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Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

MrTonyD 10y ago
I would say that one of the most common problems is unrealistic expectations placed on Marketers for highly technical products. Successful technical companies realized long ago that they must use teams which combine skills to tackle individual projects in Marketing & Advertising. There is some magic combination of experience, luck, and process - and usually many projects in parallel are required so that ineffective approaches can be quickly discarded and another tried. I've been involved in successful marketing efforts - and the failed ones were usually doomed from the start by executives with unrealistic expectations - resulting in process and organizations which can't work.
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
It's almost pathos at this point in the hacker community that if you do any marketing or promotion you're a shill and wantrepreneur at best and a charlatan and huckster at a minimum. I know I used to feel this way before I really tried to launch a product. Now I know that there is no such thing as a product that is so good that it sells itself. In fact the best technical solutions I've seen have failed because the market doesn't care about perfection, it cares about mind share. There is still a stallmanesque anarchist quality to some engineers that view commercial success as tainted. I think I can appreciate that in some philosophical senses, but let's not get too high on our horses.
- MegaButts 10y ago
  While this is almost always true, there are exceptions to this rule. If you're working on something that is inherently press friendly, you don't really need to market it. You have the first real self-driving car and you just drove from New York City to Los Angeles? I'm pretty sure that will get you whatever press you want. And then of course there's WhatsApp, which was so focused on solely their product that they had no address or phone number for investors/media to find them. Yes yes, the exception does not make the rule, but they are still important data points. That aside, 99.??% of startups will need to market heavily to compete successfully. Edit: And I just noticed the (Software) parentheses in the title. I guess you can replace self-driving cars with advanced AI, say the first AI to pass the Turing Test.
  - r_singh 10y ago
    Like you said though, it is limited to a very few exceptions. Not every company that receives press grows as desired. I was co-founder at a project that has received 10+ newspaper articles (progressively better placed) and growth kept declining over the months only to become negative. However, I obviously understand that one can never look at these factors in isolation and that there are multiple variables on which growth depends. I would also not consider press to be a part of marketing really.
    - MegaButts 10y ago
      I guess an important caveat for the exception to the rule is the product has to be so good that it just automatically makes money. A true self-driving car has an obvious path to profitability. A social media platform that is an existential threat to Facebook is an obvious target for an acquisition.
  - raverbashing 10y ago
    No, even a good "inherently press friendly" thing won't even blip on the radar without some minimal PR and marketing effort
  - azinman2 10y ago
    It's kind of a myth that press is all the marketing you need. You don't get as much quality inbound as you'd think (probability of your entire target market seeing and reading it certainly isn't 100%), and it's a singular moment in time.
  - michaelbuckbee 10y ago
    Having a press friendly startup is good for getting you press - but that's different than marketing. If it's not actually driving sales then it's just noise. For instance, I worked with an early stage hardware startup whose customers were developers (you couldn't actually do anything with the device if you weren't a developer. It was a SDK not a finished product). They generated tons of press because hardware is much easier to understand, show and write stories about than software. But despite being in really high profile publications (millions and millions of people seeing it) - it failed to move the needle sales wise. - Most developers aren't reading these publications - Most press articles don't mention the developer angle - You're just one of many many stories that day in a big publication. - In some ways is _really hurt_ because it made it seem like it was a $100 thing you could buy at Target than a complicated SDK. This resulted in lots of non-devs buying, being wildly disappointed and wanting to return it.
- pjmlp 10y ago
  > There is still a stallmanesque anarchist quality to some engineers that view commercial success as tainted. I think I can appreciate that in some philosophical senses, but let's not get too high on our horses. That is why while I appreciate what FOSS has become, as someone with coding experience since the mid-80's in home computers, I don't have any qualms with commercial software, specially since I also have the experience of what it meant failing to do pure FOSS business.
WalterBright 10y ago
I call it the "Build It And They Will Come" Hollywood myth.
z3t4 10y ago
If you have the product on the app marketplace and it's growing and generating money, there's no reason to bleed money. And it's absolutely no reason to shut it down. Make your operations more efficient. That will also help when scaling up.
aamederen 10y ago
Lately I started to understand more and more about the benefit and importance of marketing and starting to market early. This article summarizes the benefits in a clean and easy-to-read items. I think, hiring a marketer is a big problem. Let's say you are a group of engineers building a good product and you know you need to hire marketers. The questions are, how do you hire a marketer? What criteria do you seek in a marketer? How do people become marketers? One obvious choice is trying to find someone who marketed a similar product before but it is not always easy. I think this is also the case for hiring sales people.
- erikb 10y ago
  The author's approach is actually quite good: Start learning some marketing yourself, and when it starts to get repetitive pay someone else to do it. Then you also have some skills you can use to evaluate the marketers you're hiring.
justonepost 10y ago
i have built products that went to millions of users, zero marketing. If the product is inherently viral, you don't need to market. Othwerwise, you do.
- Kiro 10y ago
  Same here. One of my main criteria when evaluating a business idea is whether it will need serious marketing or not. If it needs marketing I often dismiss it.
  - Kiro 10y ago
    (Dismissing as in not pursuing it myself, not dismissing the idea in whole.)
