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> if you see advice here that puzzles you, it may be a sign of a painful lesson you're going to learn in the future. Ugh, does anybody mind taking a stab at pa

> if you see advice here that puzzles you, it may be a sign of a painful lesson you're going to learn in the future. Ugh, does anybody mind taking a stab at paraphrasing this one: > Don’t say things if your competitors can’t say the opposite. For example, your competitors can’t say their product is slow, so saying yours is fast is sloppy marketing. On the other hand, your competitors can say their software is for Python programmers, so saying yours is for Ruby programmers is good marketing. Apple can get away with breaking this rule, you can’t. This is the only bullet out of the list that I can't quite brain.

DannoHung 13y ago
Don't make positive assertions about your product which your competitor wouldn't make an opposite assertion of their product. Stop trying to say you're the hottest shit on the planet, try to make it clear how you're different without trying to imply everyone is shit. Makes it harder for people to get into idiotic debates about whether the claims are true or not for some stupid metric. That is, I suppose, unless your product actually is somehow much faster, smaller, bigger, whatever and it does everything else exactly the same.
nostrademons 13y ago
Here's Marc Andreesen saying the same thing with very different words: "There are always real and legitimate reasons why people often pass on opportunities — they see the risks and they wish to avoid them." And here's me trying to say the thing in still other words: Most people are not stupid. If they've chosen to make their product a certain way, it's probably for a real reason. If your marketing implies that they're stupid, people will assume that you can't see their real reason, and assume that you're stupid. It's better to phrase things in terms of trade-offs instead, and let your market decide whether the trade-offs you've made are more appropriate for their use-case than the trade-offs your competitors have made. For an example from a project I just released: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209908 (Incidentally, almost all the comments on Gumbo were of the vein of "Why should I use this?" until I started making replies like this, saying "Here's what html5lib does, here's why they made the choices they did, and here's how Gumbo differs from those choices. Here's what validator.nu does, here's why they made the choices they did, and here's how Gumbo differs. Here's what Hubbub does, here's why they made the choices they did, and here's how Gumbo differs."
- mhartl 13y ago
  *Marc Andreessen
jonp 13y ago
I'd come across a similar suggestion in a political context. Saying "we want a fair tax system" is meaningless, because any political party could say that. Saying "we want higher taxes on the wealthy to help the poor" or "we want lower taxes on the wealthy to encourage investment" is meaningful and distinctive.
pmarca 13y ago
Hard won marketing lesson: being different is way better than being better. Scott McNealy polarized this further -- he would say, I want half the potential customers to hate my products but half to love them.
- philsnow 13y ago
  Ahhh, that reminds me of the wonderful success that was OS/2. Makes perfect sense now, thanks.
  - pmarca 13y ago
    Yep. Scott's nightmare was that everyone would think his products were fine.
- elamadej 13y ago
  You can be better only for so long. Being different can be timeless if you're only different enough.
- wmougayar 13y ago
  Actually, being "differentiated" is what's needed, not being different. There is a difference :) sorry for the pun. Differentiated means that your statement is very defensible, and the competition cannot copy it or it will backfire on them. Differentiated means very unique to you, and it creates a position in the minds of your prospects that lodges you there and keeps you there. For e.g., "“a16z enables entrepreneurs to utilize expertise from Operating Partners who specialize in business development, technical talent, executive talent, market intelligence, marketing and brand building” is a differentiated statement, but "Andreessen Horowitz is a venture capital firm that provides seed, venture and growth stage funding to the best new technology companies" is not. I wrote a long post on Positioning: The Battle for Your Startup- that explains a modern version of Positioning, http://startupmanagement.org/2013/04/18/positioning-the-battle-for-your-startup/ http://startupmanagement.org/2013/04/18/positioning-the-batt...
mattlutze 13y ago
Here's a go... Everyone gets innundated with marketing and communications, so the things you say about your product / company have to be maximally valuable to you. I think, the goal is to use marketing to: 1. define a market, 2. define yourself within the market. If performance isn't a differentiator, talking about it doesn't help to further define your market or yourself within it. It becomes noise and hurts the clarity of your product. Python vs Ruby, however, defines discrete boundaries between what your product is and isn't with respect to the differentiators your market cares about. This makes the idea of your product / company more clear. A small set of direct, differentiating messages can be internalized by an audience. A broad set of tangential messages are hard for an audience to adopt.
loumf 13y ago
