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Replying to myself, after 11h. There is a good number of replies, and they mostly underscore my point: I do not know how to deal with the problem and there is n

by jwr 9y ago

Replying to myself, after 11h. There is a good number of replies, and they mostly underscore my point: I do not know how to deal with the problem and there is no defined way to go about it. Most replies focus on "talking to your customers", validating your idea, etc. I know, you should talk to your customers. It's all good. I do. But this won't get you out of the tarpit. Talking to your customers mostly gets you new feature requests, so you end up building new features. Also, once you have a business with a bunch of paying customers, the situation is different. You know the product can sell. If you can get 10 paying customers, you can also get 100, and probably 1000, too. That was what the original article was about. There was precious little practical advice in the comments, apart from "content marketing" and guerilla marketing. One is something pretty much everybody does, and the other is difficult to pull out for B2B. libertyEQ has a great point: we know so little about the whole subject that we even don't get the naming right. Sorry. For the moment I'll just keep calling all this stuff "marketing", until I understand it better. My original point still stands: the article got it right, and the reason why we hackers build features instead of doing marketing is because marketing is hard, poorly defined, and there is so much fluff, myths and cliches around it. I'm still looking for a solution.

ddebernardy 9y ago
If talking to your clients mostly gets you new feature requests, it either means your product isn't adequate yet or you're not asking the right questions. In a nutshell you want to get of feel of: - What was going on in your clients' heads before they found you. What precise problem were they trying to solve. This'll give you insights on whether or not your product is adequate, and on how to phrase your landing page. - How they went about to look for you. What google search they did, whether they checked out reviews and how, etc. this is to better focus your SEO and adwords campaigns. - What their decision process looked like. Was it a single person making the call, or were several people involved? What objections got raised? What were their key decision criteria? Raise them in your sales copy or in drip emails. - Are they talking about your product? Would they? This is to help you spot segments with viral potential. Don't forget to politely ask for referrals if applicable. - And, of course, feedback on the product itself. But don't spend too much time on this, and don't promise anything or build expectations.
- derefr 9y ago
  I think the parent might mean that letting their customers talk, unguided by specific questions, results in feature requests. If you’re not a marketer, that’s usually how you interpret “talking to customers.” If you are a marketer, that sounds like useless nonsense. :)
- jwr 9y ago
  The product is adequate, because people are paying for it. It could be better, hence the feature requests. The most important thing I always want to know is how they found me — unfortunately, for all of them it was via a search for a specific phrase. That doesn't help me at all: I am prominently featured for that search phrase. No viral potential, this is a niche B2B product.
iridium 9y ago
Have you read the book Traction yet? It provides a very usable growth framework. More importantly, It also allows you to start thinking of marketing as a testable iterative process, and this simple change in mindset can do wonders for the engineer/hacker. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591848369/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1591848369&linkCode=as2&tag=cguru0d-20&linkId=a9c819fd034094fb80b36975608ceb23 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591848369/ref=as_li_tl?ie...
throwaway7312 9y ago
Here's the thing with marketing: it is its own unique field that encompasses a large skill set. Copywriting, conversions, media buying. Product launches, if you're into that. Social media marketing or SEO/SEM. Guys who are good at it spend years learning it. Just like good engineers take years to learn their crafts. If a marketer came to you and said hey, I can market like a champ, but I need a quick way to engineer a killer product by myself on a razor thin budget. Can't start marketing until I've got the product ready, and I also don't know much about product design or what to build. How do I do it and succeed? Same chicken-and-egg problem. You can hire a professional who is GOOD, but then you're going to pay a lot of money for it. The better quality you want, the more you will have to pay. Or you can learn to be good YOURSELF, but then you're going to spend a lot of time to do it (and possibly still a lot of money). In marketing, you cannot usually just hire talented marketers for low dollar amounts. If a marketer is any good, he knows how to make hundreds/thousands of dollars a day marketing any number of different things. He can affiliate market something off Clickbank, or take advantage of any of a number of other affiliate channels. Or he can debut his own product and market it himself and keep 100% of the profit. Or he can work for a beefy startup with lots of equity and high upside, or if he's risk averse take a high paying salaried job at an ad firm or mega corp. So at the lower end, you get a bunch of aspiring marketers who are either brand new or just plain suck. (a few diamonds in the rough here and there, but they're few and far between and they don't stick around in the rough for long) Best path if you're bootstrapping and have limited funds: 1.) Do your own marketing until you find a few okay-enough channels to get business from. This part sucks at the beginning because it's slow going and most of what you try doesn't work. 2.) Look for free ways to market until you have more cash to spend on marketing. The average paid media campaign takes somewhere between $5K and $50K of experimentation before it reaches profitability. That's $5K to $50K down the drain before you're making money. Don't go for paid until you can afford to absorb the upfront cost of creating a profitable campaign. 3.) Once you have a few okay marketing channels in place (could be search traffic, a popular presence on Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter, or maybe you have a higher dollar offer you can leverage networks and do direct sales for), you'll get more money coming in 4.) Once more money is coming in, you have a few options how you spend it. Hire professionals to boost the conversions of your sales funnel; hire professionals to experiment with new or better marketing campaigns; or hire professionals to train you on these things and make you the expert Not fun (at first, anyway) and probably not the fast/easy way you might wish you could find. But when you don't have the skill yet, and don't have investment money or high enough sales already to pay for high skill professionals, you've got to grind it out yourself for a bit. If you'll study marketing, I suggest you pick up a copy of Jeff Walker's Product Launch Formula. It's an effective way to get an initial burst of sales and designed for people with low/no marketing experience.