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  Can you describe your product's attributes in a little more detail? I had a niche product that went "viral" within its small community. We immediately had people trying to imitate us, and most failed so badly that their products didn't work at all and any gains they made were quickly rolled back; ultimately, these copycats only served to promote our actually working product further, so they were net good things. A few key people who controlled large platforms in this niche spurned us, presumably because they intended to copy our featureset at some point, and actively removed any reference to our product. Despite this, we had continual growth with relatively small marketing budgets. After about a year, a competitor whose product occasionally worked emerged and despite being much worse than us along every conceivable axis, they cannibalized our niche market within 2 months using spammy marketing tactics (astroturfing, fake followers/likes, SEO link rings (now called "Private Blog Networks" in SEO parlance)). They also forged alliances with some of the niche platforms that refused to allow discussion of our product (though these companies ignored similar offers when I tried to make them). The new competitor eventually spammed so thoroughly that they caused a PR issue for a large company whose data this sector depended on. My company and all others that occasionally functioned in this sector, which at this point included me, the spam company, and 3-4 atrocious copies of the spam company, were all shut down by legal threats from this large company. The point of this protracted story is that it seems that any business that could go from 0 to millions would be immediately bombarded by imitators, spammers, and copycats, whose superior marketing game would destroy the original company as long as they can imitate 10% of the necessary core functionality. Did you have defenses against this? If so, what were they?
stevoski 10y ago
I built a desktop app (Poker Copilot) in 2008. I figured if I did it well, I'd have my own one-person software company supplying a steady stream of income with little ongoing effort. My product would be so intuitive that it wouldn't need a user guide. It certainly wouldn't need marketing because everyone in my target audience would spread the word that my product was what they needed! Ha, what a fool 2008 me was. What I didn't realise was that my two main tasks for years would be marketing and customer support. Coding new features (of which many were requested) and fixing bugs (of which there were many) had to be scheduled around the twice-daily customer support windows and the marketing efforts. Nine years later, and still the stream of customer support requests has not relented! Nine years and still I'm focusing on marketing one day a week! And of course, there are still bugs.
- SyneRyder 10y ago
  "Nine years later, and still the stream of customer support requests has not relented!" I wish I could upvote this more than once. Customer support burden is always underestimated. It's time consuming, especially if you want to do it properly & not just outsource to someone overseas following a script. Even releasing something as freeware is likely to cause an unintended stream of support enquiries. I have no idea how the folks selling 99c apps manage it, even one short email enquiry would wipe out a dozen sales or more (if you put a monetary value your time). Kudos on charging a sensible price for your app & upgrades! I imagine at that price point it's okay if a sale incurs a support ticket or two.
  - WA 10y ago
    I sell B2C software with a subscription of 1.99€ per month. I have 7,000 active users. I get 5-10 emails per day max. Before I charged money for my software, I was afraid of the overwhelming flood of customer support requests. Except they never came. > even one short email enquiry would wipe out a dozen sales or more (if you put a monetary value your time) Per email, yes, absolutely. Sometimes I take 20 minutes to answer a more complex email. But since I know that I don't receive more than 5-10 emails, I take the time and this person might recommend my software to other people, because of the great support. An easy way to mitigate customer support is to have FAQs and lots of written texts on the website. Most people prefer to help themselves I think, because its faster. Sometimes I wonder if this is a mentality thing. My customers are all Germans. Maybe US customers are faster to send a short email than browsing through FAQ.
dwenzek 10y ago
> Someone with less understanding of how a product actually works is often better equipped to communicate what it does than someone stuck in the weeds. This is so true! Yet, it took me a lot of time to understand this. Maybe because this is not always easy to see that the shift perceived, between what I said about my product and how my interlocutor reworded it, is in fact a move from details to the product's essence.
- Nomentatus 10y ago
  My best takeaway, too.
TeeWEE 10y ago
Marketing is important, however more important is to build in a viral loop into your product, that for every new customer x>1 new customers are contacted. This is how social networks work, invite your friends systems, etc. However, even then marketing is still important. But too often marketing is seen as: Spend huge amount of money on ads. No: marketing is market research, choosing your target audience, branding, image building, tone-of-voice etc.
- jackgolding 10y ago
  I find this as the struggle as someone who has traditionally worked with large brands. One of the companies I worked with spent millions of dollars on paid advertising while startups and web companies seem to favour inbound marketing a lot more - which big companies aren't really as good at (or pay as much attention too.)
- mootothemax 10y ago
  > more important is to build in a viral loop into your product, that for every new customer x>1 new customers are contacted This is marketing.
- thetalkingcode 10y ago
  and figuring out that particular viral loop in the product isn't easy. It takes lots of efforts from a marketer as well as an engineer to find out that one thing or pain point from which you get growth.
shubhamjain 10y ago
I jibe with the article but I disagree that marketing is something that should be pursued from Day 1. As Jessica Livingston has noted umpteen times, the first thing you need is product that delights users. Marketing activities around an idea that might not have a useful market is a bit wasteful. I don't imply that marketing is pointless at early stage but time-consuming marketing channels (blogging, social media) are best avoided at that time. A detrimental mistake that I made when I was making a product was to think that I need 'marketing' to get more (beta) users. I started writing blog articles without understanding that I needed at least a baseline of users who really desire the product. Reading about some of the SaaS successes, I think that a lot of entrepreneurs get their initial users from people they know / ads / reachout. Strong marketing effort kicks in when the product seems useful for a market and organic growth doesn't feel enough.
- garysieling 10y ago
