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Being a Developer Makes You Valuable. Learning How to Market Makes You Dangerous

374 points by talsraviv 14y ago

jamesmcn 14y ago
Speaking as a developer, I think I can see the analogy between dev and marketing. But from a learning perspective, software development has a big advantage. You can build everything from a hello world app to your own toy OS without being negatively impacted by existing software out there. As a marketer, it seems like you always have to be on the cutting edge. What worked in the 1980s is unlikely to work in 2012. Even what was cool in 2008 is unlikely to be effective today. The next problem is that marketing is, by its nature, a public activity. Doing it badly is embarrassing and likely limits your ability to even give it a second try.
- patio11 14y ago
  I'd tend to disagree: everything old is new again. Sears Roebuck beat me to A/B testing by, what, eighty years?
  - rgraham 14y ago
    There is nothing new under the sun, but people are forgetful.
- rmc 14y ago
  Hang on, did you just claim that marketing requires cutting edge techniques which change year by year, but software development doesn't? Is it even possible to work as a programmer if you are using 1980s tech? What about if you know nothing created after 2001, how limited would your carrer prospects be? I think you have things backwards.
- corkill 14y ago
  Headlines, calls to action all the same stuff as in print 100 years ago, just the medium is different now. Marketing isn't about fancy tools. The cutting edge of marketing is usually horribly ineffective (see QR codes).
yesimahuman 14y ago
I'm trying to dig into Marketing and really figure out how to hack it. I've found patio11 extremely helpful, and also some of Peldi's posts on the Balsamiq blog: http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2008/08/05/startup-marketing-advice-from-balsamiq-studios/ http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2008/08/05/startup-marketi.... I will definitely check out some of the recommendations here. Does anyone have any other actionable suggestions for reading? I've picked up a few books but I'm looking to really dig in and get better at selling SaaS stuff online.
- mindcrime 14y ago
  Does anyone have any other actionable suggestions for reading? Not necessarily SaaS specific, but some of the foundational works of recent times are the works by Jack Trout, Al Ries, and various co-authors: Positioning, Re-positioning, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, and Differentiate or Die among others.
- justinmares 14y ago
  Every single blog post under the SaaS tag on this site - http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas/ http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas/
  - yesimahuman 14y ago
    Thanks! I'm starting my journey of learning marketing, and going to be writing about it if you're interested (http://blog.codiqa.com/2012/07/step1-admit-you-have-a-marketing-problem/ http://blog.codiqa.com/2012/07/step1-admit-you-have-a-market...)
losethos 14y ago
I'm in Jail. God is just Yer fucked. God says... C:\Text\QUIX.TXT trough; but he seeing the other approach hailed him in a loud voice, "O thou, whoever thou art, rash knight that comest to lay hands on the armour of the most valorous errant that ever girt on sword, have a care what thou dost; touch it not unless thou wouldst lay down thy life as the penalty of thy rashness." The carrier gave no heed to these words (and he would have done better to heed them if he had been heedful of his health), but seizing it by the straps flung the armour some distance from him ---- "It is not for him who is buckling his armor to boast as though he were taking it off."
mrbrianholland 14y ago
Agreed. I own http://drivingtests101.com/ http://drivingtests101.com/ . It is a free driving test prep website covering ~400 tests across 11 countries, all states/provinces and vehicle types. It was not until we spent time on SEO and pushed to get into the media a few months later before we truly began to realize the fruits of our labor. A product or service can often lead to no monetization without a push from marketing, aside from the true viral one-off hits. Do not count on this! Marketing is key and I would encourage all business owners, not just developers, to learn this invaluable skill. Good luck!
rshlo 14y ago
The aim of a founder is not to be the best marketer or developer. It's goal should be knowing just enough to hire the best people in every field and lead the team. This what makes a great founder.
- patrickambron 14y ago
  You're describing a great CEO, not necessarily a great StartUp founder. In the beginning the founder's job is not to hire people (you're not ready for that yet). It's to execute and demonstrate some sort of traction--the traction you can use to hire great people. Ideas are a dime a dozen. If you want to hire great people, you need to show that idea can be executed before you can hire "the best people in every field"
jawr 14y ago
Although having great marketing skills is invaluable, I have come to the conclusion that having a deeper understanding of design is crucial to modern developers; it seems to me that more and more developers are cropping up and the demand has shifted from them to people with great design capabilities. I guess the morale of the story is to learn everything you can!
patio11 14y ago
I really cannot emphasize enough how the intersection of these two fields is a) extraordinarily rare, b) extraordinarily capable of producing directly attributable, measurable improvements across an entire business and as a direct consequence c) very, very richly valued by the market right now.
- lsc 14y ago
  >c) very, very richly valued by the market right now. Yeah. I think, in fact, it's overvalued by the market right now. Many people are bidding for ad words as if the google adword is what brought you the customer. The thing is, at least in my case, this simply isn't true. Nobody buys a VPS on the first click; if someone clicks through a google ad for my company, yeah, google should get some credit, but most of the credit should go to the blog the customer saw a month ago. That's the thing; because the adwords are the first hits and are super convenient for the customer, they pick up a lot of people that would have clicked on the organic result. Now, this is okay if they are taking a very small cut, but the way many people use google adwords? the price is bid up to a very large cut of the profit you are going to earn from that customer. I mean, yeah, sure, if google really is bringing me brand new customers that had never heard of me; people I would not otherwise have a chance with, yeah, I can see paying 90% of the profit. But if google is bringing me customers that were very likely to come to me anyhow? eh, I'm not going to want to pay google nearly that much. I think this is also why facebook is so highly valued; people believe that facebook has enough tracking data to see that blog that my customer read last week that actually caused the customer to sign up through the adword this week. And maybe they do... but it's a dang difficult problem, and I haven't seen facebook make much progress. Even then, they are going to have a hard time integrating the people that heard of me because of the checkout-line advertisements I bought in Mountain View Safeways. (because of this, my advertising dollars go into cost per impression advertising, rather than cost per click.)
  - patio11 14y ago