by jwr 9y ago

ddebernardy 9y ago

If talking to your clients mostly gets you new feature requests, it either means your product isn't adequate yet or you're not asking the right questions. In a nutshell you want to get of feel of: - What was going on in your clients' heads before they found you. What precise problem were they trying to solve. This'll give you insights on whether or not your product is adequate, and on how to phrase your landing page. - How they went about to look for you. What google search they did, whether they checked out reviews and how, etc. this is to better focus your SEO and adwords campaigns. - What their decision process looked like. Was it a single person making the call, or were several people involved? What objections got raised? What were their key decision criteria? Raise them in your sales copy or in drip emails. - Are they talking about your product? Would they? This is to help you spot segments with viral potential. Don't forget to politely ask for referrals if applicable. - And, of course, feedback on the product itself. But don't spend too much time on this, and don't promise anything or build expectations.

derefr 9y ago
I think the parent might mean that letting their customers talk, unguided by specific questions, results in feature requests. If you’re not a marketer, that’s usually how you interpret “talking to customers.” If you are a marketer, that sounds like useless nonsense. :)
jwr 9y ago
The product is adequate, because people are paying for it. It could be better, hence the feature requests. The most important thing I always want to know is how they found me — unfortunately, for all of them it was via a search for a specific phrase. That doesn't help me at all: I am prominently featured for that search phrase. No viral potential, this is a niche B2B product.

iridium 9y ago

Have you read the book Traction yet? It provides a very usable growth framework. More importantly, It also allows you to start thinking of marketing as a testable iterative process, and this simple change in mindset can do wonders for the engineer/hacker. https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591848369/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1591848369&linkCode=as2&tag=cguru0d-20&linkId=a9c819fd034094fb80b36975608ceb23 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591848369/ref=as_li_tl?ie...

throwaway7312 9y ago

Here's the thing with marketing: it is its own unique field that encompasses a large skill set. Copywriting, conversions, media buying. Product launches, if you're into that. Social media marketing or SEO/SEM. Guys who are good at it spend years learning it. Just like good engineers take years to learn their crafts. If a marketer came to you and said hey, I can market like a champ, but I need a quick way to engineer a killer product by myself on a razor thin budget. Can't start marketing until I've got the product ready, and I also don't know much about product design or what to build. How do I do it and succeed? Same chicken-and-egg problem. You can hire a professional who is GOOD, but then you're going to pay a lot of money for it. The better quality you want, the more you will have to pay. Or you can learn to be good YOURSELF, but then you're going to spend a lot of time to do it (and possibly still a lot of money). In marketing, you cannot usually just hire talented marketers for low dollar amounts. If a marketer is any good, he knows how to make hundreds/thousands of dollars a day marketing any number of different things. He can affiliate market something off Clickbank, or take advantage of any of a number of other affiliate channels. Or he can debut his own product and market it himself and keep 100% of the profit. Or he can work for a beefy startup with lots of equity and high upside, or if he's risk averse take a high paying salaried job at an ad firm or mega corp. So at the lower end, you get a bunch of aspiring marketers who are either brand new or just plain suck. (a few diamonds in the rough here and there, but they're few and far between and they don't stick around in the rough for long) Best path if you're bootstrapping and have limited funds: 1.) Do your own marketing until you find a few okay-enough channels to get business from. This part sucks at the beginning because it's slow going and most of what you try doesn't work. 2.) Look for free ways to market until you have more cash to spend on marketing. The average paid media campaign takes somewhere between $5K and $50K of experimentation before it reaches profitability. That's $5K to $50K down the drain before you're making money. Don't go for paid until you can afford to absorb the upfront cost of creating a profitable campaign. 3.) Once you have a few okay marketing channels in place (could be search traffic, a popular presence on Reddit, Facebook, or Twitter, or maybe you have a higher dollar offer you can leverage networks and do direct sales for), you'll get more money coming in 4.) Once more money is coming in, you have a few options how you spend it. Hire professionals to boost the conversions of your sales funnel; hire professionals to experiment with new or better marketing campaigns; or hire professionals to train you on these things and make you the expert Not fun (at first, anyway) and probably not the fast/easy way you might wish you could find. But when you don't have the skill yet, and don't have investment money or high enough sales already to pay for high skill professionals, you've got to grind it out yourself for a bit. If you'll study marketing, I suggest you pick up a copy of Jeff Walker's Product Launch Formula. It's an effective way to get an initial burst of sales and designed for people with low/no marketing experience.