5 ms·

Fog Creek's marketing has always seemed to me to center on Joelonsoftware.com, and then Stack Overflow, and also posts like this one. Unless I'm missing somethi

Fog Creek's marketing has always seemed to me to center on Joelonsoftware.com, and then Stack Overflow, and also posts like this one. Unless I'm missing something we are part of the target market. Now, I don't have a problem with that, but it makes me read posts like this one (and this one: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/11/16.html http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/11/16.html) a bit differently.

patio11 15y ago
You're missing something, but it's subtle. If you're reading this, you probably will never give FogCreek a dollar. That's the hard truth of the matter. We literally give the product away to startups (Student and Startup Edition, free forever for 2 users) because a) in aggregate startups demonstrably don't spend appreciable amounts of money on this, often preferring OSS or "we can totally duplicate that 100 man-years of development in a weekend" and b) dedicated effort at making sales to you doesn't make any sense relative to dedicated effort at selling 20 seats to an insurance company in Idaho. But do we care about the community liking us? Oh heck yes. The average reader of HN is very link rich relative to e.g. the project manager for the IT team at an insurance company in Idaho. Producing stuff which you like enough to link to gets us higher on the Googles and thus into the line of vision of people who can spend more money on bug tracking than many startups spend on everything. Similarly, if you feel good things about us, you might recommend us internally to someone who has ability to make decisions about which product to purchase.
- fmavituna 15y ago
  Giving it free to startups is not just "good faith" or "do good", "hire better" etc. it's getting user hooked up to the software, long term investment and almost free word-of-mouth marketing. FC knows that FB is a tool that will show itself after a long time (hence 45 day) trials. When we start using FB our company was only 2 people now we are 9 and also we are a paid customer of FB. For these reasons I don't want to believe that FC is not using channels like SO,Joel's blog as a marketing tool. That would be a waste of awesome free marketing.
- GFischer 15y ago
  Some of us are still in the corporate world and waiting to take the plunge :) I actually work for a remote insurance company that would really benefit from FogBugz :) (but I have fairly limited influence and no decision power)
- ageektrapped 15y ago
  Wait what? There's a free Startup Edition?!? I've been looking all over for free issue management software that doesn't suck and here Fogbugz and Kiln are free for little 1-man software shops. What great news! I've been using the EpicWin iPhone app for issue management and DropBox for source control up to now. Every time I thought about it for any length of time, I'd get really nervous. :) Signing up right now. Edit: Also, this made me so happy, I signed up for HN, after lurking for over a year, just so I could say so. Now that's great marketing.
  - Confusion 15y ago
    Jira with Greenhopper is almost free: $20 for up to 10 users. It beats the pants off of any open source solution. For us it won out over Fogbugz in the trials. When we pass 10 users (there's currently 5 of us), we'll pay their regular price. Anecdotal evidence against the assertion that people reading this will never give FogCreek/Atlassian a dollar: we will.

patio11 15y ago

You're missing something, but it's subtle. If you're reading this, you probably will never give FogCreek a dollar. That's the hard truth of the matter. We literally give the product away to startups (Student and Startup Edition, free forever for 2 users) because a) in aggregate startups demonstrably don't spend appreciable amounts of money on this, often preferring OSS or "we can totally duplicate that 100 man-years of development in a weekend" and b) dedicated effort at making sales to you doesn't make any sense relative to dedicated effort at selling 20 seats to an insurance company in Idaho. But do we care about the community liking us? Oh heck yes. The average reader of HN is very link rich relative to e.g. the project manager for the IT team at an insurance company in Idaho. Producing stuff which you like enough to link to gets us higher on the Googles and thus into the line of vision of people who can spend more money on bug tracking than many startups spend on everything. Similarly, if you feel good things about us, you might recommend us internally to someone who has ability to make decisions about which product to purchase.

fmavituna 15y ago
Giving it free to startups is not just "good faith" or "do good", "hire better" etc. it's getting user hooked up to the software, long term investment and almost free word-of-mouth marketing. FC knows that FB is a tool that will show itself after a long time (hence 45 day) trials. When we start using FB our company was only 2 people now we are 9 and also we are a paid customer of FB. For these reasons I don't want to believe that FC is not using channels like SO,Joel's blog as a marketing tool. That would be a waste of awesome free marketing.
GFischer 15y ago
Some of us are still in the corporate world and waiting to take the plunge :) I actually work for a remote insurance company that would really benefit from FogBugz :) (but I have fairly limited influence and no decision power)
ageektrapped 15y ago
Wait what? There's a free Startup Edition?!? I've been looking all over for free issue management software that doesn't suck and here Fogbugz and Kiln are free for little 1-man software shops. What great news! I've been using the EpicWin iPhone app for issue management and DropBox for source control up to now. Every time I thought about it for any length of time, I'd get really nervous. :) Signing up right now. Edit: Also, this made me so happy, I signed up for HN, after lurking for over a year, just so I could say so. Now that's great marketing.
- Confusion 15y ago
  Jira with Greenhopper is almost free: $20 for up to 10 users. It beats the pants off of any open source solution. For us it won out over Fogbugz in the trials. When we pass 10 users (there's currently 5 of us), we'll pay their regular price. Anecdotal evidence against the assertion that people reading this will never give FogCreek/Atlassian a dollar: we will.