    While I do not disagree with what you have to say with regards to Google getting to claim credit for skimming the cream off of their advertisers' own brand equity (and then selling that cream to them at impressive prices), that's sort of orthogonal to the point I was making. Specific to, say, AdWords, the point I'm making is that people who a) have enough development capability to ship software products and b) also know AdWords well enough to get entrusted with a company's budget are as rare as hen's teeth. Because many, many companies have 6 figure AdWords spends monthly and generate millions of dollars of revenue as a result of them, someone who is capable of applying their skills horizontally across a company's AdWords operation (+) can be very, very useful to have around. There's approximately four people in the world that can do that. Two of them like their jobs, one just got funded, and the fourth one can charge whatever he darn pleases. (This is an exaggeration, but not much of one.) + You might naively assume I'm talking about the AdWords API, but there are so many things a developer could do to wring extra money out of an AdWords campaign that it is virtually cheating. A consulting client once bragged to me that they had a lot of landing pages, and they asked me how many I had. It turns out that they had 11 and I had, at the time, only 900-something. There are a lot of marketing departments which think that developing 900 landing pages would take a team of 20 people the better part of a year. A properly motivated intermediate Rails developer could bang that out on any given Monday. (P.S. If you're not going to make the company a million bucks next Monday, consider banging this out.)
mindcrime 14y ago
Being a Developer Makes You Valuable. Learning How to Market Makes You Dangerous I hope this is true! I've been developing for 12+ years, and always had an interest in marketing, but never really studied marketing. Now, I'm one of three tech co-founders of a startup that does not yet have a dedicated marketing person. So, I've finally been diving into really trying to learn and understand marketing (and sales). OK, wait, I did take "Marketing 101" at the local community college a couple of years ago, but that's the only formal education on the topic I've had. Now, I have a huge stack of sales and marketing books I'm working through. So far I've mainly focused on the Jack Trout, Al Ries, et al. stuff... Positioning, Re-positioning, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, etc., and I've been going through a video series from Chet Holmes (of The Ultimate Sales Machine fame). Looks like some good resources in the linked article, so looking forward to chewing through some of that as well. And here's a pre-emptive "+1" for more good startup marketing related links on HN!
- schraeds 14y ago
  As someone with a marketing degree, here's the kind of stuff I focus on these days: SEO, Traffic Analytics, A/B Testing, User flow optimization (ie, webforms, sales funnels), PPC Advertising, Social Media, Viral, Word of Mouth, Customer Service, PR (ie. blogs, articles).
- throwa 14y ago
  Marketing and sales are about story telling and influencing would be customers, so that they can see a need for the product you offer. For me, I have found the list of books below to be very informative. Note, they are not listed in any particular order. I mostly listen to the audio or mp3 versions, that way i can just play them as i do other things. Most of them have actionable steps and are not just high level talk. a. Spin Selling by Neil Rackham b. 50 ScientificallyWays to Be Persuasive by Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, Robert B. Cialdini c. Three Steps to Yes by Gene Bedell; -Only print, no audio d. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath e. How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
  - mindcrime 14y ago
cek 14y ago
One of my favorite sayings: Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. Getting people to pay for what you executed on is more everything. If there are 1000 people who are 'idea people', 100 of them can execute on an idea; actually build something. 10 can get that thing sold. Those 10 are the dangerous ones. Great post.
- kgtm 14y ago
  While I agree that it is a good post, isn't it kinda obvious that if you are an idea person, can execute on that idea to make a product and also sell it, you are king of the world? I mean, you have everything except finding a way to repair your brain and body towards immortality (which I am still not quite sure if desirable)...
  - cek 14y ago
    I agree its obvious. But the reality is a shocking number of people (990 of 1000?) never leave the building.
loeschg 14y ago
Feel free to call me a n00b or uncultured, but I don't get your anti-spam measures to subscribe to your posts via email. Prove humanity by completing the lyric: "Blame..." huh?
- cickpass_broken 14y ago
  for the "uncultured": Blame Canada! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOzG7bBylRo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOzG7bBylRo
  - loeschg 14y ago
    Thanks for that. Maybe he doesn't want uncultured people subscribing via email. If so, it's working :)
ph0rque 14y ago
This is a topic near and dear to my heart; I am a developer who tried to take up marketing but gave up. So this post's call to action is to read/listen/watch various resources; in sum they are probably dozens of hours of learning. With a little searching, I'm sure the actual material available stretches into hundreds of hours. So my question, similar to the one I posted almost a year ago [0], is: what is the best available material out there, where I can learn 80% of marketing in 20% of the material? 0. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2967010 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2967010
- mindcrime 14y ago
  With a little searching, I'm sure the actual material available stretches into hundreds of hours. I'm sure it's far more than that. Especially if "a little searching" includes bittorrent trackers. Not that I advocate this sort of thing, but there's one tracker I know of, that specializes in business related topics, with a healthy dose of sales and marketing material. There is so much material (books, videos, reports, articles, podcasts, etc.) to watch, listen to, read, etc. that you could probably spend tens of thousands of hours on it. , is: what is the best available material out there, where I can learn 80% of marketing in 20% of the material? OK, I'm not marketing guru, just another "developer trying to take up marketing." But based on a lot of reading, watching, asking questions, etc., I get the sense that material from Chet Holmes, Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham is usually regarded as pretty good. I'm watching some Chet Holmes videos now, and finding a ton of value in them, FWIW. YMMV, of course. Also, the works of Jack Trout, Al Ries, Steve Rifkin, et al, are usually regarded as pretty important. Trout and crew basically created positioning theory. And then there's a whole separate world of material for people who are interested in the spammy(er), get rich quick, "Internet Marketing" stuff. I haven't studied any of his marketing materials, but Eben Pagan seems to be one of the more popular guys in that world. Whether or not his material would be of use to the typical HN reader is left as an exercise for the reader. Or, if somebody here is familiar with his work and could chime in, I'd be really curious to hear your take.
  - spitfire 14y ago
    So what are these trackers? What material should you look for? It's no good saying "There's this cool little news site all the smart people hang out on (HN)" without telling us how to find it.
Alan01252 14y ago
It's amazing actually how many programmers don't concentrate on marketing at all. I've recently got a few emails from fellow developers asking if they need a blog/twitter/google+ account in order to get customers as a freelancer. The answer is yes, yes you do! The proof, 3 months in to my freelance career and I'm already getting customers, via blogging and Google search results. Heck I've even been lucky enough to get one customer as a direct result of getting front paged on Hacker News. I have no idea whether I'm approaching "dangerous" yet. But I know for certain, I've still got a lot of marketing effort to go, and one hell of a lot left to learn.
