8 ms·

I'm not sure why people are proud to do things without spending money on marketing. What if spending money on marketing had made you grow twice larger? Twice f

I'm not sure why people are proud to do things without spending money on marketing. What if spending money on marketing had made you grow twice larger? Twice faster? When people say "I didn't spend money on marketing", the only translation is "I knowingly overlooked massive growth opportunities."

artursapek 9y ago
It's prideful because using ads is the easy way out, and it's often not very cost-efficient. Doing it the hard way is cool.
- davidivadavid 9y ago
  Yes, that seems to be the sentiment. And that sentiment is puzzling to me.
  - artursapek 9y ago
    Why? People hate ads. If your service grows with no spending on ads, it means you're getting traffic from word-of-mouth. And that indicates that you've built a great service that people are happy to promote for you. It just shows your product has virtue and it's naturally taken as a compliment. I'd compare it to having a kid. If you have money you can probably buy your kid into a good school and hook them up with a good job when they graduate. Or you can set them up with the right foundation and watch them succeed on their own. I did the same as the OP with a project of mine. I never spent a penny on ads and it's grown into a very popular charting/trading tool among cryptocurrency traders. I also take pride in the fact that I grew it organically.
    - davidivadavid 9y ago
      What you're addressing here seems orthogonal to me. You can use "marketing" for a crappy product, and you can use it for a good product. All combinations exist. What's puzzling is that you would deprive yourself from making your great product known to more people simply because you want to do it the "hard way." Forgive me, but I'd call it "the dumb way."
skizm 9y ago
Not if they had no money to spend on marketing in the first place. Saying no money was spent on marketing is advertising strategies that might work if someone with low capital who is trying to boostrap a company.
- davidivadavid 9y ago
  That's a fair and charitable interpretation. If we relax the "no money" assumption a little, one might then question if it's the wisest capital allocation (why not spend, say, $200 on marketing and see if that helps?).
  - Lev1a 9y ago
    I read from this > I built the API in a few hours, posted the answer, and forgot about it — until a few months later I got an email saying my server usage was off the charts. I’d been getting millions of requests per day. that they basically just set it up as a side-project and answered a couple questions on SO about it only to be confronted with its explosive growth after a few months. One could then interpret the author in that situation as thinking "don't need marketing, who's gonna use this little thing I made anyway. [a couple months later] Oh shit, this blew up and I didn't even need to spend anything on marketing it besides plugging it on Stackoverflow occasionally".
xiaoma 9y ago
They may just be specifying the amount of marketing. If the headline simply reads "Taking $foo to 250M API req/day" and then it turns out that all of the traffic came from a $4MM ad spend, it's a lot less interesting to those without $4MM to spend.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
throwaway91111 9y ago
Some people don't want to market. Surely this would be a victory for them despite having higher profits available.
nostrademons 9y ago
I wouldn't be so quick to make that translation. I think a more useful way to think about it is "Know your users, and your channel." There are some user populations - and developers are usually one of them - that are virulently anti-advertising. Any paid channel usually earns instant distrust from them. Putting money into marketing spending can have a negative ROI for them, because it has a signaling effect on the brand that says "Our product quality isn't good enough for us to get users without paying for them." Then there are other user populations - most e-commerce is like this - where there is no such signaling effect, and they are happy to check out new products, regardless of how they hear about the product. For these markets, it's silly to ignore paid channels; you're just leaving money on the table.
- davidivadavid 9y ago
  They're anti-advertising on paper. Are you telling me no one's ever run a successful ad campaign targeted at developers? I don't believe that for a minute.
  - nostrademons 9y ago
    I wouldn't go so far as "never", but historically, developer tools with lasting growth tend to spread via word of mouth & community recommendations rather than ad campaigns. See eg. Ruby/Rails, Python and supporting ecosystem, JQuery, Node.js, Express, Postgres, Vue.js, GitHub before they took VC, Parse before they were acquired by Facebook, etc. Even Google - they had distribution deals starting early on, but they were very reluctant to spend money on advertising up until about 2010 (I remember watching the first Google SuperBowl commercials at TGIF, and hearing a lot of questions about why were spending money on advertising and what it meant for organic growth). When ad campaigns are run, they usually work by targeting programmers' bosses, encouraging the organization to purchase & standardize on one solution and then forcing developers to adopt it via management fiat. That's the route taken by Java, MongoDB, Oracle, .NET, many of the companies in the Hadoop ecosystem, etc. It certainly works - these are big companies - but it requires a consultative enterprise sales team that can work to get the solution deployed across the whole enterprise. The author obviously doesn't have the resources for that. The middle ground, where you provide a developer tool with $100-200/year CLTV and hope to get it distributed via paid advertising, is a very difficult place to occupy. That's the area occupied by FogBugz and RethinkDB and Sandstorm and many analytics providers. Most of them go the community-building route, and it's still very difficult. Only company I can think of that's thrived here is GitHub, and they went the word-of-mouth, community-building route first. Companies like Jetbrains, Atlassian, Rational, etc. thrive as well, but they've got large enterprise sales teams that standardize a whole organization on their products.
justonepost 9y ago
Because marketing invariable reaches people who are uninterested and just leads to wasted bandwidth. Also, it leads to added risk to building something people don't want and only engaged because of the marketing drowned out finding what they really wanted.
wnevets 9y ago
>I'm not sure why people are proud to do things without spending money on marketing. being successful without marketing probably means you were successful due to word of mouth. Its hard to be successful due to word of mouth when your product sucks.
prodmerc 9y ago
Because continuous growth is not the sanest decision.
OzzyB 9y ago
The takeaway isn't that he could make more money from marketing directly to developers, but that sites like StackOverflow give him direct access to developers right at the _very_ moment their pain point is at maximum velocity. Someone searching for "IP API" on StackOverflow and having his site rank in the top result(s) is the same as searching for "dresses" on Google, but without having to pay for search placement and getting 100% targeted traffic.
inopinatus 9y ago
The post title is misleading. The author has clearly invested substantial amounts of time, and some money (because the brochureware landing pages presumably aren't hosted at zero cost, they're on EC2). What they seem to be suggesting is they didn't buy ads. So it's a short and incomplete list of basic tips for identifying a need & creating a buzz via online communities; don't get hung up on the title.
enraged_camel 9y ago
>>When people say "I didn't spend money on marketing", the only translation is "I knowingly overlooked massive growth opportunities." That's not the only translation. Another one is "I knowingly avoided pouring lots of money down the drain." After all, just because you spend money on marketing doesn't mean you will see any returns.
- davidivadavid 9y ago
  I would question whether you can know the ROI of all marketing channels before you've tested them.
zionic 9y ago
This. We saw a 500,000% gain in sales by marketing, but to be fair we were small and had no idea what we were doing. I was as skeptical as they come, but a good marketing team basically launched us from nobodies into LEO. Yeah we had a great core product but still... gotta know how to sell it.
amrrs 9y ago
That resonates Peter Theil in Zero to One saying, Silicon Valley Developer-Entrepreneurs believing Good Products sell by itself with no sales and marketing effort.

