9 ms·

Avoiding Startup Tarpits

184 points by dtawfik1 9y ago

shrumm 9y ago
Month 2 into building a startup and found this article very relevant. I think one of the challenges I personally face is that building more features feels safe. You can spend a whole day trying to reach out to more people to validate the problem and come away with nothing. A day of coding gives you something tangible. Since we're B2B focused, my co-founder and I resolved this by deciding to go the consulting route to build the product. We essentially banned ourselves from writing code until we found someone willing to pay us to write the feature.
- jnetic 9y ago
  >I think one of the challenges I personally face is that building more features feels safe. You can spend a whole day trying to reach out to more people to validate the problem and come away with nothing. A day of coding gives you something tangible. Coming away with nothing and then to keep on trying. This has been the hardest thing for me too. Coding/designing/building is way more fun and easy (in the short-term).
ghettoCoder 9y ago
Half of this article could be summed up as "Validate your idea/product. Do not assume what people want." The other half is "Marketing is not stupid". Marketing, sadly, is something that many of us are not good at. People still believe that if you build it, they will come. Myself, I have a several dead side projects that nobody came for, as do many here. Also, maybe I've been out of the adword world for too long, so question for you folks that are living it now. Is a $70 CAC about average? I find that a bit high but I suppose if it only takes 2 months to recoup then their CLV must be good.
- rpeden 9y ago
  I see product/idea validation as part of the marketing process, too. In the intro to marketing course I took in college, one of the points they really tried to ingrain in everyone was that the market research you do before you create a product or feature is one of the most important parts of marketing.
- soneca 9y ago
  I believe the first validation of product must come regardless of marketing skills. If you built a side project and no one is using it, it is a product problem, not a marketing problem. Actually, I believe a clever marketing tactic can be counter-productive in such an early stage, as you might lure customers to a product that doesn't deliver value. So, your first few paying customers should come from building the product and putting it in front of few people (your personal and professional network, Show HN, Reddit). After you have these first customers then it is time to stop underestimating the marketing effort a successful product demands.
  - mgkimsal 9y ago
    > If you built a side project and no one is using it, it is a product problem, not a marketing problem. If you built it but no one knows about it to come and use it, how is that a product problem?
    - soneca 9y ago
      If "no one" means exactly zero person beside yourself you would be right. To grow from exactly zero to a few dozens of potential customers you don't need marketing. You need to tell people what you built. This is not an euphemism for marketing, its exactly what it means, to tell people that you build it. The very first sale must come from yourself telling people you already know pra reaching people in online forums. I don't classify this as "marketing". At most, you need to do sales, not marketing.
      - valuearb 9y ago
        Everything you’ve described, including product design, is marketing. Yes, sales is a very narrow part of marketing to. Marketing is knowing who you are selling to, what they want, and how best to reach them.
- lj3 9y ago
  I can't speak for most devs with a side project, but for me specifically, market validation and marketing don't feel like real work. I know it's real work and it's necessary work, but they don't feel like it. They feel like goofing off on the internet without the fun. I don't get the immediate gratification of posting on Hacker News or the satisfaction of coding up a new feature. Then there's the added fear of being really bad at a new skill. It doesn't help that the iteration cycle of market validation and marketing is extremely long compared to programming. You could be screwing up for months and not have enough clear data to know you're screwing up. To clarify, this is not me complaining. I realize I need to get over everything I've listed, press forward and learn a new (lucrative!) skill. But I can't be the only dev who feels this way about marketing.
- rcarrigan87 9y ago
  Average CAC in terms of dollars depends entirely on your industry/product. A good number is all relative.
andy_ppp 9y ago
I think the thing that affected me the most is trying to solve all of the problems with ever more code and cleverness. I actually think the less code you have as a startup the better, I suppose this is a small expansion of "Do things that don't scale". Avoid writing code.
savrajsingh 9y ago
For many funded startups, they have the opposite scenario — growth that wholly depends on marketing that masks the product deficiencies. As soon as you lay off the gas, product deficiencies become apparent, so you are tempted to raise more and more money.
- dtawfik1 9y ago
  That's an interesting point that I hadn't really considered. Our startup never got to that stage. We raised money, burnt through it and then had to figure out how to salvage the situation being gritty.
- ohadron 9y ago
  Absolutely. This is very common in consumer products where the burden of moving over to the competition is minimal (think food delivery, ridesharing, home maintenance etc.). Additional symptoms are relatively low retention or no retention at all, and aggressive marketing tactics to the point where as a customer you're not sure how can they be possibly making money.
dpandya 9y ago
> We invested all of our seed funding in developing a great product. In doing so, our feature list expanded, but our actual revenue growth never changed in a meaningful way to support that development. I think the key distinction to make here is that a "great product" is not defined by whether or not it is feature- complete, pleasant to use, etc. but whether or not your customers like using it, consequently paying you for it. Likewise, any change you make to your product should only be considered a positive delta if it makes people like it more (or pay more for it); otherwise, it's just a prettier/faster/more complicated product, not a better one.