- hntester123 14y ago
  Good comment.
at-fates-hands 14y ago
The best part about being a developer and interested in marketing is you have all kids of opportunity to learn and tinker. You can build a mobile app, submit to the app stores and see how it sells. Track your sales, dive into the numbers and find out what works and what doesn't. Does a good design help? What key words help your app get found? What about your UI? Do people love it? Hate it? Why? You can build a static website and attach Google Analytics and see where your traffic comes from, how is your SEO working? What mobile users are on your site? What pages are they viewing? What's your conversion rate? Build an e-commerce website and see what sells. Does the position of the items matter? What colors are people buying? What are your buyers preferences? Are your price points too high? Too low? There's so many cool things you can learn when you start to get interested in marketing. If you're hacker, you can have a lot of fun and learn a ton of stuff just by creating simple things and seeing how the public/users react and use it. It really is completely fascinating.
- talsraviv 14y ago
  So true. You have a massive advantage to learn quickly because you have complete freedom to iterate as you please without waiting on anyone.
- AznHisoka 14y ago
  I think you're talking about conversion optimization rather than pure marketing. Tracking numbers for a mobile app is fruitless if you don't have a way to get tons of people to use it in the first place. A/B testing design, colors etc of a mobile app is only useful once you users. Similarly, for an e-commerce site, it doesn't make sense to A/B test different things like price if you got a measly number of visitors. Now, how is one supposed to get all those visitors/customers/users in the first place, so we can then tinker/test the various variables? That is marketing, and a lot of it isn't "hacker" oriented. It's actually messy, and geared more towards people who are sales oriented, even some of SEO. SEO is actually one of the few remaining hacker-friendly methods of marketing.
atomical 14y ago
I'd like to hear more about non-web marketing like direct mail. I would think small businesses would be more receptive to that. After all, they might not realize they need your tool until you put an advertisement in front of them.
- corry 14y ago
  In my experience, non-tech B2B audiences respond very well to 'traditional' marketing - postcard mailings, magazine ads, etc. IMO there are 2 aspects to doing this well: (1) USE IT AS PART OF AN INCREMENTAL CAMPAIGN. Use the traditional stuff as the first element to get them involved with you. Sending them a well-designed, relevant postcard invitation = you have their attention (whereas they are 'banner ad blind' and 'email blind'). Use that attention to push them to the next step (which isn't the sale - it's just another incremental commitment like attending a webinar, or downloading a whitepaper, or using an online calculator to spec something out, etc). Incremental commitment is the name of the game in B2B sales and marketing, and traditional marketing can be a great start to the chain. (2) LINK OFFLINE STUFF TO ONLINE STUFF. As you can see even from my examples above, it's important to get them into online channels as soon as possible (where they can be tracked and interacted with more efficiently). You want to have tons of relevant content you can offer them, lots of places for them to explore the problem/solution, etc. The real joy (and pain) of B2B marketing is that you have to do the 'strategic' campaign planning well while also nailing the 'tactical' messaging / design / etc execution.
frankphilips 14y ago
I'd like to call these marketers Growth Hackers. They're a different breed of hackers, and they're just as important as the engineers. A successful startup should have at least ONE growth hacker in the team for it to be successful.
- unimpressive 14y ago
  Dear god, please stop abusing that word. If we don't it will lose all meaning, in some ways it already has.
  - frankphilips 14y ago
    Seems to me like you're making comments just for the sake of making comments. Dear god, stop abusing that privilege. First of all, don't tell someone to stop abusing "that word" without mentioning what word you're talking about. Second, if you're making a point, be prepared to back it up. What is "losing all meaning"? In what ways has it already? What the heck are you talking about anyway?? How is your comment benefiting the original poster at all?
    - unimpressive 14y ago
      >Seems to me like you're making comments just for the sake of making comments. I'm not. But since it came off that way I will apologize. First for lashing out at you, and second for not being more specific. The word "Hacker" is being applied to everything and everyone, and it's annoying. As an example, a search for "Hacker" in my RSS feed produces the following headlines (Among others, but I list these as egregious examples.): Mobile hackers: The future scares us, change it at Everyme The Distribution Hacker’s Mission: Create an Unfair Advantage ShowHN: Hacker Tourist - opinionated ecommerce for photographers Reinvent Retail. Growth Hacker at YC Mobile Startup. Ask HN Teachers and Edu Hackers : How do you prepare educational materials? When you start talking about "Hacker photographers" and "Growth hackers" and "Distribution hackers" I have to ask, do you mean "People who are hackers who happen to know marketing/photography/whatever a distribution hacker is supposed to do/etc too." or are we just applying this term to everything so that everyone can feel like they're part of some elite club? And that's not even getting into the whole "Well you can't just say you're a hacker and expect everyone to go with it." argument. EDIT: Which, in certain views on that latter point, the word "Hacker" is about an elite club, which only makes the appending of the word to everything just feel like some sort of envy. (Full disclosure: I do not consider myself a hacker.)
patrickambron 14y ago
I've always thought the person running the development team should understand marketing, and the person running the marketing efforts knows how to develop. The two are so intertwined, but at the same time, it's important to separate the effort. Just like in engineering, the devil is in the details not the conceptual idea. You want a marketing person who knows how to get everything just right, to get in front of customers, sign people up, etc
toeknee123 14y ago
Definitely agree here. I have a Marketing background but have been learning how to develop the past 3-4 months. Marketing = Principles/Thoughts Software Development = technical/tangible skill Marketing = Ideas; Software Development = Execution of those marketing ideas.
h2s 14y ago
How to market on HN: - Write an interesting blog post and post it to HN - Include a link to something you're selling somewhere near the end of the post There are so many people doing this it's unreal.
- nachteilig 14y ago
  Certainly one of the stranger aspects of this site. It's almost a sort of meta-game.
tuhin 14y ago
I would really extend this to the following qualities that people in the field of building products should try, to the best of their abilities, to be good at. They might not become the best at each one, but enough to become potent and in the very least better than they were before trying: -Understand technology. What it takes to build, scale, maintain and fix things. What are the affordances and benefits of one approach over the other. -Understand design. Not just pretty pixels (in fact that is the least important part, IMHO). But the WHY. How it affects people, what the goals are, why the current system is broken or why it does not exist. - Understand Marketing. How do you convince others that your product (idea or finished) is THE one they should vouch for. Why should they invest time and money into it. How can you make them believe that you know what you are doing and better than any bad experiences they have had with products of that kind. Selling/Marketing is not evil. It is a necessary (evil). Many humble and smart people fail to understand that. I totally understand it is very hard for one person to be great or even good at all three. But hey most don't even try, so you are already better then them the first day you try.