  I think the marketing work that happens early is of a different character than what you'd do if you had a base of customers. I've been building a search engine for talks (https://www.findlectures.com https://www.findlectures.com), and when I demo it people often give me new language that helps the copy on the site, or ideas for features that communicate the value better.
- gk1 10y ago
  I agree. I've helped startups with marketing at every, and found there's more value in marketing when you (the founder) can tell the marketer what problem the product solves, and for whom. If you don't know those two things, then it's too early to be thinking about marketing.
- kbos87 10y ago
  100% agree. As a marketer, the first litmus test I apply in evaluating a role is the level of product market fit a company has achieved. As a marketer, I don't have the levers to get a company past that hump if they haven't on their own. My expertise is in driving scale, not finding the initial seeds of value. There are places that marketing can be done before product/market fit. If you are well funded and 100% committed to building for a certain audience, there is value in creating content and building a following. But this doesn't necessarily require marketing headcount.
cknight 10y ago
I fell very much in to the trap of his second point there. Mind you, I would never hire a marketer (not enough money is involved in my startup), so this "marketer" would of course be "me". I decided there was no point telling people about my web-based startup until I had a working site that they could see for themselves. So indeed, by the time I was ready to let beta testers in, I had no real network on which to rely on to get it in front of peoples eyes. As a not-for-profit, I don't plan to make money off it (and hence don't plan to spend much on it), and am not interested in the VC side of things. I remember initially reading BetaList's requirement of submitting to them before you actually launch and I found it ridiculous. Now I realise, if done right, it's the proper way to go about things. And I missed that boat badly.
scotty79 10y ago
For me it was always because - they know how the meat is made.
superasn 10y ago
There are other myths. 6) What if someone steals my idea and beats me to the market? Due to the culture of secrecy propagated by big companies like Apple we too believe our ideas are unique and need to be secret. If anything, the best ideas are usually incremental changes to already existing ideas but I digress. The point is being first to the market means squat but if you have a solid marketing plan and a consistent supply of leads (+ good relationship with your list) then you will make money. period. 7) A big launch is the end goal Even a big launch is only 1% of your total traffic put leniently. So many people put all their hopes on a big launch.. So you're on Techcrunch, big deal. I've had many sites on TC, Mashable, etc but the traffic usually means nothing. You get a burst of signups (probably 1k+ in a week IIRC) but that is like a drop in the ocean and just like posting on a Forum, the moment your post drops from homepage - it's history. On the other hand, good SEO, and consistent supply of leads (say 100 leads a day = your big launch on TC in 10 days) is what will keep you in the game and make you money everyday. 8) If I have more traffic my site will grow Getting traffic is half the job. Converting that traffic into paying leads is where the money is. If you think your lead will buy from you the moment it lands on your site, you're being naive. You have to romance your subscribers, give them free bonuses, educate them and then one day when you have something they need, they will buy from you - even if you're last to the market or are charging them more. When people trust you, you will get more repeat business than the new orders. I bet people with iPhones are the biggest consumers of the next iPhones too. Never ever underestimate the power of up-selling (though this one I think you only learn from experience).
DrNuke 10y ago
Most times there is not a market for a decent ROI and unfortunately there will never be, it would really cost too much terraforming your niche.
meshr 10y ago
>5) Hiring a marketer takes too much time Is there any recommendations for all in one turnkey service for marketing? So that i just pay money and they do the rest.
- CPLX 10y ago
  No. That makes about as much sense as asking if there's a turnkey service for product. I mean, in both cases it's possible to hire competent people or firms to help you, but you still have to like actually be involved in the core work of getting customers.
- hluska 10y ago
  I'm part developer/part marketer and I once tried something like this. Unfortunately, it was easy to bill for tactics but incredibly hard to bill for strategy. So, all the research that goes into being good at marketing was a sunk cost.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- F_J_H 10y ago
  Yes, for the most part. This is what marketing agencies do. You still need to provide them with the talking points and value proposition so they have the background for drafting copy for the Marketing collateral, but once they have that they can do a great job at putting together a marketing plan and executing on it, assuming you found a good agency.
  - sparrish 10y ago
    > assuming you found a good agency. There's the rub. How do you find a good one? We've spent obscene amounts of money on agencies that said they could get us growth but none made the needle move. Where are all these good agencies?
    - F_J_H 10y ago
      Yes, that's the rub for sure. The same question is also asked by non-technical people when trying to find a developer - how do you find a good one? So, I think you can follow some of the same principles: What projects have they done in the past? What results have they produced? Can you show some examples of your work? Can we speak to your references? etc. Although it's not "turnkey" as the OP was asking about, you can do a lot of it on your own, or at least put together an overall plan, and then use agencies to fill the gaps. Just as with starting a start-up, there is a lot of great material and thought leadership out there on how to do it, along with a lot of practical advice. Other than a few courses as part of my business degree, and working with marketing agencies in the past, I don't have a marketing background. However, I took a deep dive into marketing over the past 18 months, and we achieved some solid results. I spent a bit of time doing some research, came up with a strategy and overall plan, and then executed. Specifically, we put a content marketing program in place, along with some lead tracking tools, spoke at a few conferences, did some webinars, etc., all of which led to deals in the six figures. (In the B2B space.) PM me if you'd like more detail re: resources.
throwaway26960 10y ago
Oddly enough, the only somewhat successful project ($20k/month peak passive income) I've ever had was when I didn't know how to code. I spent all my time on marketing and built the site in Wordpress + Plugins in 1 day.
- tchock23 10y ago