smikhanov 9y ago
If the author of this article would try to persuade me to join his company as a techie, I would say no. The reason is simple: as experienced as he sounds (and he sounds like a total badass, by the way), the overarching conclusion that a hacker may take away from this article is "startups are little more than a lot of clever marketing". Which is sad, in a way. We all read about how Woz was hacking logic boards during the early days of Apple, or how Sergey and Larry built their company on top of their groundbreaking PhD research. As a techie, you would dream that you can join a team where your contribution is crucial and consists of something that can't be outsourced to Ukraine. Yet, this mostly doesn't appear to be the case. Sad.
- dtawfik1 9y ago
  I am the author and I do agree with what you are saying. Our story was different. I mentioned that one of the original sins of our company was how we budgeted solely into product development. The other original sin was that the idea for the company was ill conceived. We had been working on tech at another company why not release as stand alone product. The idea frankly wasn't that differentiated enough from other products out there. When you don't have a truly differentiated idea like the companies you brought up, then marketing becomes more and more important to get peoples attention. Part of what made the examples you brought up special is that what they were working was so unique. That differentiation/uniqueness makes it a lot easier to market (the virality piece is more likely). In our case because we didn't have that. The way to survive was that we had to fight it out bidding for ads on Google. I would not recommend that path for anyone. It was just the environment we were in. I would say even for those companies to focus on marketing will not be a disservice, but focus on the initial conception of the idea even more. It makes a world of difference in determining what kind of head winds you'll face.
- valuearb 9y ago
  No one would ever have heard about Woz and his logic board hacking if Jobs hadn’t decided his target market was non technical people in the home and office, insisted the products contain features targeting their needs (no kit, a working computer packaged to connect to a TV, disk drives instead of tapes, etc, etc) and then created massive awareness of Apple using great PR, advertising, and a worldwide sales network of resellers.
jnwatson 9y ago
I guess lots of founders forget that an early tech startup is still a small business and similar rules apply whether you're starting the next Uber or opening a new restaurant. Marketing and sales are super important. R&D is super risky. This is true for every business. To de-risk, spend more on the former and less on the latter.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
ne01 9y ago
I'm Sed and I'm addicted to adding more features to my startup. This article talks to my heart. I have been working on my startup for 7 years now. For all these years, I have been adding more and more features, changing the product direction twice and still not knowing if we have something valuable. I want to start marketing right now and stop adding more features! P.S. Anyone interested in helping me? I am willing to split the profits for the lifespan of a user if you can help me acquire new paying users!
- andy_ppp 9y ago
  Interesting, I wonder if you can set that up as a marketplace connecting successful marketers to recurring revenue.
  - icebraining 9y ago
    Isn't that essentially a marketplace for affiliate programs? There are a few around.
- no1youknowz 9y ago
  I hear you and I'm in the same boat lol. Except that, I have been engaging potential customers prior to a launch. I am having 30 minute conversations and asking THEM things like:- 1) What their process looks like. 2) What pain-points they have. 3) What they are actually using and paying... We then brain storm what potential solutions could solve these pain points and move onto: 4) How much they would be willing to pay to solve these problems. i.e, if their ROI could increase by a certain % is paying the $$ a no brainer. 5) More importantly, how much time they would be saving and is the $$$ a now brainer now? Features are great, they differentiate between yourself and your competitors. But they aren't the goal. What is the goal, is making those features part of a process flow and achieving a result that your customers want AND will be willing to pay for, compared to your competitors. What's the point in building a feature a potential customer won't use or understand? Or even worse, is too complex and when they use it they leave frustrated? Bottom line is, you don't know if you have something because you aren't talking to your market. So stop what you are doing. Nowadays it's really easy. Go on Facebook, start searching for some groups. Sometimes the gold is there because people are asking questions and you can get a sense of where your product fits. Then insert yourself into the conversation and start asking questions. Start adding people and trying to engage them directly. Say you'll send them a coupon or buy them lunch for 30 minutes of their time. You can setup a Skype conversation and then glean lots of knowledge. I would also suggest doing this with those who are experienced and in the weeds. Because they could give you actual insights over what people THINK they need. Best of luck! :)
jwr 9y ago
It seems I am one of those in the tarpit. I think the problem for us engineering types is that there is so much bullshit around marketing, that it's offputting to us. That's the case for me at least. If I spend time/money on a feature, I know how long it will take, how much it will cost and when it will be ready. Compared to this, marketing seems like burning money with voodoo rituals. It doesn't help that marketing efforts are only meaningfully measurable on a larger scale. If you're bootstrapping something yourself, you don't have 12k to spend on marketing this month. You have $300. It's easy to burn that $300 on adwords or facebook ads and get zero signups, with no meaningful data whatsoever. The usual advice goes: hire a marketing expert. But how do I hire a marketing expert that a) isn't full of it, b) will even listen to me if my current budgets are in the hundreds of dollars? I think the article is right on point, but I wish it pointed me to a way to deal with the marketing problem.