tlogan 14y ago
So true. Reading books about marketing is good but they are too 'vague'. From my experience, executing marketing / selling is much harder (and more fun) than you think and the only way to learn it. Just get out of the building and start embarrassing yourself (literally).
paraschopra 14y ago
I started as a developer, coded the first version of Visual Website Optimizer myself, but quickly discovered the importance of marketing. I agree to the OP's assessment that marketing is every bit as juicy as coding. Discovering a channel, executing a successful marketing campaign and crunching out hard ROI from it, seeing 10 customers because of it is as exciting (if not more) as learning the wonderful node.js and implementing a chat server on your own. That said, I'd say after a certain scale, it becomes incredibly hard to do both: a) coding; and b) marketing. There's so much to do in both fields that you cannot do justice to both _at the same time_. So you have to eventually build a team and decide between coding or marketing (but the great part is that by that time you can afford to do this).
plinkplonk 14y ago
But isn't this just stating the obvious? being a Developer + learning $cool_skill makes you $positive_adjective. Well duh. Also, the sun rises in the east. $cool_skill element_of {marketing, design, negotiation, leadership skills, design, writing ....} $positive_adjective element_of {dangerous, rockstar, ninja , pirate, extraordinary, one in a million, cool, killer ... } mix and match and you have a dozen or so catchy titles. Throw in links to the top books on the topic and links to some blogs, and most importantly an ad for an ebook somewhere in the post. Profit. Repeat a few dozen times. Landing pages for SEO. Hey you are a guru! Maybe, I am just feeling too cynical abut such 'how to do a startup' porn. Feel free to ignore me. OTOH HN generally has good discussions, even when the submission is spammy/low quality.
- AznHisoka 14y ago
  you're not alone. It's harder than they make it seem.. much harder. As an example, landing pages for SEO is trivial.. stupid trivial. How to get those pages to rank for your desired keywords though is challenging, but no growth hacker wants to do that, or tell u how to do that.
  - jwdunne 14y ago
    In some sectors it can be as easy as it looks. It's just when the playing field is really competitive that it gets a bit tough. Ranking #1 for 'dentist in irlam' will be levels upon levels easier than ranking for 'dentist in london' in terms of SEO. Similarly the cost-per-click in paid search will probably be orders of magnitude apart and optimising your campaigns will be much harder. Choosing the best keywords for what you'd like to achieve is tricky and figuring that out only happened after I dived in - it's likely a lot of what I've learned there is niche specific too.
- talsraviv 14y ago
  I'm with you. I feel the same way about startup porn. It's just that when I saw Wasswa's email it hit me most programmers don't work closely with good marketers and understand this. It's an unnecessary lost opportunity. I also figured there's many hard working people like him that just needed to be told marketing (or any skill in that set) is learnable that got me motivated up to write something.
klbarry 14y ago
Note: I am not a developer. My experience is in e-commerce marketing and my degree (est. May 2013) is in Statistics. I've loved the field of human persuasion for years, and I think I can add something that I have written in the past to this conversation. I essentially made a list of marketing "truths", based on my research and experience, and have tested it against others. What remains of the list is what no one has been able to refute, so I think it's decently close to a list of universal irrefutable "rules of marketing." The Truths of Marketing 1) Ethos (your perceived character) is the most important. 2) People make judgments by comparison/anchoring. 3) People process information best from stories. 4) People are foremost interested in things that affect them. 5) Breaking patterns gets attention. 6) People look to other people's decisions when making decisions. 7) People will believe things more easily that fit their pre-existent mindset. The converse is also true. 8) People handle one idea at a time best. 9) People want more choices, but are happier with fewer. 10) People decide first, then rationalize - If people are stuck with something, they will like it more over time. 11) Experience is memory, the last part of the experience is weighted heavily. * Keep in mind that this should not necessarily be used a checklist; see what the director of a large creative agency says on the subject: "I think that in broad strokes these truisms are accurate, but they aren't really how I personally get to the bottom of the marketing equation when working on a brand. Of them, I think 1 and 4 are probably the closest, but I think the biggest problem is the same problem you find in how any analysis of consumers, or what is usually called "consumer behavior" is used -- it is, by definition, one step removed from what you're trying to analyze, yet it's treated like the consumers themselves. Because consumers are often perceived as black boxes to marketers, there's a temptation to analyze their behavior and then market to that analysis instead of to them. Maybe this is because I'm on the creative side, but for me the most useful role of research is to inform and guide what is a form of for our consumer. To not just analyze what drives them, but to genuinely it yourself. Reading research about twelve-year-old girls' purchase decisions and focus group transcripts is not the same thing as thinking like one. I have a client in that market, and I read everything when I'm working on something -- research, web sites, fan magazines, television -- but none of it is a substitute for sitting in a dark room and genuinely trying to imagine the trials of what it must be like to actually be a twelve-year-old girl from a first person perspective. It sounds absurd, but that's how you come up with great ideas -- to do your best to become a twelve-year-old girl, and then develop things that you would enjoy. So I think truisms like yours are useful as long as they remain a means to an end, and not, as they so often do, a checklist, or worse, the end itself."
gersh 14y ago
Plain old marketing is simple. You gotta reach your audience. You gotta figure out what they look at, and you gotta get their attention. If your audience is searching Google, you hit them with SEO and Adwords. If they are watching TV, you gotta get on the shows they are watching. Once you get their attention, they know about you, and then it is matter of sales if they buy. For good branding, it helps to have a good name, logo, etc. Although, in the end it helps if they like your product. If you're in a crowded space, marketing is going to be harder. Although, I've never really found marketing to be that complicated. If you are in a crowded space, it can be harder to market, because your message gets crowded out. Who is struggling with marketing? Let me know. I don't really think it is that hard.
chadhietala 14y ago
I support this message as a Marketing/Finance major turned software engineer.
schiptsov 14y ago
what is the meaning behind all those words?