  The number of potentially successful businesses that can be built with Wordpress + Plugins (+ maybe Zapier) is crazy. I have a few SaaS products out in the wild and find myself longing for the days where I just had to worry about maintaining a decent WP site (with various integrations around it). All the work that goes into just maintaining a SaaS application tires you out - particularly if you're a solo founder - leaving less time available for marketing...
- laktek 10y ago
  Curious how was the long term maintenance of a Wordpress site? Like applying security fixes, etc.
matheweis 10y ago
As a founder myself I find it's more about the difficulty in finding a marketing strategy that has an effective ROI without increasing your burn rate to a point of failure. The article implies that all marketing will be effective, or at least that you can easily have a positive ROI just by hiring a marketer. This is not necessarily true, especially with the limited capital that many bootstrapped startup may have available. Experincing negative ROI (or even hearing experiences about that) seem more likely candidates for why it isn't done than the "Myths" listed here.
- brilliantcode 10y ago
  THIS. The WHAT is driving me nuts. I get the WHY and HOWs of numerous marketing channels and methods. Pretty much what happens when I start blogging. I put a lot of effort but even the blog post itself must now be marketed. Put it in on HN, Reddit and it feels like playing lottery...
josh_carterPDX 10y ago
Such great insight here. This could have been an article that I wrote since I've gone through nearly everything Dave has gone through. As some have already commented it's something a lot of folks struggle with. You build a great product, perhaps you get a good initial bounce, but struggle to keep the growth going. You really need a lot of stamina and patience to grow a product to critical mass. You can never predict when it'll happen.
wordpressdev 10y ago
I think the founders that fail to market their products are those who take marketing as something external to product development. Those who consider marketing as introducing and explaining their product features to the world - are successful.
20years 10y ago
I always say coding is the easy part of your SaaS. Marketing is hard. Don't forget customer support, which if you are really good at can fuel your sales and act has it's own marketing channel. Let's not even mention all of the other things that come into play with running a business. Coding is the easy part!
gnicholas 10y ago
> Great products deserve great marketing—Tweet this For early-stage founders, this is a misleading suggestion. Yes, it's true that if you could have great marketing without any cost, you'd want to have it. But this misses the point that if you put $5k into marketing every month, then you're putting $5k less into the product. So the real question is, would you rather have a good product and great marketing, or a great product and good marketing? I will concede that some founders don't put enough emphasis on marketing, but quotes like this overlook the basic cost-benefit balancing act that early-stage founders live and die by. Also, I cringe every time I see a "Tweet this" link. Especially in a piece about marketing, it reminds me that this guy wants to build up his personal brand, which is why he's blogging in the first place. I understand that, but this in-your-face reminder (3x in one blog post) makes the piece come across as less of a "I learned some lessons I want to share" post and more of a "I'm trying to build a brand so I blog a bunch, and this is what I came up with for a post." It kills the authenticity and makes the whole thing suspect (and then when I read trite stuff like the above quote, that confirms that the information contained within isn't thoughtful—it's largely filler).
- nostrademons 10y ago
  I think a better suggestion for early-stage founders might be to focus on information coming in rather than information going out. You should do as much sales & marketing as you need to generate a reaction from your target users. Then pay careful attention to that reaction and adapt the product. The focus is always about learning rather than evangelizing - putting a half-baked product out there and then blasting the hell out of Facebook/Twitter/Medium/PR doesn't usually get you very many recurring projects, but putting a half-baked product out there, attempting to sell it to a few engaged potential customers, and then adapting it in response to their feedback might.
erichocean 10y ago
Read The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company by Steve Blank — it teaches founders how to achieve product-market fit. Once you have that, marketing is easy and cost effective. Until then, it's usually a waste of money.
tibs4eva 10y ago
Great write-up. As a marketer (independent consultant for years and now founder of a digital agency), I cannot tell you how many times I have had to tell clients, "If you build it, they will not come" if they do not know your product even exists. Even so, many technical startup founders still place marketing low on the list of things to focus on early on. And I'm saying this as someone who started out on the tech side and moved to the business and marketing side later.
grammarnazzzi 10y ago
It surprises me to see so many comments about this article. I couldn't get past the grammar problems in the first paragraph. The most compelling thing at the beginning of this article is the stock photograph of a pretty girl seemingly praying in a coffee shop. "Founders predictably underestimate the importance of hiring marketers." They do? Who are these founders? Founders of what? And who are these people predicting the estimations of these founders? How did you learn of these predictions? Are the predictors publishing their founder predictions somewhere? "As a result, many startups don’t get round to marketing their product until it’s too late." I realize I'm being pedantic now, but "get round" threw me for a moment. It's another break in the flow of reading his message. I wondered what's "get round" mean? Is that like getting fat? Like getting "round about the middle"? Oh. he means "get around to". Googling "get round" returns 400k results. Googling "get around": 55M. I guess some people do say "get round." 1 out of 137 people. Word choice matters. "This happened to me and I’ve thought long and hard about why this happens." What's he referring to? What is "this" that happened? I had to stop and reread the previous sentence to figure out what "this" and "happened" refers to: "startups don’t get round to marketing their product until it’s too late." So a start up didn't get round to marketing a product. Okay, so I guess that implies that a startup was lazy and irresponsible by not getting around to marketing a product. In short, the problem is that something bad was done to a product. That's what happened to you? Inflicted upon you? David Bailey is a product and a startup didn't market him responsibly. I stopped reading at this point. He put so little care into editing and proofreading his article, I figured he probably put just as little effort into crafting a meaningful message and formulating logical conclusions. I guess I'll never find out what the pretty girl is praying for.

