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Given what I've read here, it seems that most people here forget or don't know that most apps need a strong marketing plan from the start to give it a decent ch

Given what I've read here, it seems that most people here forget or don't know that most apps need a strong marketing plan from the start to give it a decent chance to succeed. Writing an app that sells itself is very rare and even if it takes off it needs constant marketing. If you read the financials from most software companies that are public you'll see that marketing costs are way higher than development and maintenance costs. It's the primary way to get customers to buy or use your app.

umvi 7y ago
Why can't you build it first, and then market it? You can pretend it is still under development if that will convince more people to sign up, but I don't understand why marketing needs to be there from day 1. But also marketing seems like a money black hole to me. I could sink tons of money into marketing and have little to show for it.
- stanmancan 7y ago
  You can, but it takes time to build an audience and find potential customers. Starting that process early can make all the difference. If it takes 3 months to build that’s 3 months you could have been finding potential users.
  - gentleman11 7y ago
    And up to 3 extra months of product development time if the marketing takes a lot of time too. The time cost of marketing is important to be wary of - it really has to pay off because it costs you completed features (as a small team). The marketing is critical but I’m just saying there is a cost also
- erikrothoff 7y ago
  As developers we often assume ”build it and they will come”. Or that marketing or sales is something that is bolted on afterwards. What we forget is that marketing is a full time job that requires a full set of skills, experience and intuitions to do well. If you build something for 6 months and THEN start the marketing, its like starting from scratch all over again. You have zero experience to work from or iterate on and havent built any of the foundation. It’s like waiting to build the backend until the frontend is 100% complete. While building assumptions change based on things you learn. Marketing for your product works the same way. By putting the effort into marketing (meaning any form of reaching out: blog posts, direct sales, social media or even paid) you might even avoiding building features that nobody wanted anyway.
  - jakequade 7y ago
    I think you're both giving marketing too much credit in the product's creation, and inverting the creation process in general. > It’s like waiting to build the backend until the frontend is 100% complete It's more like building a backend, then realising that the data structures could be improved when you're building the front. Marketing at best provides enhancements, not core changes (unless your product itself was incorrect to begin with). Honestly, if your marketing affects your product as much as you're suggesting, you have a pretty unstable product.
    - rapphil 7y ago
      But marketing can help the dev team focus on the core functionalities that the customer really want.
      - watwut 7y ago
        No, marketing as driver will cause massive feature creep.
        speedplane 7y ago
        > No, marketing as driver will cause massive feature creep. Marketing is about exposing your product to your target customers. It's relatively orthogonal to product features.
    - erikrothoff 7y ago
      I disagree. Marketing gets people in. Users guide product development and thus the product. If an ”unstable product” is one that users actually want to use, then I guess an unstable product is a good thing?
      - watwut 7y ago
        Treating marketing as requirements gathering gets you overly complicated internally inconsistent requirements. The instability is side product. Marketing is not making trade-off between bugs and features, they are unaware of trade-off. When the "buggy" part happens, they treat it as "we have incapable developers" and not as reason to change something in process and requirements gathering. By overly internally inconsistent I mean that at some places they will be impossible to fulfill. The code will always breaking at edge cases. The ui will do three things at the same time, will be incoherent and will be complicated for user to understand and learn. By complicated I mean that you will have to code super complicated hard to maintain structures to fulfill everything at the same time. Marketing can not be requirements gathering, because marketing is motivated to promise everything to everybody and to exaggerate. I dont use exaggerate here as euphemism for "lie" through that happens too. Exaggerating itself is a problem. Marketing is not motivated to build coherent analysis. I know because I worked on projects where marketing was driving requirements . It did not led to happy customers, because customers were unhappy over instability and our inability to fill their requirements in a reasonable way.
- WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
  You need to know your target audience and needs. Building an app takes time so it's best to start your marketing plan ASAP.
- ufmace 7y ago
  I'd say that "marketing" as used here includes a wide variety of activities, much more than actually buying ads and trying to directly sell your product to people. More like - if you have an idea for a commercial website or app or something, it's best to start by finding potential customers, building relationships with them, and getting to know what they actually need and are willing to pay for. This is much more important than what language and framework to use, how you'll host it, and other technical decisions. Do the research first to figure out if people are willing to pay for your idea in a form that's in your "runway" budget of what you can afford to build and run before you get money coming in. It's also perfectly fine to build something without that to try out a new tech you think is interesting, or to scratch a personal itch, etc. Just don't expect to bring in any money with it without doing that research.
- Gustomaximus 7y ago
  You can build it then market it, but odds are a decent marketer will add value to how the product can be more promotable with features etc in the developement phase. Also if you want to hit the ground running marketing can be developing plans for some time ahead of launch. As for a black hole of money, it can be. Any area is if spent poorly. A failed product is a development money pit. Marketing should be looked at like an investment, not a cost. Track your activities and if a dollar spent brings back more than a dollar, spend more and see where it plateaus. And vice versa, stop spending or find another channel/marketer. Ive seen developer lead companies looking at marketing as a cost line reject budget increases even with marketing showing a dollar spent was directly returning significantly more. I've also seen money shoveled into the furnace. Marketing is not just good/bad, it's recognising good marketing and bad marketing.
muzani 7y ago
Strong marketing plan is true, but not accurate. I think a lot of people's marketing plan is to show it on HN/Product Hunt/Indie Hackers/Reddit entrepreneur groups, which is a horrible marketing plan. I think the marketing plan is part of the project design - you should have it before you build it. Are you targeting remote workers? That should be part of the UI, the features, etc. Do you plan on marketing via social media? Your app should have lots of share buttons and the formatting of the content should be shareable. Every time someone brings up the discussion of whether an app is web, iOS, or Android, my answer is always how that links to marketing. Some people are better at some forms of marketing, and that has to be in synergy with the product. However, if you need to throw money at it, it's also likely not doing a great job. Sites like Google and Facebook launched with no paid marketing, even though they spend a good amount of money marketing now. It's not that they didn't have money, but not using paid advertising is a good way to gauge how strong your product is and give you time to patch it.
- libertine 7y ago
  >However, if you need to throw money at it, it's also likely not doing a great job. There are plenty of reasons you need to throw money at it. For example, if the distribution is made by a third party (like Steam, if the project was a game), you're literally paying Steam to get your game distributed - and you could have a great game. I don't think Google and Facebook are the best examples, because the internet was quite a different place when they launched.
- jotakami 7y ago
  Judging by my own side projects, there seem to be two varieties: scratching your own itch, or scratching someone else’s. In the former case, marketing really does come later because you already have a perfect user to consult on product design (yourself) and just need to find other people with the same problem you have. The latter case is when marketing is a lot more integrated with building the product. If you’ve made it all the way to a public release but don’t really know how to market, then there is a dangerously high probability that you built something nobody really asked for.
- fierro 7y ago
relaunched 7y ago
So...does anyone want to help me figure out a way to better market my product? Contact info in my bio.
- icer2312 7y ago
  Your contact info is not in your bio. Send me an email at my HN username at yahoo dot com dot au.