artursapek 9y ago

It's prideful because using ads is the easy way out, and it's often not very cost-efficient. Doing it the hard way is cool.

davidivadavid 9y ago
Yes, that seems to be the sentiment. And that sentiment is puzzling to me.
- artursapek 9y ago
  Why? People hate ads. If your service grows with no spending on ads, it means you're getting traffic from word-of-mouth. And that indicates that you've built a great service that people are happy to promote for you. It just shows your product has virtue and it's naturally taken as a compliment. I'd compare it to having a kid. If you have money you can probably buy your kid into a good school and hook them up with a good job when they graduate. Or you can set them up with the right foundation and watch them succeed on their own. I did the same as the OP with a project of mine. I never spent a penny on ads and it's grown into a very popular charting/trading tool among cryptocurrency traders. I also take pride in the fact that I grew it organically.
  - davidivadavid 9y ago
    What you're addressing here seems orthogonal to me. You can use "marketing" for a crappy product, and you can use it for a good product. All combinations exist. What's puzzling is that you would deprive yourself from making your great product known to more people simply because you want to do it the "hard way." Forgive me, but I'd call it "the dumb way."

skizm 9y ago

Not if they had no money to spend on marketing in the first place. Saying no money was spent on marketing is advertising strategies that might work if someone with low capital who is trying to boostrap a company.

davidivadavid 9y ago
That's a fair and charitable interpretation. If we relax the "no money" assumption a little, one might then question if it's the wisest capital allocation (why not spend, say, $200 on marketing and see if that helps?).
- Lev1a 9y ago
  I read from this > I built the API in a few hours, posted the answer, and forgot about it — until a few months later I got an email saying my server usage was off the charts. I’d been getting millions of requests per day. that they basically just set it up as a side-project and answered a couple questions on SO about it only to be confronted with its explosive growth after a few months. One could then interpret the author in that situation as thinking "don't need marketing, who's gonna use this little thing I made anyway. [a couple months later] Oh shit, this blew up and I didn't even need to spend anything on marketing it besides plugging it on Stackoverflow occasionally".