I would say that one of the most common problems is unrealistic expectations placed on Marketers for highly technical products. Successful technical companies realized long ago that they must use teams which combine skills to tackle individual projects in Marketing & Advertising. There is some magic combination of experience, luck, and process - and usually many projects in parallel are required so that ineffective approaches can be quickly discarded and another tried. I've been involved in successful marketing efforts - and the failed ones were usually doomed from the start by executives with unrealistic expectations - resulting in process and organizations which can't work.

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

It's almost pathos at this point in the hacker community that if you do any marketing or promotion you're a shill and wantrepreneur at best and a charlatan and huckster at a minimum. I know I used to feel this way before I really tried to launch a product. Now I know that there is no such thing as a product that is so good that it sells itself. In fact the best technical solutions I've seen have failed because the market doesn't care about perfection, it cares about mind share. There is still a stallmanesque anarchist quality to some engineers that view commercial success as tainted. I think I can appreciate that in some philosophical senses, but let's not get too high on our horses.

MegaButts 10y ago
While this is almost always true, there are exceptions to this rule. If you're working on something that is inherently press friendly, you don't really need to market it. You have the first real self-driving car and you just drove from New York City to Los Angeles? I'm pretty sure that will get you whatever press you want. And then of course there's WhatsApp, which was so focused on solely their product that they had no address or phone number for investors/media to find them. Yes yes, the exception does not make the rule, but they are still important data points. That aside, 99.??% of startups will need to market heavily to compete successfully. Edit: And I just noticed the (Software) parentheses in the title. I guess you can replace self-driving cars with advanced AI, say the first AI to pass the Turing Test.
- r_singh 10y ago
  Like you said though, it is limited to a very few exceptions. Not every company that receives press grows as desired. I was co-founder at a project that has received 10+ newspaper articles (progressively better placed) and growth kept declining over the months only to become negative. However, I obviously understand that one can never look at these factors in isolation and that there are multiple variables on which growth depends. I would also not consider press to be a part of marketing really.
  - MegaButts 10y ago
    I guess an important caveat for the exception to the rule is the product has to be so good that it just automatically makes money. A true self-driving car has an obvious path to profitability. A social media platform that is an existential threat to Facebook is an obvious target for an acquisition.
- raverbashing 10y ago
  No, even a good "inherently press friendly" thing won't even blip on the radar without some minimal PR and marketing effort
- azinman2 10y ago
  It's kind of a myth that press is all the marketing you need. You don't get as much quality inbound as you'd think (probability of your entire target market seeing and reading it certainly isn't 100%), and it's a singular moment in time.
- michaelbuckbee 10y ago
  Having a press friendly startup is good for getting you press - but that's different than marketing. If it's not actually driving sales then it's just noise. For instance, I worked with an early stage hardware startup whose customers were developers (you couldn't actually do anything with the device if you weren't a developer. It was a SDK not a finished product). They generated tons of press because hardware is much easier to understand, show and write stories about than software. But despite being in really high profile publications (millions and millions of people seeing it) - it failed to move the needle sales wise. - Most developers aren't reading these publications - Most press articles don't mention the developer angle - You're just one of many many stories that day in a big publication. - In some ways is _really hurt_ because it made it seem like it was a $100 thing you could buy at Target than a complicated SDK. This resulted in lots of non-devs buying, being wildly disappointed and wanting to return it.
pjmlp 10y ago
> There is still a stallmanesque anarchist quality to some engineers that view commercial success as tainted. I think I can appreciate that in some philosophical senses, but let's not get too high on our horses. That is why while I appreciate what FOSS has become, as someone with coding experience since the mid-80's in home computers, I don't have any qualms with commercial software, specially since I also have the experience of what it meant failing to do pure FOSS business.

WalterBright 10y ago

I call it the "Build It And They Will Come" Hollywood myth.

z3t4 10y ago

If you have the product on the app marketplace and it's growing and generating money, there's no reason to bleed money. And it's absolutely no reason to shut it down. Make your operations more efficient. That will also help when scaling up.

aamederen 10y ago

Lately I started to understand more and more about the benefit and importance of marketing and starting to market early. This article summarizes the benefits in a clean and easy-to-read items. I think, hiring a marketer is a big problem. Let's say you are a group of engineers building a good product and you know you need to hire marketers. The questions are, how do you hire a marketer? What criteria do you seek in a marketer? How do people become marketers? One obvious choice is trying to find someone who marketed a similar product before but it is not always easy. I think this is also the case for hiring sales people.

erikb 10y ago
The author's approach is actually quite good: Start learning some marketing yourself, and when it starts to get repetitive pay someone else to do it. Then you also have some skills you can use to evaluate the marketers you're hiring.

justonepost 10y ago

i have built products that went to millions of users, zero marketing. If the product is inherently viral, you don't need to market. Othwerwise, you do.