umvi 7y ago

Why can't you build it first, and then market it? You can pretend it is still under development if that will convince more people to sign up, but I don't understand why marketing needs to be there from day 1. But also marketing seems like a money black hole to me. I could sink tons of money into marketing and have little to show for it.

stanmancan 7y ago
You can, but it takes time to build an audience and find potential customers. Starting that process early can make all the difference. If it takes 3 months to build that’s 3 months you could have been finding potential users.
- gentleman11 7y ago
  And up to 3 extra months of product development time if the marketing takes a lot of time too. The time cost of marketing is important to be wary of - it really has to pay off because it costs you completed features (as a small team). The marketing is critical but I’m just saying there is a cost also
erikrothoff 7y ago
As developers we often assume ”build it and they will come”. Or that marketing or sales is something that is bolted on afterwards. What we forget is that marketing is a full time job that requires a full set of skills, experience and intuitions to do well. If you build something for 6 months and THEN start the marketing, its like starting from scratch all over again. You have zero experience to work from or iterate on and havent built any of the foundation. It’s like waiting to build the backend until the frontend is 100% complete. While building assumptions change based on things you learn. Marketing for your product works the same way. By putting the effort into marketing (meaning any form of reaching out: blog posts, direct sales, social media or even paid) you might even avoiding building features that nobody wanted anyway.
- jakequade 7y ago
  I think you're both giving marketing too much credit in the product's creation, and inverting the creation process in general. > It’s like waiting to build the backend until the frontend is 100% complete It's more like building a backend, then realising that the data structures could be improved when you're building the front. Marketing at best provides enhancements, not core changes (unless your product itself was incorrect to begin with). Honestly, if your marketing affects your product as much as you're suggesting, you have a pretty unstable product.
  - rapphil 7y ago
    But marketing can help the dev team focus on the core functionalities that the customer really want.
    - watwut 7y ago
      No, marketing as driver will cause massive feature creep.
      - speedplane 7y ago
        > No, marketing as driver will cause massive feature creep. Marketing is about exposing your product to your target customers. It's relatively orthogonal to product features.
  - erikrothoff 7y ago
    I disagree. Marketing gets people in. Users guide product development and thus the product. If an ”unstable product” is one that users actually want to use, then I guess an unstable product is a good thing?
    - watwut 7y ago
      Treating marketing as requirements gathering gets you overly complicated internally inconsistent requirements. The instability is side product. Marketing is not making trade-off between bugs and features, they are unaware of trade-off. When the "buggy" part happens, they treat it as "we have incapable developers" and not as reason to change something in process and requirements gathering. By overly internally inconsistent I mean that at some places they will be impossible to fulfill. The code will always breaking at edge cases. The ui will do three things at the same time, will be incoherent and will be complicated for user to understand and learn. By complicated I mean that you will have to code super complicated hard to maintain structures to fulfill everything at the same time. Marketing can not be requirements gathering, because marketing is motivated to promise everything to everybody and to exaggerate. I dont use exaggerate here as euphemism for "lie" through that happens too. Exaggerating itself is a problem. Marketing is not motivated to build coherent analysis. I know because I worked on projects where marketing was driving requirements . It did not led to happy customers, because customers were unhappy over instability and our inability to fill their requirements in a reasonable way.
WheelsAtLarge 7y ago
You need to know your target audience and needs. Building an app takes time so it's best to start your marketing plan ASAP.
ufmace 7y ago
I'd say that "marketing" as used here includes a wide variety of activities, much more than actually buying ads and trying to directly sell your product to people. More like - if you have an idea for a commercial website or app or something, it's best to start by finding potential customers, building relationships with them, and getting to know what they actually need and are willing to pay for. This is much more important than what language and framework to use, how you'll host it, and other technical decisions. Do the research first to figure out if people are willing to pay for your idea in a form that's in your "runway" budget of what you can afford to build and run before you get money coming in. It's also perfectly fine to build something without that to try out a new tech you think is interesting, or to scratch a personal itch, etc. Just don't expect to bring in any money with it without doing that research.
Gustomaximus 7y ago
You can build it then market it, but odds are a decent marketer will add value to how the product can be more promotable with features etc in the developement phase. Also if you want to hit the ground running marketing can be developing plans for some time ahead of launch. As for a black hole of money, it can be. Any area is if spent poorly. A failed product is a development money pit. Marketing should be looked at like an investment, not a cost. Track your activities and if a dollar spent brings back more than a dollar, spend more and see where it plateaus. And vice versa, stop spending or find another channel/marketer. Ive seen developer lead companies looking at marketing as a cost line reject budget increases even with marketing showing a dollar spent was directly returning significantly more. I've also seen money shoveled into the furnace. Marketing is not just good/bad, it's recognising good marketing and bad marketing.

muzani 7y ago

Strong marketing plan is true, but not accurate. I think a lot of people's marketing plan is to show it on HN/Product Hunt/Indie Hackers/Reddit entrepreneur groups, which is a horrible marketing plan. I think the marketing plan is part of the project design - you should have it before you build it. Are you targeting remote workers? That should be part of the UI, the features, etc. Do you plan on marketing via social media? Your app should have lots of share buttons and the formatting of the content should be shareable. Every time someone brings up the discussion of whether an app is web, iOS, or Android, my answer is always how that links to marketing. Some people are better at some forms of marketing, and that has to be in synergy with the product. However, if you need to throw money at it, it's also likely not doing a great job. Sites like Google and Facebook launched with no paid marketing, even though they spend a good amount of money marketing now. It's not that they didn't have money, but not using paid advertising is a good way to gauge how strong your product is and give you time to patch it.

libertine 7y ago
>However, if you need to throw money at it, it's also likely not doing a great job. There are plenty of reasons you need to throw money at it. For example, if the distribution is made by a third party (like Steam, if the project was a game), you're literally paying Steam to get your game distributed - and you could have a great game. I don't think Google and Facebook are the best examples, because the internet was quite a different place when they launched.
jotakami 7y ago
Judging by my own side projects, there seem to be two varieties: scratching your own itch, or scratching someone else’s. In the former case, marketing really does come later because you already have a perfect user to consult on product design (yourself) and just need to find other people with the same problem you have. The latter case is when marketing is a lot more integrated with building the product. If you’ve made it all the way to a public release but don’t really know how to market, then there is a dangerously high probability that you built something nobody really asked for.
fierro 7y ago

relaunched 7y ago

So...does anyone want to help me figure out a way to better market my product? Contact info in my bio.

icer2312 7y ago
Your contact info is not in your bio. Send me an email at my HN username at yahoo dot com dot au.