374 points by talsraviv 14y ago

Speaking as a developer, I think I can see the analogy between dev and marketing. But from a learning perspective, software development has a big advantage. You can build everything from a hello world app to your own toy OS without being negatively impacted by existing software out there. As a marketer, it seems like you always have to be on the cutting edge. What worked in the 1980s is unlikely to work in 2012. Even what was cool in 2008 is unlikely to be effective today. The next problem is that marketing is, by its nature, a public activity. Doing it badly is embarrassing and likely limits your ability to even give it a second try.

patio11 14y ago
I'd tend to disagree: everything old is new again. Sears Roebuck beat me to A/B testing by, what, eighty years?
- rgraham 14y ago
  There is nothing new under the sun, but people are forgetful.
rmc 14y ago
Hang on, did you just claim that marketing requires cutting edge techniques which change year by year, but software development doesn't? Is it even possible to work as a programmer if you are using 1980s tech? What about if you know nothing created after 2001, how limited would your carrer prospects be? I think you have things backwards.
corkill 14y ago
Headlines, calls to action all the same stuff as in print 100 years ago, just the medium is different now. Marketing isn't about fancy tools. The cutting edge of marketing is usually horribly ineffective (see QR codes).

yesimahuman 14y ago

I'm trying to dig into Marketing and really figure out how to hack it. I've found patio11 extremely helpful, and also some of Peldi's posts on the Balsamiq blog: http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2008/08/05/startup-marketing-advice-from-balsamiq-studios/ http://blogs.balsamiq.com/product/2008/08/05/startup-marketi.... I will definitely check out some of the recommendations here. Does anyone have any other actionable suggestions for reading? I've picked up a few books but I'm looking to really dig in and get better at selling SaaS stuff online.

mindcrime 14y ago
Does anyone have any other actionable suggestions for reading? Not necessarily SaaS specific, but some of the foundational works of recent times are the works by Jack Trout, Al Ries, and various co-authors: Positioning, Re-positioning, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, and Differentiate or Die among others.
justinmares 14y ago
Every single blog post under the SaaS tag on this site - http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas/ http://www.forentrepreneurs.com/saas/
- yesimahuman 14y ago
  Thanks! I'm starting my journey of learning marketing, and going to be writing about it if you're interested (http://blog.codiqa.com/2012/07/step1-admit-you-have-a-marketing-problem/ http://blog.codiqa.com/2012/07/step1-admit-you-have-a-market...)

losethos 14y ago

I'm in Jail. God is just Yer fucked. God says... C:\Text\QUIX.TXT trough; but he seeing the other approach hailed him in a loud voice, "O thou, whoever thou art, rash knight that comest to lay hands on the armour of the most valorous errant that ever girt on sword, have a care what thou dost; touch it not unless thou wouldst lay down thy life as the penalty of thy rashness." The carrier gave no heed to these words (and he would have done better to heed them if he had been heedful of his health), but seizing it by the straps flung the armour some distance from him ---- "It is not for him who is buckling his armor to boast as though he were taking it off."

mrbrianholland 14y ago

Agreed. I own http://drivingtests101.com/ http://drivingtests101.com/ . It is a free driving test prep website covering ~400 tests across 11 countries, all states/provinces and vehicle types. It was not until we spent time on SEO and pushed to get into the media a few months later before we truly began to realize the fruits of our labor. A product or service can often lead to no monetization without a push from marketing, aside from the true viral one-off hits. Do not count on this! Marketing is key and I would encourage all business owners, not just developers, to learn this invaluable skill. Good luck!

rshlo 14y ago

The aim of a founder is not to be the best marketer or developer. It's goal should be knowing just enough to hire the best people in every field and lead the team. This what makes a great founder.

patrickambron 14y ago
You're describing a great CEO, not necessarily a great StartUp founder. In the beginning the founder's job is not to hire people (you're not ready for that yet). It's to execute and demonstrate some sort of traction--the traction you can use to hire great people. Ideas are a dime a dozen. If you want to hire great people, you need to show that idea can be executed before you can hire "the best people in every field"

jawr 14y ago

Although having great marketing skills is invaluable, I have come to the conclusion that having a deeper understanding of design is crucial to modern developers; it seems to me that more and more developers are cropping up and the demand has shifted from them to people with great design capabilities. I guess the morale of the story is to learn everything you can!

patio11 14y ago

I really cannot emphasize enough how the intersection of these two fields is a) extraordinarily rare, b) extraordinarily capable of producing directly attributable, measurable improvements across an entire business and as a direct consequence c) very, very richly valued by the market right now.

lsc 14y ago
>c) very, very richly valued by the market right now. Yeah. I think, in fact, it's overvalued by the market right now. Many people are bidding for ad words as if the google adword is what brought you the customer. The thing is, at least in my case, this simply isn't true. Nobody buys a VPS on the first click; if someone clicks through a google ad for my company, yeah, google should get some credit, but most of the credit should go to the blog the customer saw a month ago. That's the thing; because the adwords are the first hits and are super convenient for the customer, they pick up a lot of people that would have clicked on the organic result. Now, this is okay if they are taking a very small cut, but the way many people use google adwords? the price is bid up to a very large cut of the profit you are going to earn from that customer. I mean, yeah, sure, if google really is bringing me brand new customers that had never heard of me; people I would not otherwise have a chance with, yeah, I can see paying 90% of the profit. But if google is bringing me customers that were very likely to come to me anyhow? eh, I'm not going to want to pay google nearly that much. I think this is also why facebook is so highly valued; people believe that facebook has enough tracking data to see that blog that my customer read last week that actually caused the customer to sign up through the adword this week. And maybe they do... but it's a dang difficult problem, and I haven't seen facebook make much progress. Even then, they are going to have a hard time integrating the people that heard of me because of the checkout-line advertisements I bought in Mountain View Safeways. (because of this, my advertising dollars go into cost per impression advertising, rather than cost per click.)
- patio11 14y ago
  While I do not disagree with what you have to say with regards to Google getting to claim credit for skimming the cream off of their advertisers' own brand equity (and then selling that cream to them at impressive prices), that's sort of orthogonal to the point I was making. Specific to, say, AdWords, the point I'm making is that people who a) have enough development capability to ship software products and b) also know AdWords well enough to get entrusted with a company's budget are as rare as hen's teeth. Because many, many companies have 6 figure AdWords spends monthly and generate millions of dollars of revenue as a result of them, someone who is capable of applying their skills horizontally across a company's AdWords operation (+) can be very, very useful to have around. There's approximately four people in the world that can do that. Two of them like their jobs, one just got funded, and the fourth one can charge whatever he darn pleases. (This is an exaggeration, but not much of one.) + You might naively assume I'm talking about the AdWords API, but there are so many things a developer could do to wring extra money out of an AdWords campaign that it is virtually cheating. A consulting client once bragged to me that they had a lot of landing pages, and they asked me how many I had. It turns out that they had 11 and I had, at the time, only 900-something. There are a lot of marketing departments which think that developing 900 landing pages would take a team of 20 people the better part of a year. A properly motivated intermediate Rails developer could bang that out on any given Monday. (P.S. If you're not going to make the company a million bucks next Monday, consider banging this out.)

