should believe them.
The unglamorous truth
Most of these partnerships will not work. Most indie software products earn nothing regardless of who markets them, and a share of nothing is nothing. Anyone telling you that co-founding with a developer is a reliable replacement for a salary is selling something.
But the trade is genuinely different from the one you have been making. A job paid you reliably and capped you absolutely. This caps nothing and guarantees nothing, and — this is the part people underrate — it puts you on something you chose, rather than on the fourth quarter campaign for a product you privately think is mediocre.
If your career has been spent making people care about things that did not deserve it, there is a reasonable argument that you are extremely well trained for making people care about something that does.