Kiro 10y ago
Same here. One of my main criteria when evaluating a business idea is whether it will need serious marketing or not. If it needs marketing I often dismiss it.
- Kiro 10y ago
  (Dismissing as in not pursuing it myself, not dismissing the idea in whole.)
cookiecaper 10y ago
Can you describe your product's attributes in a little more detail? I had a niche product that went "viral" within its small community. We immediately had people trying to imitate us, and most failed so badly that their products didn't work at all and any gains they made were quickly rolled back; ultimately, these copycats only served to promote our actually working product further, so they were net good things. A few key people who controlled large platforms in this niche spurned us, presumably because they intended to copy our featureset at some point, and actively removed any reference to our product. Despite this, we had continual growth with relatively small marketing budgets. After about a year, a competitor whose product occasionally worked emerged and despite being much worse than us along every conceivable axis, they cannibalized our niche market within 2 months using spammy marketing tactics (astroturfing, fake followers/likes, SEO link rings (now called "Private Blog Networks" in SEO parlance)). They also forged alliances with some of the niche platforms that refused to allow discussion of our product (though these companies ignored similar offers when I tried to make them). The new competitor eventually spammed so thoroughly that they caused a PR issue for a large company whose data this sector depended on. My company and all others that occasionally functioned in this sector, which at this point included me, the spam company, and 3-4 atrocious copies of the spam company, were all shut down by legal threats from this large company. The point of this protracted story is that it seems that any business that could go from 0 to millions would be immediately bombarded by imitators, spammers, and copycats, whose superior marketing game would destroy the original company as long as they can imitate 10% of the necessary core functionality. Did you have defenses against this? If so, what were they?

stevoski 10y ago

I built a desktop app (Poker Copilot) in 2008. I figured if I did it well, I'd have my own one-person software company supplying a steady stream of income with little ongoing effort. My product would be so intuitive that it wouldn't need a user guide. It certainly wouldn't need marketing because everyone in my target audience would spread the word that my product was what they needed! Ha, what a fool 2008 me was. What I didn't realise was that my two main tasks for years would be marketing and customer support. Coding new features (of which many were requested) and fixing bugs (of which there were many) had to be scheduled around the twice-daily customer support windows and the marketing efforts. Nine years later, and still the stream of customer support requests has not relented! Nine years and still I'm focusing on marketing one day a week! And of course, there are still bugs.

SyneRyder 10y ago
"Nine years later, and still the stream of customer support requests has not relented!" I wish I could upvote this more than once. Customer support burden is always underestimated. It's time consuming, especially if you want to do it properly & not just outsource to someone overseas following a script. Even releasing something as freeware is likely to cause an unintended stream of support enquiries. I have no idea how the folks selling 99c apps manage it, even one short email enquiry would wipe out a dozen sales or more (if you put a monetary value your time). Kudos on charging a sensible price for your app & upgrades! I imagine at that price point it's okay if a sale incurs a support ticket or two.
- WA 10y ago
  I sell B2C software with a subscription of 1.99€ per month. I have 7,000 active users. I get 5-10 emails per day max. Before I charged money for my software, I was afraid of the overwhelming flood of customer support requests. Except they never came. > even one short email enquiry would wipe out a dozen sales or more (if you put a monetary value your time) Per email, yes, absolutely. Sometimes I take 20 minutes to answer a more complex email. But since I know that I don't receive more than 5-10 emails, I take the time and this person might recommend my software to other people, because of the great support. An easy way to mitigate customer support is to have FAQs and lots of written texts on the website. Most people prefer to help themselves I think, because its faster. Sometimes I wonder if this is a mentality thing. My customers are all Germans. Maybe US customers are faster to send a short email than browsing through FAQ.

dwenzek 10y ago

> Someone with less understanding of how a product actually works is often better equipped to communicate what it does than someone stuck in the weeds. This is so true! Yet, it took me a lot of time to understand this. Maybe because this is not always easy to see that the shift perceived, between what I said about my product and how my interlocutor reworded it, is in fact a move from details to the product's essence.

Nomentatus 10y ago
My best takeaway, too.

TeeWEE 10y ago

Marketing is important, however more important is to build in a viral loop into your product, that for every new customer x>1 new customers are contacted. This is how social networks work, invite your friends systems, etc. However, even then marketing is still important. But too often marketing is seen as: Spend huge amount of money on ads. No: marketing is market research, choosing your target audience, branding, image building, tone-of-voice etc.

jackgolding 10y ago
I find this as the struggle as someone who has traditionally worked with large brands. One of the companies I worked with spent millions of dollars on paid advertising while startups and web companies seem to favour inbound marketing a lot more - which big companies aren't really as good at (or pay as much attention too.)
mootothemax 10y ago
> more important is to build in a viral loop into your product, that for every new customer x>1 new customers are contacted This is marketing.
thetalkingcode 10y ago
and figuring out that particular viral loop in the product isn't easy. It takes lots of efforts from a marketer as well as an engineer to find out that one thing or pain point from which you get growth.

shubhamjain 10y ago

I jibe with the article but I disagree that marketing is something that should be pursued from Day 1. As Jessica Livingston has noted umpteen times, the first thing you need is product that delights users. Marketing activities around an idea that might not have a useful market is a bit wasteful. I don't imply that marketing is pointless at early stage but time-consuming marketing channels (blogging, social media) are best avoided at that time. A detrimental mistake that I made when I was making a product was to think that I need 'marketing' to get more (beta) users. I started writing blog articles without understanding that I needed at least a baseline of users who really desire the product. Reading about some of the SaaS successes, I think that a lot of entrepreneurs get their initial users from people they know / ads / reachout. Strong marketing effort kicks in when the product seems useful for a market and organic growth doesn't feel enough.