xiaoma 9y ago

They may just be specifying the amount of marketing. If the headline simply reads "Taking $foo to 250M API req/day" and then it turns out that all of the traffic came from a $4MM ad spend, it's a lot less interesting to those without $4MM to spend.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

throwaway91111 9y ago

Some people don't want to market. Surely this would be a victory for them despite having higher profits available.

nostrademons 9y ago

I wouldn't be so quick to make that translation. I think a more useful way to think about it is "Know your users, and your channel." There are some user populations - and developers are usually one of them - that are virulently anti-advertising. Any paid channel usually earns instant distrust from them. Putting money into marketing spending can have a negative ROI for them, because it has a signaling effect on the brand that says "Our product quality isn't good enough for us to get users without paying for them." Then there are other user populations - most e-commerce is like this - where there is no such signaling effect, and they are happy to check out new products, regardless of how they hear about the product. For these markets, it's silly to ignore paid channels; you're just leaving money on the table.

davidivadavid 9y ago
They're anti-advertising on paper. Are you telling me no one's ever run a successful ad campaign targeted at developers? I don't believe that for a minute.
- nostrademons 9y ago
  I wouldn't go so far as "never", but historically, developer tools with lasting growth tend to spread via word of mouth & community recommendations rather than ad campaigns. See eg. Ruby/Rails, Python and supporting ecosystem, JQuery, Node.js, Express, Postgres, Vue.js, GitHub before they took VC, Parse before they were acquired by Facebook, etc. Even Google - they had distribution deals starting early on, but they were very reluctant to spend money on advertising up until about 2010 (I remember watching the first Google SuperBowl commercials at TGIF, and hearing a lot of questions about why were spending money on advertising and what it meant for organic growth). When ad campaigns are run, they usually work by targeting programmers' bosses, encouraging the organization to purchase & standardize on one solution and then forcing developers to adopt it via management fiat. That's the route taken by Java, MongoDB, Oracle, .NET, many of the companies in the Hadoop ecosystem, etc. It certainly works - these are big companies - but it requires a consultative enterprise sales team that can work to get the solution deployed across the whole enterprise. The author obviously doesn't have the resources for that. The middle ground, where you provide a developer tool with $100-200/year CLTV and hope to get it distributed via paid advertising, is a very difficult place to occupy. That's the area occupied by FogBugz and RethinkDB and Sandstorm and many analytics providers. Most of them go the community-building route, and it's still very difficult. Only company I can think of that's thrived here is GitHub, and they went the word-of-mouth, community-building route first. Companies like Jetbrains, Atlassian, Rational, etc. thrive as well, but they've got large enterprise sales teams that standardize a whole organization on their products.

justonepost 9y ago

Because marketing invariable reaches people who are uninterested and just leads to wasted bandwidth. Also, it leads to added risk to building something people don't want and only engaged because of the marketing drowned out finding what they really wanted.

wnevets 9y ago

>I'm not sure why people are proud to do things without spending money on marketing. being successful without marketing probably means you were successful due to word of mouth. Its hard to be successful due to word of mouth when your product sucks.

prodmerc 9y ago

Because continuous growth is not the sanest decision.

OzzyB 9y ago

The takeaway isn't that he could make more money from marketing directly to developers, but that sites like StackOverflow give him direct access to developers right at the _very_ moment their pain point is at maximum velocity. Someone searching for "IP API" on StackOverflow and having his site rank in the top result(s) is the same as searching for "dresses" on Google, but without having to pay for search placement and getting 100% targeted traffic.

inopinatus 9y ago

The post title is misleading. The author has clearly invested substantial amounts of time, and some money (because the brochureware landing pages presumably aren't hosted at zero cost, they're on EC2). What they seem to be suggesting is they didn't buy ads. So it's a short and incomplete list of basic tips for identifying a need & creating a buzz via online communities; don't get hung up on the title.

enraged_camel 9y ago

>>When people say "I didn't spend money on marketing", the only translation is "I knowingly overlooked massive growth opportunities." That's not the only translation. Another one is "I knowingly avoided pouring lots of money down the drain." After all, just because you spend money on marketing doesn't mean you will see any returns.

davidivadavid 9y ago
I would question whether you can know the ROI of all marketing channels before you've tested them.

zionic 9y ago

This. We saw a 500,000% gain in sales by marketing, but to be fair we were small and had no idea what we were doing. I was as skeptical as they come, but a good marketing team basically launched us from nobodies into LEO. Yeah we had a great core product but still... gotta know how to sell it.

amrrs 9y ago

That resonates Peter Theil in Zero to One saying, Silicon Valley Developer-Entrepreneurs believing Good Products sell by itself with no sales and marketing effort.