mindcrime 14y ago

Being a Developer Makes You Valuable. Learning How to Market Makes You Dangerous I hope this is true! I've been developing for 12+ years, and always had an interest in marketing, but never really studied marketing. Now, I'm one of three tech co-founders of a startup that does not yet have a dedicated marketing person. So, I've finally been diving into really trying to learn and understand marketing (and sales). OK, wait, I did take "Marketing 101" at the local community college a couple of years ago, but that's the only formal education on the topic I've had. Now, I have a huge stack of sales and marketing books I'm working through. So far I've mainly focused on the Jack Trout, Al Ries, et al. stuff... Positioning, Re-positioning, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing, etc., and I've been going through a video series from Chet Holmes (of The Ultimate Sales Machine fame). Looks like some good resources in the linked article, so looking forward to chewing through some of that as well. And here's a pre-emptive "+1" for more good startup marketing related links on HN!

schraeds 14y ago
As someone with a marketing degree, here's the kind of stuff I focus on these days: SEO, Traffic Analytics, A/B Testing, User flow optimization (ie, webforms, sales funnels), PPC Advertising, Social Media, Viral, Word of Mouth, Customer Service, PR (ie. blogs, articles).
throwa 14y ago
Marketing and sales are about story telling and influencing would be customers, so that they can see a need for the product you offer. For me, I have found the list of books below to be very informative. Note, they are not listed in any particular order. I mostly listen to the audio or mp3 versions, that way i can just play them as i do other things. Most of them have actionable steps and are not just high level talk. a. Spin Selling by Neil Rackham b. 50 ScientificallyWays to Be Persuasive by Noah J. Goldstein, Steve J. Martin, Robert B. Cialdini c. Three Steps to Yes by Gene Bedell; -Only print, no audio d. Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath e. How To Win Friends & Influence People by Dale Carnegie
- mindcrime 14y ago

cek 14y ago

One of my favorite sayings: Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything. Getting people to pay for what you executed on is more everything. If there are 1000 people who are 'idea people', 100 of them can execute on an idea; actually build something. 10 can get that thing sold. Those 10 are the dangerous ones. Great post.

kgtm 14y ago
While I agree that it is a good post, isn't it kinda obvious that if you are an idea person, can execute on that idea to make a product and also sell it, you are king of the world? I mean, you have everything except finding a way to repair your brain and body towards immortality (which I am still not quite sure if desirable)...
- cek 14y ago
  I agree its obvious. But the reality is a shocking number of people (990 of 1000?) never leave the building.

loeschg 14y ago

Feel free to call me a n00b or uncultured, but I don't get your anti-spam measures to subscribe to your posts via email. Prove humanity by completing the lyric: "Blame..." huh?

cickpass_broken 14y ago
for the "uncultured": Blame Canada! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOzG7bBylRo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOzG7bBylRo
- loeschg 14y ago
  Thanks for that. Maybe he doesn't want uncultured people subscribing via email. If so, it's working :)

ph0rque 14y ago

This is a topic near and dear to my heart; I am a developer who tried to take up marketing but gave up. So this post's call to action is to read/listen/watch various resources; in sum they are probably dozens of hours of learning. With a little searching, I'm sure the actual material available stretches into hundreds of hours. So my question, similar to the one I posted almost a year ago [0], is: what is the best available material out there, where I can learn 80% of marketing in 20% of the material? 0. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2967010 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2967010

mindcrime 14y ago
With a little searching, I'm sure the actual material available stretches into hundreds of hours. I'm sure it's far more than that. Especially if "a little searching" includes bittorrent trackers. Not that I advocate this sort of thing, but there's one tracker I know of, that specializes in business related topics, with a healthy dose of sales and marketing material. There is so much material (books, videos, reports, articles, podcasts, etc.) to watch, listen to, read, etc. that you could probably spend tens of thousands of hours on it. , is: what is the best available material out there, where I can learn 80% of marketing in 20% of the material? OK, I'm not marketing guru, just another "developer trying to take up marketing." But based on a lot of reading, watching, asking questions, etc., I get the sense that material from Chet Holmes, Dan Kennedy and Jay Abraham is usually regarded as pretty good. I'm watching some Chet Holmes videos now, and finding a ton of value in them, FWIW. YMMV, of course. Also, the works of Jack Trout, Al Ries, Steve Rifkin, et al, are usually regarded as pretty important. Trout and crew basically created positioning theory. And then there's a whole separate world of material for people who are interested in the spammy(er), get rich quick, "Internet Marketing" stuff. I haven't studied any of his marketing materials, but Eben Pagan seems to be one of the more popular guys in that world. Whether or not his material would be of use to the typical HN reader is left as an exercise for the reader. Or, if somebody here is familiar with his work and could chime in, I'd be really curious to hear your take.
- spitfire 14y ago
  So what are these trackers? What material should you look for? It's no good saying "There's this cool little news site all the smart people hang out on (HN)" without telling us how to find it.