- nedwin 9y ago
  Hiring for marketing is incredibly tough. I’ve yet to work with a marketer I would recommend. Re your situation I’m not sure there is much you can or should do with $300. It’s too small an amount to make a dent in any paid channels for sure. Hire a marketing/growth coach is probably the most cost effective way to spend a budget like that imho
  - libertyEQ 9y ago
    The way you and your parent comment are discussing "marketing" I would think would be more accurate to discuss as promotions/promoting. This is an example of killing the language, and it minimizes the nuance involved. Advertising and promotions are a subset of marketing. Edit: To be clear, I work in the area of addressable market/ /go-to-market strategy/ product definition/ competitive analysis and I have never had anything to do with outbound, promotional messaging.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      Not sure why this is being downvoted. Marketing involves a lot more than advertising. At my current job I mentioned my surprise that no one from marketing was embedded with our dev team and got a querulous response that “why would we someone from advertising or PR in our dev process?” My response was that marketing encompasses both designing and selling products that meet customer needs. We needed a product manager who does the customer research to help us determine our target customers and to build the right product to meet their needs and wants, and who will design a marketing plan with the relative priorities of advertising, PR, promotions, and various sales channels (direct, reseller, etc) to most efficiently reach target customers with an always limited marketing budget. As an aside: What can be a thousand times more efficient than Google AdWords or any advertising ever? Good PR. No one should ever spend a dime on advertising without first considering whether they have a compelling story that media outlets will publicize for free, with just the cost of a dedicated or even part time PR resource. I spent $1,500 on a PR contractor for my 2nd app, with 3 months I had positive reviews in PC World, CBS Marketwatch, etc, and my highest sales ever. In the end I’d estimate his efforts produced at 20-40x his cost in revenues. I’m dumb enough that I never did it again.
ohadron 9y ago
Key word here is retention. The author was in a pretty good position to be in, where the paid users were happy enough not to churn and move to the competition. Once you're there - you have product market fit, and you should presumably move into growth mode. That means more expenses on sales and marketing, and diverting r&d resources to scale (if needed) and building features that will reduce churn or help marketing. Another way to describe the situation here is - moving to growth mode too late, when you already have a good enough product to attack with but you're also almost out of runway.
strin 9y ago
Marketing is crucial when you have the right product. If a startup spends tons on marketing and there are product deficiencies, then users are going to come and go.
- valuearb 9y ago
  If a products target customers think it has deficiencies, you need to reemphasixe marketing. Researching and understanding your target customers needs and wants is the first, and by far most important part of marketing.
jv22222 9y ago
Features != Success, is such an important truth, I wish every new founder could somehow be made to understand it. Build one simple feature that people are willing to pay for and start marketing and selling it is by far the path of least resistance. (Then carefully grow your product outward from that point)
- philsnow 9y ago
  It seems that you add more features, you attract more users, but I think that if you've prioritized your features 'right', each additional one makes your product attractive to fewer and fewer marginal users. Also, when you get really down in the weeds, I bet it's easy to have a daunting feature list that people bounce off of, especially if you don't have a clear separation between marquee/headline features and detail features, meaning you might make your product attractive to an additional 1% of users, but 5% of your existing potential users fall out of the funnel because of the word soup.
  - marcosdumay 9y ago
    > if you've prioritized your features 'right', each additional one makes your product attractive to fewer and fewer marginal users. Only if they are independent. Features A + B may attract a bigger public than both feature A or feature B alone.
j_s 9y ago
There are many HN discussions with practical steps for startup marketing. Side Project Marketing Checklist ・ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002079 (Aug 2017, 68 comments) ・ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942902 (Aug 2017, 68 comments) Ask HN: Building a side project that makes money. Where to start? ・ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14039135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14039135 (Apr 2017, 248 comments) -- A couple more free resources: Getting Real, chapter 13: Promotion (2006) ・ https://gettingreal.37signals.com/#ch13 https://gettingreal.37signals.com/#ch13 Growth Hacking: How to Acquire Users (2017) ・ https://www.julian.com/learn/growth/intro https://www.julian.com/learn/growth/intro
thadk 9y ago
They missed `withstanding` in this classic https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/07/25/how-i-met-my-wife https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/07/25/how-i-met-my-w...
ouid 9y ago
startup tarpit is a juicy phrase.
hellopat 9y ago
One thing I don't really have much experience in doing is measuring growth. Is this something you have to figure out before avoiding the tarpits?
kyaghmour 9y ago
This is a fallacy within technical circles: that the world will somehow immediately recognize the intrinsic value of a feature/addition as soon as it becomes public and that it'll therefore spread on its own merits. It's good to always keep in mind that history is littered with perfect technologies that failed miserably. Creating the perfect mouse trap without placing it where it'll catch mice is useless. P.S.: Been there, done that.

