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IMHO: In most cases, dedicating 50% of your time to marketing is a good idea. The notable exceptions would be: * Your growth model relies on virality. (In whic
by MalcolmDiggs 11y ago
IMHO: In most cases, dedicating 50% of your time to marketing is a good idea. The notable exceptions would be:
* Your growth model relies on virality. (In which case, as long as you have some traffic, that should be enough to test your model and potentially start growing).
* Your growth model relies on SEO (in which case, you should spend time on that, not direct marketing)
* Your growth model relies on referrals. (Think of a contractor who does no marketing himself, he just incentivizes his clients to refer new clients)
* Your business model doesn't rely on user growth (hard to think of an example here, but I'm sure it exists).
But in most cases, you've got to market the product aggressively. Think of how many millions of sites exist (and are vying for your users' attention). Without some effort put into marketing, there's little reason to assume a user will visit your site at all.
That being said, you should do what you're good at. If you feel like the product needs to be marketed heavily (and you don't enjoy that kind of work), then maybe it's worth finding a co-founder who enjoys that part.
- chadholt 11y agoEven if your growth model relies on virality, seo, referrals, you should run some marketing tasks to validate your idea. For example SEO takes a really long time to kick in. You do not want to build a product and work on SEO, only to realize a few years later after site has gone up in the SERPs that you built something no one wants. A better approach is to run some ads before (and during) you build your product to validate it. Even if the ads are not cost effective, initially it is worth paying for validation.
- siquick 11y agothis x 10 One of the most effective ways I've found to validate is to put up a landing page with a brief overview of your offering and, explain that you'll be launching soon and ask the user to enter their email address into a Mailchimp-linked signup box. Then spend $30 on super-targeted Facebook/Google ads for your niche and make sure you ad links to the landing page. If 25-30% of visitors enter their email address then you're onto something.
- PerfectElement 11y agoIs $30 statistically significant? Depending on the keyword, this could bring only 10 people to your website.