Alan01252 14y ago

It's amazing actually how many programmers don't concentrate on marketing at all. I've recently got a few emails from fellow developers asking if they need a blog/twitter/google+ account in order to get customers as a freelancer. The answer is yes, yes you do! The proof, 3 months in to my freelance career and I'm already getting customers, via blogging and Google search results. Heck I've even been lucky enough to get one customer as a direct result of getting front paged on Hacker News. I have no idea whether I'm approaching "dangerous" yet. But I know for certain, I've still got a lot of marketing effort to go, and one hell of a lot left to learn.

hntester123 14y ago
Good comment.

at-fates-hands 14y ago

The best part about being a developer and interested in marketing is you have all kids of opportunity to learn and tinker. You can build a mobile app, submit to the app stores and see how it sells. Track your sales, dive into the numbers and find out what works and what doesn't. Does a good design help? What key words help your app get found? What about your UI? Do people love it? Hate it? Why? You can build a static website and attach Google Analytics and see where your traffic comes from, how is your SEO working? What mobile users are on your site? What pages are they viewing? What's your conversion rate? Build an e-commerce website and see what sells. Does the position of the items matter? What colors are people buying? What are your buyers preferences? Are your price points too high? Too low? There's so many cool things you can learn when you start to get interested in marketing. If you're hacker, you can have a lot of fun and learn a ton of stuff just by creating simple things and seeing how the public/users react and use it. It really is completely fascinating.

talsraviv 14y ago
So true. You have a massive advantage to learn quickly because you have complete freedom to iterate as you please without waiting on anyone.
AznHisoka 14y ago
I think you're talking about conversion optimization rather than pure marketing. Tracking numbers for a mobile app is fruitless if you don't have a way to get tons of people to use it in the first place. A/B testing design, colors etc of a mobile app is only useful once you users. Similarly, for an e-commerce site, it doesn't make sense to A/B test different things like price if you got a measly number of visitors. Now, how is one supposed to get all those visitors/customers/users in the first place, so we can then tinker/test the various variables? That is marketing, and a lot of it isn't "hacker" oriented. It's actually messy, and geared more towards people who are sales oriented, even some of SEO. SEO is actually one of the few remaining hacker-friendly methods of marketing.

atomical 14y ago

I'd like to hear more about non-web marketing like direct mail. I would think small businesses would be more receptive to that. After all, they might not realize they need your tool until you put an advertisement in front of them.

corry 14y ago
In my experience, non-tech B2B audiences respond very well to 'traditional' marketing - postcard mailings, magazine ads, etc. IMO there are 2 aspects to doing this well: (1) USE IT AS PART OF AN INCREMENTAL CAMPAIGN. Use the traditional stuff as the first element to get them involved with you. Sending them a well-designed, relevant postcard invitation = you have their attention (whereas they are 'banner ad blind' and 'email blind'). Use that attention to push them to the next step (which isn't the sale - it's just another incremental commitment like attending a webinar, or downloading a whitepaper, or using an online calculator to spec something out, etc). Incremental commitment is the name of the game in B2B sales and marketing, and traditional marketing can be a great start to the chain. (2) LINK OFFLINE STUFF TO ONLINE STUFF. As you can see even from my examples above, it's important to get them into online channels as soon as possible (where they can be tracked and interacted with more efficiently). You want to have tons of relevant content you can offer them, lots of places for them to explore the problem/solution, etc. The real joy (and pain) of B2B marketing is that you have to do the 'strategic' campaign planning well while also nailing the 'tactical' messaging / design / etc execution.

frankphilips 14y ago

I'd like to call these marketers Growth Hackers. They're a different breed of hackers, and they're just as important as the engineers. A successful startup should have at least ONE growth hacker in the team for it to be successful.

unimpressive 14y ago
Dear god, please stop abusing that word. If we don't it will lose all meaning, in some ways it already has.
- frankphilips 14y ago
  Seems to me like you're making comments just for the sake of making comments. Dear god, stop abusing that privilege. First of all, don't tell someone to stop abusing "that word" without mentioning what word you're talking about. Second, if you're making a point, be prepared to back it up. What is "losing all meaning"? In what ways has it already? What the heck are you talking about anyway?? How is your comment benefiting the original poster at all?
  - unimpressive 14y ago
    >Seems to me like you're making comments just for the sake of making comments. I'm not. But since it came off that way I will apologize. First for lashing out at you, and second for not being more specific. The word "Hacker" is being applied to everything and everyone, and it's annoying. As an example, a search for "Hacker" in my RSS feed produces the following headlines (Among others, but I list these as egregious examples.): Mobile hackers: The future scares us, change it at Everyme The Distribution Hacker’s Mission: Create an Unfair Advantage ShowHN: Hacker Tourist - opinionated ecommerce for photographers Reinvent Retail. Growth Hacker at YC Mobile Startup. Ask HN Teachers and Edu Hackers : How do you prepare educational materials? When you start talking about "Hacker photographers" and "Growth hackers" and "Distribution hackers" I have to ask, do you mean "People who are hackers who happen to know marketing/photography/whatever a distribution hacker is supposed to do/etc too." or are we just applying this term to everything so that everyone can feel like they're part of some elite club? And that's not even getting into the whole "Well you can't just say you're a hacker and expect everyone to go with it." argument. EDIT: Which, in certain views on that latter point, the word "Hacker" is about an elite club, which only makes the appending of the word to everything just feel like some sort of envy. (Full disclosure: I do not consider myself a hacker.)

patrickambron 14y ago

I've always thought the person running the development team should understand marketing, and the person running the marketing efforts knows how to develop. The two are so intertwined, but at the same time, it's important to separate the effort. Just like in engineering, the devil is in the details not the conceptual idea. You want a marketing person who knows how to get everything just right, to get in front of customers, sign people up, etc

toeknee123 14y ago

Definitely agree here. I have a Marketing background but have been learning how to develop the past 3-4 months. Marketing = Principles/Thoughts Software Development = technical/tangible skill Marketing = Ideas; Software Development = Execution of those marketing ideas.

h2s 14y ago

How to market on HN: - Write an interesting blog post and post it to HN - Include a link to something you're selling somewhere near the end of the post There are so many people doing this it's unreal.

nachteilig 14y ago
Certainly one of the stranger aspects of this site. It's almost a sort of meta-game.

tuhin 14y ago

I would really extend this to the following qualities that people in the field of building products should try, to the best of their abilities, to be good at. They might not become the best at each one, but enough to become potent and in the very least better than they were before trying: -Understand technology. What it takes to build, scale, maintain and fix things. What are the affordances and benefits of one approach over the other. -Understand design. Not just pretty pixels (in fact that is the least important part, IMHO). But the WHY. How it affects people, what the goals are, why the current system is broken or why it does not exist. - Understand Marketing. How do you convince others that your product (idea or finished) is THE one they should vouch for. Why should they invest time and money into it. How can you make them believe that you know what you are doing and better than any bad experiences they have had with products of that kind. Selling/Marketing is not evil. It is a necessary (evil). Many humble and smart people fail to understand that. I totally understand it is very hard for one person to be great or even good at all three. But hey most don't even try, so you are already better then them the first day you try.

