9 ms·

This is a pretty good atticle, and the product is actually quite solid (maybe a tad overpriced), but this right here is a rookie mistake: > In January, 2019 I

• cheez 6y ago
  The best indie launch I've seen was the initial launch of Balsamiq. It was played off as "meh" by Peldi but it was masterful. I had launched a product 2 years before and until then, I couldn't understand what I did wrong. I obsessed over what he did. Every single thing. Trying to find where he got "lucky". There was no luck.
  • dvt 6y ago
    Can I get some insight into this? What did Balsamiq do? I'm not familiar.
    • cheez 6y ago
      hard to really say, most of the stuff will be bitrotted. But, he networked VERY hard.
      • Sophistifunk 6y ago
        He was all over various Flex dev spaces, IIRC. Not only was Balsamiq written in Flex, we were all building the kinds of things it was perfectly suited for, too.
    • onion2k 6y ago
      It was an early wire framing tool for prototyping UIs. The clever bit (that seems obvious now) was that it looked intentionally rough so that clients would focus on the overall UI layout instead of the minor details. It was a great app.
      • cercatrova 6y ago
        That's funny because the actual value proposition of using Balsamiq to create apps is that they themselves are intentionally rough. So it looks like the founders used Balsamiq to create and pitch Balsamiq. Very cool example of dogfooding.
      • balsamiq 6y ago
        Ehm...why all the past tense? We still ARE very much around...we just had our best year yet [1], and are on track to do even better. Don't count us out just yet! :) [1] https://blog.balsamiq.com/looking-back-2019/ https://blog.balsamiq.com/looking-back-2019/
        • cheez 6y ago
          Ok Peldi, now don't make me a liar. It wasn't luck. Double it in 3 years :-)
          • balsamiq 6y ago
            That sounds stressful! ;) We're not here for growth, but for longevity. I aim for 2% year on year growth, but for 100+ years. :)
            • cheez 6y ago
              Excellent. Whatever works for you man, you are my hero.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • mettamage 6y ago
    Is it in here? I just Google searched it, but the article is too big for me to read at the moment. https://blog.balsamiq.com/startup-marketing-advice-from-balsamiq-studios/ https://blog.balsamiq.com/startup-marketing-advice-from-bals...
    • cheez 6y ago
      This is probably a good start.
  • Brajeshwar 6y ago
    Peldi is just super friendly and a superhero with customer support. I believe that played a big role in the beginning, and perhaps later. I knew Peldi from the Flash days. Met him once or twice in SFO, and he has an infectious smile and was super friendly. Once, one of our team was showing me Balsamiq and they all liked it. I tried and it was super easy to use. I went to buy the license or I went to ask how to buy it, and Peldi replied back, something in the lines of, "Free for you buddy. You did enough for the community, this is the least I can do." That was also the time when I realized Peldi was behind Balsamiq. I had had various interactions with him, not just about Balsamiq but asking him stupid questions, advice, and networking introductions.
    • stets 6y ago
      They are still a pretty damn awesome company. Gave me a bit of free credit and a shirt for tweeting about them. I'm wearing it in my tweet about this post making front page :-) https://twitter.com/stets_10/status/1266158608024305664 https://twitter.com/stets_10/status/1266158608024305664
    • cheez 6y ago
      That's a nice story! In my opinion, customer service/etc was irrelevant early on.
    • balsamiq 6y ago
      Brajeshwar! It's good to come across you on the internet again, it's been a while! I hope you're doing great, and thanks for the kind words.
  • balsamiq 6y ago
    Geez @cheez ;) thanks for the kind words. I do still believe there was a fair amount of luck involved, but I'm glad my writing was useful to you.
    • cheez 6y ago
      You're welcome. I still use Mockups :-) As for luck, you made your own luck. Congrats on your success!
• MathCodeLove 6y ago
  Are facebook ads really viable forna SaaS product? How should a lone founder organize a better launch than the OP?
  • dvt 6y ago
    I've only had one successful "ramp-up" to launch with a project that eventually didn't go anywhere[1], but here's what I did. For context, this was in the eSports/gaming space. I had an Excel sheet with ~500 game journalists and I emailed every. Single. One of them. With a semi-personalized email. I ended up being interviewed by Vice, Polygon, PCGamer, RedBull, and about a dozen others. I started also emailing podcasters and Twitch personalities and went on a few of these shows as well. I also was invited and attented an eSports Summit in London where I spoke on a panel (I had to spring for my flights and hotel). I networked like crazy there as well. Again, the project didn't quite go anywhere, but I was getting nibbles from a few investors. In any case, that's the closest I've gotten and I've learned to appreciate the hustle. It was also, for me, much more difficult than the actual coding/building. Although it was neat gaining a bit of "clout," it was repetitive, monotone, and extremely draining. [1] www.gameref.io
    • stets 6y ago
      Awesome story. Automate a little bit of that away and find out how to engineer it.