184 points by dtawfik1 9y ago

Month 2 into building a startup and found this article very relevant. I think one of the challenges I personally face is that building more features feels safe. You can spend a whole day trying to reach out to more people to validate the problem and come away with nothing. A day of coding gives you something tangible. Since we're B2B focused, my co-founder and I resolved this by deciding to go the consulting route to build the product. We essentially banned ourselves from writing code until we found someone willing to pay us to write the feature.

jnetic 9y ago
>I think one of the challenges I personally face is that building more features feels safe. You can spend a whole day trying to reach out to more people to validate the problem and come away with nothing. A day of coding gives you something tangible. Coming away with nothing and then to keep on trying. This has been the hardest thing for me too. Coding/designing/building is way more fun and easy (in the short-term).

ghettoCoder 9y ago

Half of this article could be summed up as "Validate your idea/product. Do not assume what people want." The other half is "Marketing is not stupid". Marketing, sadly, is something that many of us are not good at. People still believe that if you build it, they will come. Myself, I have a several dead side projects that nobody came for, as do many here. Also, maybe I've been out of the adword world for too long, so question for you folks that are living it now. Is a $70 CAC about average? I find that a bit high but I suppose if it only takes 2 months to recoup then their CLV must be good.

rpeden 9y ago
I see product/idea validation as part of the marketing process, too. In the intro to marketing course I took in college, one of the points they really tried to ingrain in everyone was that the market research you do before you create a product or feature is one of the most important parts of marketing.
soneca 9y ago
I believe the first validation of product must come regardless of marketing skills. If you built a side project and no one is using it, it is a product problem, not a marketing problem. Actually, I believe a clever marketing tactic can be counter-productive in such an early stage, as you might lure customers to a product that doesn't deliver value. So, your first few paying customers should come from building the product and putting it in front of few people (your personal and professional network, Show HN, Reddit). After you have these first customers then it is time to stop underestimating the marketing effort a successful product demands.
- mgkimsal 9y ago
  > If you built a side project and no one is using it, it is a product problem, not a marketing problem. If you built it but no one knows about it to come and use it, how is that a product problem?
  - soneca 9y ago
    If "no one" means exactly zero person beside yourself you would be right. To grow from exactly zero to a few dozens of potential customers you don't need marketing. You need to tell people what you built. This is not an euphemism for marketing, its exactly what it means, to tell people that you build it. The very first sale must come from yourself telling people you already know pra reaching people in online forums. I don't classify this as "marketing". At most, you need to do sales, not marketing.
    - valuearb 9y ago
      Everything you’ve described, including product design, is marketing. Yes, sales is a very narrow part of marketing to. Marketing is knowing who you are selling to, what they want, and how best to reach them.
lj3 9y ago
I can't speak for most devs with a side project, but for me specifically, market validation and marketing don't feel like real work. I know it's real work and it's necessary work, but they don't feel like it. They feel like goofing off on the internet without the fun. I don't get the immediate gratification of posting on Hacker News or the satisfaction of coding up a new feature. Then there's the added fear of being really bad at a new skill. It doesn't help that the iteration cycle of market validation and marketing is extremely long compared to programming. You could be screwing up for months and not have enough clear data to know you're screwing up. To clarify, this is not me complaining. I realize I need to get over everything I've listed, press forward and learn a new (lucrative!) skill. But I can't be the only dev who feels this way about marketing.