garysieling 10y ago
I think the marketing work that happens early is of a different character than what you'd do if you had a base of customers. I've been building a search engine for talks (https://www.findlectures.com https://www.findlectures.com), and when I demo it people often give me new language that helps the copy on the site, or ideas for features that communicate the value better.
gk1 10y ago
I agree. I've helped startups with marketing at every, and found there's more value in marketing when you (the founder) can tell the marketer what problem the product solves, and for whom. If you don't know those two things, then it's too early to be thinking about marketing.
kbos87 10y ago
100% agree. As a marketer, the first litmus test I apply in evaluating a role is the level of product market fit a company has achieved. As a marketer, I don't have the levers to get a company past that hump if they haven't on their own. My expertise is in driving scale, not finding the initial seeds of value. There are places that marketing can be done before product/market fit. If you are well funded and 100% committed to building for a certain audience, there is value in creating content and building a following. But this doesn't necessarily require marketing headcount.

cknight 10y ago

I fell very much in to the trap of his second point there. Mind you, I would never hire a marketer (not enough money is involved in my startup), so this "marketer" would of course be "me". I decided there was no point telling people about my web-based startup until I had a working site that they could see for themselves. So indeed, by the time I was ready to let beta testers in, I had no real network on which to rely on to get it in front of peoples eyes. As a not-for-profit, I don't plan to make money off it (and hence don't plan to spend much on it), and am not interested in the VC side of things. I remember initially reading BetaList's requirement of submitting to them before you actually launch and I found it ridiculous. Now I realise, if done right, it's the proper way to go about things. And I missed that boat badly.

scotty79 10y ago

For me it was always because - they know how the meat is made.

superasn 10y ago

There are other myths. 6) What if someone steals my idea and beats me to the market? Due to the culture of secrecy propagated by big companies like Apple we too believe our ideas are unique and need to be secret. If anything, the best ideas are usually incremental changes to already existing ideas but I digress. The point is being first to the market means squat but if you have a solid marketing plan and a consistent supply of leads (+ good relationship with your list) then you will make money. period. 7) A big launch is the end goal Even a big launch is only 1% of your total traffic put leniently. So many people put all their hopes on a big launch.. So you're on Techcrunch, big deal. I've had many sites on TC, Mashable, etc but the traffic usually means nothing. You get a burst of signups (probably 1k+ in a week IIRC) but that is like a drop in the ocean and just like posting on a Forum, the moment your post drops from homepage - it's history. On the other hand, good SEO, and consistent supply of leads (say 100 leads a day = your big launch on TC in 10 days) is what will keep you in the game and make you money everyday. 8) If I have more traffic my site will grow Getting traffic is half the job. Converting that traffic into paying leads is where the money is. If you think your lead will buy from you the moment it lands on your site, you're being naive. You have to romance your subscribers, give them free bonuses, educate them and then one day when you have something they need, they will buy from you - even if you're last to the market or are charging them more. When people trust you, you will get more repeat business than the new orders. I bet people with iPhones are the biggest consumers of the next iPhones too. Never ever underestimate the power of up-selling (though this one I think you only learn from experience).

DrNuke 10y ago

Most times there is not a market for a decent ROI and unfortunately there will never be, it would really cost too much terraforming your niche.

meshr 10y ago

>5) Hiring a marketer takes too much time Is there any recommendations for all in one turnkey service for marketing? So that i just pay money and they do the rest.

CPLX 10y ago
No. That makes about as much sense as asking if there's a turnkey service for product. I mean, in both cases it's possible to hire competent people or firms to help you, but you still have to like actually be involved in the core work of getting customers.
hluska 10y ago
I'm part developer/part marketer and I once tried something like this. Unfortunately, it was easy to bill for tactics but incredibly hard to bill for strategy. So, all the research that goes into being good at marketing was a sunk cost.
deleted 10y ago
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F_J_H 10y ago
Yes, for the most part. This is what marketing agencies do. You still need to provide them with the talking points and value proposition so they have the background for drafting copy for the Marketing collateral, but once they have that they can do a great job at putting together a marketing plan and executing on it, assuming you found a good agency.
- sparrish 10y ago
  > assuming you found a good agency. There's the rub. How do you find a good one? We've spent obscene amounts of money on agencies that said they could get us growth but none made the needle move. Where are all these good agencies?
  - F_J_H 10y ago
    Yes, that's the rub for sure. The same question is also asked by non-technical people when trying to find a developer - how do you find a good one? So, I think you can follow some of the same principles: What projects have they done in the past? What results have they produced? Can you show some examples of your work? Can we speak to your references? etc. Although it's not "turnkey" as the OP was asking about, you can do a lot of it on your own, or at least put together an overall plan, and then use agencies to fill the gaps. Just as with starting a start-up, there is a lot of great material and thought leadership out there on how to do it, along with a lot of practical advice. Other than a few courses as part of my business degree, and working with marketing agencies in the past, I don't have a marketing background. However, I took a deep dive into marketing over the past 18 months, and we achieved some solid results. I spent a bit of time doing some research, came up with a strategy and overall plan, and then executed. Specifically, we put a content marketing program in place, along with some lead tracking tools, spoke at a few conferences, did some webinars, etc., all of which led to deals in the six figures. (In the B2B space.) PM me if you'd like more detail re: resources.

throwaway26960 10y ago

Oddly enough, the only somewhat successful project ($20k/month peak passive income) I've ever had was when I didn't know how to code. I spent all my time on marketing and built the site in Wordpress + Plugins in 1 day.