    • forgingahead 6y ago
      Good for you - sorry to hear it didn't get very far, but it's a great experience to go through that "hustle" as you say. As a quick thought: who was/is your customer? It wasn't quickly apparent from your site. Is it game devs? Or game dev studios? Or platform owners? The hustle you did was actually great, but may have yielded more positive momentum if directed at potential customers. That way, you get product feedback and also test the waters on pricing/revenue. Journalists have their place, but it's really PR and getting the general word out. Defining a customer profile, and having direct sales more-or-less figured out generally comes first before press pushes.
  • 6y ago
• stets 6y ago
  Yeah, you're probably not wrong. TBH, I used to not be a fan of FB ads because I thought paid ads were evil or something. I still haven't really used them but I've got some other projects I'm about to use them for.
  • fxtentacle 6y ago
    In my opinion, Facebook is so full of bots and hacked accounts, buying ads there is like pouring money down a drain. Unless, of course, you are an expert at filtering those out through super specific audience restrictions. Reddit, on the other hand, is similarly priced and I got a lot more real users from them.
• ShorsHammer 6y ago
  HN readers are probably the most likely to copy and reproduce your product then spend 5x more on marketing and drive you out. In true cynical form: Unless you are trying to either sell products to developers or are working on getting into ycombinator it seems like a terrible idea to pitch your idea here, the main benefit seems to be identifying competitors. Then again, dropbox.
  • keithwhor 6y ago
    Nobody's going to copy your product and outspend you on ads. Mostly because you have things the wrong way around; you spend on ads after you understand who you're marketing to and why. If your product already has that messaging nailed then you'll succeed regardless of where it's posted, and ad spend irrelevant. (You do it once you have the cash to accelerate the product adoption.)
    • ueuebwiw8 6y ago
      Said by someone who never competed for anything meaningful ever.
      • keithwhor 6y ago
        Not true. I am pretty sure I was the first sperm to fertilize the egg, and that was a pretty important competition! You can make arguments about ad spend and somebody can come here to correct me but I am fairly confident in the assertion that worrying about idea stealing and competition at the idea stage means you’re almost definitely indexing on the wrong things.
    • chmike 6y ago
      For me, spending in marketing doesn’t mean paying ads on facebook or alternatives. It is spending energy in refining communication strategy: refine interface into candy looking and easy to grab fruits, lowering entry barrier, increase visibility, pin point target audience and provide a simple, direct and clear message with a call to action.
• nmfisher 6y ago
  > Really? That's a "launch" these days? At least scrounge up a few hundred bucks and throw up some Facebook ads. Reddit and Hacker News have some of the most cynical and thrifty readers out there. Networking and getting the word out is half the battle. With such little effort put into the launch, OP could have been selling a dollar for fifty cents and no one would've cared. Eh, I tried exactly this for a "thought bubble" project I had. Figured a landing page and $200 on ads would be the best way to gauge demand before writing any code. Seemed like a great success - 50 or so e-mail signups, time to roll up my sleeves and start building! Until I looked closer and realized that every single signup was from a clearly fraudulent address. There's absolutely zero chance that they all just happened to be female, nicely formatted [firstname].[lastname]@gmail.com addresses. Using ads to dip your toe in the water might have worked ten years ago, but there's just way too much fraud nowadays. I think you're better off finding your first ten users manually and asking very nicely for their time and feedback. That was a few years ago, but I launched my app on the Play Store recently and noticed the exact same pattern. Definitely fake, too, because accounts were created in Firebase without user profiles (i.e. the app was never launched). I assume there are bot farms scanning new releases for certain packages (e.g. Firebase) and creating fake accounts.
  • stets 6y ago
    Bummer. Yeah, my idea was more along the lines of find my audience hanging out online and gently, subtly mention my product. Niche specific subreddits, forums (they still exist), Slack rooms, creating YouTube videos and others work pretty okay for initial traction for free.