rcarrigan87 9y ago
Average CAC in terms of dollars depends entirely on your industry/product. A good number is all relative.

andy_ppp 9y ago

I think the thing that affected me the most is trying to solve all of the problems with ever more code and cleverness. I actually think the less code you have as a startup the better, I suppose this is a small expansion of "Do things that don't scale". Avoid writing code.

savrajsingh 9y ago

For many funded startups, they have the opposite scenario — growth that wholly depends on marketing that masks the product deficiencies. As soon as you lay off the gas, product deficiencies become apparent, so you are tempted to raise more and more money.

dtawfik1 9y ago
That's an interesting point that I hadn't really considered. Our startup never got to that stage. We raised money, burnt through it and then had to figure out how to salvage the situation being gritty.
ohadron 9y ago
Absolutely. This is very common in consumer products where the burden of moving over to the competition is minimal (think food delivery, ridesharing, home maintenance etc.). Additional symptoms are relatively low retention or no retention at all, and aggressive marketing tactics to the point where as a customer you're not sure how can they be possibly making money.

dpandya 9y ago

> We invested all of our seed funding in developing a great product. In doing so, our feature list expanded, but our actual revenue growth never changed in a meaningful way to support that development. I think the key distinction to make here is that a "great product" is not defined by whether or not it is feature- complete, pleasant to use, etc. but whether or not your customers like using it, consequently paying you for it. Likewise, any change you make to your product should only be considered a positive delta if it makes people like it more (or pay more for it); otherwise, it's just a prettier/faster/more complicated product, not a better one.

smikhanov 9y ago

If the author of this article would try to persuade me to join his company as a techie, I would say no. The reason is simple: as experienced as he sounds (and he sounds like a total badass, by the way), the overarching conclusion that a hacker may take away from this article is "startups are little more than a lot of clever marketing". Which is sad, in a way. We all read about how Woz was hacking logic boards during the early days of Apple, or how Sergey and Larry built their company on top of their groundbreaking PhD research. As a techie, you would dream that you can join a team where your contribution is crucial and consists of something that can't be outsourced to Ukraine. Yet, this mostly doesn't appear to be the case. Sad.

dtawfik1 9y ago
I am the author and I do agree with what you are saying. Our story was different. I mentioned that one of the original sins of our company was how we budgeted solely into product development. The other original sin was that the idea for the company was ill conceived. We had been working on tech at another company why not release as stand alone product. The idea frankly wasn't that differentiated enough from other products out there. When you don't have a truly differentiated idea like the companies you brought up, then marketing becomes more and more important to get peoples attention. Part of what made the examples you brought up special is that what they were working was so unique. That differentiation/uniqueness makes it a lot easier to market (the virality piece is more likely). In our case because we didn't have that. The way to survive was that we had to fight it out bidding for ads on Google. I would not recommend that path for anyone. It was just the environment we were in. I would say even for those companies to focus on marketing will not be a disservice, but focus on the initial conception of the idea even more. It makes a world of difference in determining what kind of head winds you'll face.
valuearb 9y ago
No one would ever have heard about Woz and his logic board hacking if Jobs hadn’t decided his target market was non technical people in the home and office, insisted the products contain features targeting their needs (no kit, a working computer packaged to connect to a TV, disk drives instead of tapes, etc, etc) and then created massive awareness of Apple using great PR, advertising, and a worldwide sales network of resellers.