tchock23 10y ago
The number of potentially successful businesses that can be built with Wordpress + Plugins (+ maybe Zapier) is crazy. I have a few SaaS products out in the wild and find myself longing for the days where I just had to worry about maintaining a decent WP site (with various integrations around it). All the work that goes into just maintaining a SaaS application tires you out - particularly if you're a solo founder - leaving less time available for marketing...
laktek 10y ago
Curious how was the long term maintenance of a Wordpress site? Like applying security fixes, etc.

matheweis 10y ago

As a founder myself I find it's more about the difficulty in finding a marketing strategy that has an effective ROI without increasing your burn rate to a point of failure. The article implies that all marketing will be effective, or at least that you can easily have a positive ROI just by hiring a marketer. This is not necessarily true, especially with the limited capital that many bootstrapped startup may have available. Experincing negative ROI (or even hearing experiences about that) seem more likely candidates for why it isn't done than the "Myths" listed here.

brilliantcode 10y ago
THIS. The WHAT is driving me nuts. I get the WHY and HOWs of numerous marketing channels and methods. Pretty much what happens when I start blogging. I put a lot of effort but even the blog post itself must now be marketed. Put it in on HN, Reddit and it feels like playing lottery...

josh_carterPDX 10y ago

Such great insight here. This could have been an article that I wrote since I've gone through nearly everything Dave has gone through. As some have already commented it's something a lot of folks struggle with. You build a great product, perhaps you get a good initial bounce, but struggle to keep the growth going. You really need a lot of stamina and patience to grow a product to critical mass. You can never predict when it'll happen.

wordpressdev 10y ago

I think the founders that fail to market their products are those who take marketing as something external to product development. Those who consider marketing as introducing and explaining their product features to the world - are successful.

20years 10y ago

I always say coding is the easy part of your SaaS. Marketing is hard. Don't forget customer support, which if you are really good at can fuel your sales and act has it's own marketing channel. Let's not even mention all of the other things that come into play with running a business. Coding is the easy part!

gnicholas 10y ago

> Great products deserve great marketing—Tweet this For early-stage founders, this is a misleading suggestion. Yes, it's true that if you could have great marketing without any cost, you'd want to have it. But this misses the point that if you put $5k into marketing every month, then you're putting $5k less into the product. So the real question is, would you rather have a good product and great marketing, or a great product and good marketing? I will concede that some founders don't put enough emphasis on marketing, but quotes like this overlook the basic cost-benefit balancing act that early-stage founders live and die by. Also, I cringe every time I see a "Tweet this" link. Especially in a piece about marketing, it reminds me that this guy wants to build up his personal brand, which is why he's blogging in the first place. I understand that, but this in-your-face reminder (3x in one blog post) makes the piece come across as less of a "I learned some lessons I want to share" post and more of a "I'm trying to build a brand so I blog a bunch, and this is what I came up with for a post." It kills the authenticity and makes the whole thing suspect (and then when I read trite stuff like the above quote, that confirms that the information contained within isn't thoughtful—it's largely filler).

nostrademons 10y ago
I think a better suggestion for early-stage founders might be to focus on information coming in rather than information going out. You should do as much sales & marketing as you need to generate a reaction from your target users. Then pay careful attention to that reaction and adapt the product. The focus is always about learning rather than evangelizing - putting a half-baked product out there and then blasting the hell out of Facebook/Twitter/Medium/PR doesn't usually get you very many recurring projects, but putting a half-baked product out there, attempting to sell it to a few engaged potential customers, and then adapting it in response to their feedback might.

erichocean 10y ago

Read The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company by Steve Blank — it teaches founders how to achieve product-market fit. Once you have that, marketing is easy and cost effective. Until then, it's usually a waste of money.

tibs4eva 10y ago

Great write-up. As a marketer (independent consultant for years and now founder of a digital agency), I cannot tell you how many times I have had to tell clients, "If you build it, they will not come" if they do not know your product even exists. Even so, many technical startup founders still place marketing low on the list of things to focus on early on. And I'm saying this as someone who started out on the tech side and moved to the business and marketing side later.

grammarnazzzi 10y ago

It surprises me to see so many comments about this article. I couldn't get past the grammar problems in the first paragraph. The most compelling thing at the beginning of this article is the stock photograph of a pretty girl seemingly praying in a coffee shop. "Founders predictably underestimate the importance of hiring marketers." They do? Who are these founders? Founders of what? And who are these people predicting the estimations of these founders? How did you learn of these predictions? Are the predictors publishing their founder predictions somewhere? "As a result, many startups don’t get round to marketing their product until it’s too late." I realize I'm being pedantic now, but "get round" threw me for a moment. It's another break in the flow of reading his message. I wondered what's "get round" mean? Is that like getting fat? Like getting "round about the middle"? Oh. he means "get around to". Googling "get round" returns 400k results. Googling "get around": 55M. I guess some people do say "get round." 1 out of 137 people. Word choice matters. "This happened to me and I’ve thought long and hard about why this happens." What's he referring to? What is "this" that happened? I had to stop and reread the previous sentence to figure out what "this" and "happened" refers to: "startups don’t get round to marketing their product until it’s too late." So a start up didn't get round to marketing a product. Okay, so I guess that implies that a startup was lazy and irresponsible by not getting around to marketing a product. In short, the problem is that something bad was done to a product. That's what happened to you? Inflicted upon you? David Bailey is a product and a startup didn't market him responsibly. I stopped reading at this point. He put so little care into editing and proofreading his article, I figured he probably put just as little effort into crafting a meaningful message and formulating logical conclusions. I guess I'll never find out what the pretty girl is praying for.