    • ngngngng 6y ago
      I get so frustrated marketing like this. I've put weeks of my life into FOSS projects just to post them on reddit and have them immediately deleted because "self promotion". If I can't post my FOSS to the linux subreddit then what in the world am I allowed to post?
      • probably_wrong 6y ago
• InvOfSmallC 6y ago
  Actually the YC startup school says you should not pay for customers initially. Paid ads come to a later stage.
  • amdavidson 6y ago
    Its not particularly useful to just parrot the information without also including their justification; not all of us take YC mantras as the gospel. Did they give you a reasoning for this guidance?
    • apatters 6y ago
      You don't know your LTV, churn rate, or even if you have product market fit at the beginning so paid acquisition is sort a gamble. I think YC soundly advises that you get your initial customers in ways that are less scaleable and get to know them a bit before you turn on the firehose.
    • rfrey 6y ago
      I have not attended the Startup School, but I imagine there's a lot of value in personally recruiting your first 20 or 50 customers. You get to talk directly to them; you get a chance (not easy, though!) to find out the real reason they stopped using it, etc.
      • marcosdumay 6y ago
        I imagine you can talk to people that see your ads too. Going after your customers looks great (honestly, I have zero successful experiences either way), but it is really hard for people that have a day job.
• guevara 6y ago
  Gotta do things that don't scale, chief. Granted, instead of just making some generic Show HN and posting to reddit, it could be a worthwhile to privately PM users who comment and seem quite interested. You could also just go to some old posts (HN or reddit) that are relevant to your product and reach out to anyone who seems ideal customer. It's easier said than done, but hey, now you (hopefully) have some initial users, all for $0.
• reillychase 6y ago
  I told him that too. People put too much emphasis on “Launch Day”, when really Launch Day should be day one and every day after. Never stop promoting and publicly “Launching” new features. Also too many people launching to Hacker News, Product Hunt, and Reddit where their peers hangout instead of places where their customers hangout.
  • petargyurov 6y ago
    100% agree with you. I recently sort of "launched". Product is still in development but I wanted to start getting the word out. I posted on ProductHunt, shared on Facebook and was waiting to blow up... nothing happened. I got more visitors from briefly mentioning my site on a comment here on HN than from ads and PH. Anyway, after a week of sulking that I wasn't the next Facebook overnight I buckled down and continued working with more long term vision. Growing a userbase takes time, 99% of the time.
• CM30 6y ago
  This plus the mention of ProductHunt makes me think they fell into the trap of marketing to their fellow creators rather than their audience. That's a common mistake plenty of people make when building anything. Game developers market their games on game development forums, website owners market their sites on web development/webmaster forums, authors market on writing forums, etc. They then forget that the typical person there is an industry peer or competitor rather than a customer, and that the chances of selling them on their product is slim to none.
  • tudorw 6y ago
    This comment is gold dust, if I had known that 25 years ago...
  • mromnia 6y ago
    I see this advice a lot, but I never really understood what the alternative is. If your product has a specific niche, maybe there are some forums or subreddits dedicated to it, sure. But if it's a game? Some are designed for a niche audience, but most really aren't. Another thing is that most of the forums/subreddits these days have strict rules against self-promotion. And I'm not saying that you're wrong - I'm just wondering what do you think is the right way to do things.
    • perlgeek 6y ago
      > But if it's a game? Some are designed for a niche audience, but most really aren't. Even if it isn't designed for a niche, you can still start by marketing to one. Or to a demographic, and advertise to media that targets that demographic.
      • mromnia 6y ago
        Can you give an example? Because if you're talking about ads, many people (even in this post) are saying that they just don't work for small projects.
    • CM30 6y ago
• mifeng 6y ago
  This is bad advice. Spending money on SEM before you have any product validation is a waste of money.
• mylons 6y ago
  agreed. making the product is just the beginning. sales is the hard part. figuring that out myself with a kettlebell bell app i made and here’s the plug because i can’t help myself: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/simple-and-sinister/id1513275382 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/simple-and-sinister/id15132753...
• UnpossibleJim 6y ago
  I think /this/ is where a lot of creators/creatives fail, hard. They work through the steps to bring the minimum viable product to market and have the steps to get a finished product to market once the launch has been handled. All of that has gone through their mind, as that is the major hurdle from their perspective. It's the "build a better mouse trap" scenario. A huge portion of success in today's market is the marketing and the launch, which is handled by a different form of person (or, more often, team of people). A small developer puts themselves at a major disadvantage by not, at least, looking into a small online marketing company.