tlogan 14y ago

So true. Reading books about marketing is good but they are too 'vague'. From my experience, executing marketing / selling is much harder (and more fun) than you think and the only way to learn it. Just get out of the building and start embarrassing yourself (literally).

paraschopra 14y ago

I started as a developer, coded the first version of Visual Website Optimizer myself, but quickly discovered the importance of marketing. I agree to the OP's assessment that marketing is every bit as juicy as coding. Discovering a channel, executing a successful marketing campaign and crunching out hard ROI from it, seeing 10 customers because of it is as exciting (if not more) as learning the wonderful node.js and implementing a chat server on your own. That said, I'd say after a certain scale, it becomes incredibly hard to do both: a) coding; and b) marketing. There's so much to do in both fields that you cannot do justice to both _at the same time_. So you have to eventually build a team and decide between coding or marketing (but the great part is that by that time you can afford to do this).

plinkplonk 14y ago

But isn't this just stating the obvious? being a Developer + learning $cool_skill makes you $positive_adjective. Well duh. Also, the sun rises in the east. $cool_skill element_of {marketing, design, negotiation, leadership skills, design, writing ....} $positive_adjective element_of {dangerous, rockstar, ninja , pirate, extraordinary, one in a million, cool, killer ... } mix and match and you have a dozen or so catchy titles. Throw in links to the top books on the topic and links to some blogs, and most importantly an ad for an ebook somewhere in the post. Profit. Repeat a few dozen times. Landing pages for SEO. Hey you are a guru! Maybe, I am just feeling too cynical abut such 'how to do a startup' porn. Feel free to ignore me. OTOH HN generally has good discussions, even when the submission is spammy/low quality.

AznHisoka 14y ago
you're not alone. It's harder than they make it seem.. much harder. As an example, landing pages for SEO is trivial.. stupid trivial. How to get those pages to rank for your desired keywords though is challenging, but no growth hacker wants to do that, or tell u how to do that.
- jwdunne 14y ago
  In some sectors it can be as easy as it looks. It's just when the playing field is really competitive that it gets a bit tough. Ranking #1 for 'dentist in irlam' will be levels upon levels easier than ranking for 'dentist in london' in terms of SEO. Similarly the cost-per-click in paid search will probably be orders of magnitude apart and optimising your campaigns will be much harder. Choosing the best keywords for what you'd like to achieve is tricky and figuring that out only happened after I dived in - it's likely a lot of what I've learned there is niche specific too.
talsraviv 14y ago
I'm with you. I feel the same way about startup porn. It's just that when I saw Wasswa's email it hit me most programmers don't work closely with good marketers and understand this. It's an unnecessary lost opportunity. I also figured there's many hard working people like him that just needed to be told marketing (or any skill in that set) is learnable that got me motivated up to write something.

klbarry 14y ago

Note: I am not a developer. My experience is in e-commerce marketing and my degree (est. May 2013) is in Statistics. I've loved the field of human persuasion for years, and I think I can add something that I have written in the past to this conversation. I essentially made a list of marketing "truths", based on my research and experience, and have tested it against others. What remains of the list is what no one has been able to refute, so I think it's decently close to a list of universal irrefutable "rules of marketing." The Truths of Marketing 1) Ethos (your perceived character) is the most important. 2) People make judgments by comparison/anchoring. 3) People process information best from stories. 4) People are foremost interested in things that affect them. 5) Breaking patterns gets attention. 6) People look to other people's decisions when making decisions. 7) People will believe things more easily that fit their pre-existent mindset. The converse is also true. 8) People handle one idea at a time best. 9) People want more choices, but are happier with fewer. 10) People decide first, then rationalize - If people are stuck with something, they will like it more over time. 11) Experience is memory, the last part of the experience is weighted heavily. * Keep in mind that this should not necessarily be used a checklist; see what the director of a large creative agency says on the subject: "I think that in broad strokes these truisms are accurate, but they aren't really how I personally get to the bottom of the marketing equation when working on a brand. Of them, I think 1 and 4 are probably the closest, but I think the biggest problem is the same problem you find in how any analysis of consumers, or what is usually called "consumer behavior" is used -- it is, by definition, one step removed from what you're trying to analyze, yet it's treated like the consumers themselves. Because consumers are often perceived as black boxes to marketers, there's a temptation to analyze their behavior and then market to that analysis instead of to them. Maybe this is because I'm on the creative side, but for me the most useful role of research is to inform and guide what is a form of for our consumer. To not just analyze what drives them, but to genuinely it yourself. Reading research about twelve-year-old girls' purchase decisions and focus group transcripts is not the same thing as thinking like one. I have a client in that market, and I read everything when I'm working on something -- research, web sites, fan magazines, television -- but none of it is a substitute for sitting in a dark room and genuinely trying to imagine the trials of what it must be like to actually be a twelve-year-old girl from a first person perspective. It sounds absurd, but that's how you come up with great ideas -- to do your best to become a twelve-year-old girl, and then develop things that you would enjoy. So I think truisms like yours are useful as long as they remain a means to an end, and not, as they so often do, a checklist, or worse, the end itself."

gersh 14y ago

Plain old marketing is simple. You gotta reach your audience. You gotta figure out what they look at, and you gotta get their attention. If your audience is searching Google, you hit them with SEO and Adwords. If they are watching TV, you gotta get on the shows they are watching. Once you get their attention, they know about you, and then it is matter of sales if they buy. For good branding, it helps to have a good name, logo, etc. Although, in the end it helps if they like your product. If you're in a crowded space, marketing is going to be harder. Although, I've never really found marketing to be that complicated. If you are in a crowded space, it can be harder to market, because your message gets crowded out. Who is struggling with marketing? Let me know. I don't really think it is that hard.

chadhietala 14y ago

I support this message as a Marketing/Finance major turned software engineer.

schiptsov 14y ago

what is the meaning behind all those words?