jnwatson 9y ago

I guess lots of founders forget that an early tech startup is still a small business and similar rules apply whether you're starting the next Uber or opening a new restaurant. Marketing and sales are super important. R&D is super risky. This is true for every business. To de-risk, spend more on the former and less on the latter.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

ne01 9y ago

I'm Sed and I'm addicted to adding more features to my startup. This article talks to my heart. I have been working on my startup for 7 years now. For all these years, I have been adding more and more features, changing the product direction twice and still not knowing if we have something valuable. I want to start marketing right now and stop adding more features! P.S. Anyone interested in helping me? I am willing to split the profits for the lifespan of a user if you can help me acquire new paying users!

andy_ppp 9y ago
Interesting, I wonder if you can set that up as a marketplace connecting successful marketers to recurring revenue.
- icebraining 9y ago
  Isn't that essentially a marketplace for affiliate programs? There are a few around.
no1youknowz 9y ago
I hear you and I'm in the same boat lol. Except that, I have been engaging potential customers prior to a launch. I am having 30 minute conversations and asking THEM things like:- 1) What their process looks like. 2) What pain-points they have. 3) What they are actually using and paying... We then brain storm what potential solutions could solve these pain points and move onto: 4) How much they would be willing to pay to solve these problems. i.e, if their ROI could increase by a certain % is paying the $$ a no brainer. 5) More importantly, how much time they would be saving and is the $$$ a now brainer now? Features are great, they differentiate between yourself and your competitors. But they aren't the goal. What is the goal, is making those features part of a process flow and achieving a result that your customers want AND will be willing to pay for, compared to your competitors. What's the point in building a feature a potential customer won't use or understand? Or even worse, is too complex and when they use it they leave frustrated? Bottom line is, you don't know if you have something because you aren't talking to your market. So stop what you are doing. Nowadays it's really easy. Go on Facebook, start searching for some groups. Sometimes the gold is there because people are asking questions and you can get a sense of where your product fits. Then insert yourself into the conversation and start asking questions. Start adding people and trying to engage them directly. Say you'll send them a coupon or buy them lunch for 30 minutes of their time. You can setup a Skype conversation and then glean lots of knowledge. I would also suggest doing this with those who are experienced and in the weeds. Because they could give you actual insights over what people THINK they need. Best of luck! :)

jwr 9y ago

It seems I am one of those in the tarpit. I think the problem for us engineering types is that there is so much bullshit around marketing, that it's offputting to us. That's the case for me at least. If I spend time/money on a feature, I know how long it will take, how much it will cost and when it will be ready. Compared to this, marketing seems like burning money with voodoo rituals. It doesn't help that marketing efforts are only meaningfully measurable on a larger scale. If you're bootstrapping something yourself, you don't have 12k to spend on marketing this month. You have $300. It's easy to burn that $300 on adwords or facebook ads and get zero signups, with no meaningful data whatsoever. The usual advice goes: hire a marketing expert. But how do I hire a marketing expert that a) isn't full of it, b) will even listen to me if my current budgets are in the hundreds of dollars? I think the article is right on point, but I wish it pointed me to a way to deal with the marketing problem.

nedwin 9y ago
Hiring for marketing is incredibly tough. I’ve yet to work with a marketer I would recommend. Re your situation I’m not sure there is much you can or should do with $300. It’s too small an amount to make a dent in any paid channels for sure. Hire a marketing/growth coach is probably the most cost effective way to spend a budget like that imho
- libertyEQ 9y ago
  The way you and your parent comment are discussing "marketing" I would think would be more accurate to discuss as promotions/promoting. This is an example of killing the language, and it minimizes the nuance involved. Advertising and promotions are a subset of marketing. Edit: To be clear, I work in the area of addressable market/ /go-to-market strategy/ product definition/ competitive analysis and I have never had anything to do with outbound, promotional messaging.
  - valuearb 9y ago
    Not sure why this is being downvoted. Marketing involves a lot more than advertising. At my current job I mentioned my surprise that no one from marketing was embedded with our dev team and got a querulous response that “why would we someone from advertising or PR in our dev process?” My response was that marketing encompasses both designing and selling products that meet customer needs. We needed a product manager who does the customer research to help us determine our target customers and to build the right product to meet their needs and wants, and who will design a marketing plan with the relative priorities of advertising, PR, promotions, and various sales channels (direct, reseller, etc) to most efficiently reach target customers with an always limited marketing budget. As an aside: What can be a thousand times more efficient than Google AdWords or any advertising ever? Good PR. No one should ever spend a dime on advertising without first considering whether they have a compelling story that media outlets will publicize for free, with just the cost of a dedicated or even part time PR resource. I spent $1,500 on a PR contractor for my 2nd app, with 3 months I had positive reviews in PC World, CBS Marketwatch, etc, and my highest sales ever. In the end I’d estimate his efforts produced at 20-40x his cost in revenues. I’m dumb enough that I never did it again.

ohadron 9y ago

Key word here is retention. The author was in a pretty good position to be in, where the paid users were happy enough not to churn and move to the competition. Once you're there - you have product market fit, and you should presumably move into growth mode. That means more expenses on sales and marketing, and diverting r&d resources to scale (if needed) and building features that will reduce churn or help marketing. Another way to describe the situation here is - moving to growth mode too late, when you already have a good enough product to attack with but you're also almost out of runway.

strin 9y ago

Marketing is crucial when you have the right product. If a startup spends tons on marketing and there are product deficiencies, then users are going to come and go.

valuearb 9y ago
If a products target customers think it has deficiencies, you need to reemphasixe marketing. Researching and understanding your target customers needs and wants is the first, and by far most important part of marketing.

jv22222 9y ago

Features != Success, is such an important truth, I wish every new founder could somehow be made to understand it. Build one simple feature that people are willing to pay for and start marketing and selling it is by far the path of least resistance. (Then carefully grow your product outward from that point)

philsnow 9y ago
It seems that you add more features, you attract more users, but I think that if you've prioritized your features 'right', each additional one makes your product attractive to fewer and fewer marginal users. Also, when you get really down in the weeds, I bet it's easy to have a daunting feature list that people bounce off of, especially if you don't have a clear separation between marquee/headline features and detail features, meaning you might make your product attractive to an additional 1% of users, but 5% of your existing potential users fall out of the funnel because of the word soup.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  > if you've prioritized your features 'right', each additional one makes your product attractive to fewer and fewer marginal users. Only if they are independent. Features A + B may attract a bigger public than both feature A or feature B alone.

j_s 9y ago

There are many HN discussions with practical steps for startup marketing. Side Project Marketing Checklist ・ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002079 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15002079 (Aug 2017, 68 comments) ・ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14942902 (Aug 2017, 68 comments) Ask HN: Building a side project that makes money. Where to start? ・ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14039135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14039135 (Apr 2017, 248 comments) -- A couple more free resources: Getting Real, chapter 13: Promotion (2006) ・ https://gettingreal.37signals.com/#ch13 https://gettingreal.37signals.com/#ch13 Growth Hacking: How to Acquire Users (2017) ・ https://www.julian.com/learn/growth/intro https://www.julian.com/learn/growth/intro

thadk 9y ago

They missed `withstanding` in this classic https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/07/25/how-i-met-my-wife https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1994/07/25/how-i-met-my-w...

ouid 9y ago

startup tarpit is a juicy phrase.

hellopat 9y ago

One thing I don't really have much experience in doing is measuring growth. Is this something you have to figure out before avoiding the tarpits?

kyaghmour 9y ago

This is a fallacy within technical circles: that the world will somehow immediately recognize the intrinsic value of a feature/addition as soon as it becomes public and that it'll therefore spread on its own merits. It's good to always keep in mind that history is littered with perfect technologies that failed miserably. Creating the perfect mouse trap without placing it where it'll catch mice is useless. P.S.: Been there, done that.