I like this explanation http://www.ericsink.com/item_10174.html http://www.ericsink.com/item_10174.html from 2004 from Eric Sink, and this recent application of his own advice http://www.ericsink.com/entries/mobile_database_sync.html http://www.ericsink.com/entries/mobile_database_sync.html
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jfarmer 13y ago
I actually disagree with the advice. Well, I'll walk that back: the advice is sound but too specific. I think it's more like, "Don't say things unless it's hard for your competitors to disagree." If your competitor is insisting on the opposite it would of course be hard for them to disagree, but I think that obscures what's really going on. Take Volvo, for example, a brand strongly associated with safety. They'd never croon about how slow their cars were, of course. It's more like they've chosen a third route -- in the "fast vs. slow" game they've decided to not play. In a world where Volvo was the only car brand, there is an opportunity for a competitor to differentiate themselves from Volvo by focusing on speed over safety, even though Volvo isn't claiming "the opposite." In fact, this works really well because the type of people who are attracted to raw speed will probably be turned on by the idea of their car being a little more dangerous. I don't need the same protection my grandmother does -- I want something exciting! You see how even though in some sense being "less safe" is objectively worse, it might nevertheless resonate with the customer psychologically? Once consumers reflexively think "Volvo" when one says "safety," however, you're never going to out-safety them. It's better to compete in a different game than compete in the game they've won. That's what folks mean when they say "Being different is more important than being better." I think engineers have a hard time with branding because they imagine building a brand or a product involves maximizing some utility function. People don't work like that, though. They operate in terms of narratives and stories and identity. Who am I? What does using this product say about me? They generalize their utilitarian temperament to everyone else, when in fact that temperament is just one of many. If you tried to out-safety Volvo you wouldn't be known as the "safer brand," you'd risk being known as "the brand that claims it's more safe than Volvo." But is it really? I don't know, man, I'm scared of buying a car that might not be safe. I'm going to stick with Volvo.
- pmarca 13y ago
  My view -- which marketing people frequently yell at me for having, so take it for what it's worth -- There are product categories outside of tech (in particular) that are sold to consumers, whose products are more or less interchangeable. Those products get marketed and sold a lot more on how they make the buyer feel, than anything about the actual product. So Volvo is bought by people who want other people around them to think they're the kind of person who would prioritize safety (and therefore boring/conservative) over other attributes -- even though none of those customers, and none of us, actually have any idea whether Volvos in 2013 are actually safer than any other car. This is classic brand marketing -- it's how Coca-Cola, P&G, bottled water companies, etc. make a living. And it's fine for them. BUT in the fields in which we operate -- both enterprise tech and consumer tech -- the customers more often actually care about the products. So marketing that is disconnected from actual product differentiation generally doesn't work. The clearest illustration of this in the past decade is mobile handsets. There's been a series of dramatic (and catastrophic) rises and falls of mobile handset companies -- Motorola, Nokia, RIM, HTC, Samsung, Microsoft. Each of these companies, when they were on top, had state of the art marketing teams and advertising agencies doing classic brand marketing at huge scale -- and none of it did any of them any good when the product trends turned against them. I know a lot of the people at these companies and in each case they were utterly shocked when their brands and their marketing budgets were not more effective buffers against big declines when technology shifted. So my general MO is -- admire companies outside of tech that are really good at consumer marketing, daydream about someday being in a business where I can pull a Don Draper and sell a product on the basis of it being "toasted" (the classic Lucky Strike cigarettes positioning -- even though all cigarettes are toasted), but never assume that I can get away with marketing a technology product on the basis of anything other than real product differentiation. p.s. The pushback I often get on this is, oh, no, I drink Coke vs Pepsi or Pepsi vs Coke because I like its flavor better. Same with bottled water and all the rest. To which I say, you are fooling yourself -- in any double-blind study you'd never be able to tell the products apart. Hell, people can't even tell white and red wine apart when they can't see it.

DannoHung 13y ago

Don't make positive assertions about your product which your competitor wouldn't make an opposite assertion of their product. Stop trying to say you're the hottest shit on the planet, try to make it clear how you're different without trying to imply everyone is shit. Makes it harder for people to get into idiotic debates about whether the claims are true or not for some stupid metric. That is, I suppose, unless your product actually is somehow much faster, smaller, bigger, whatever and it does everything else exactly the same.

nostrademons 13y ago

Here's Marc Andreesen saying the same thing with very different words: "There are always real and legitimate reasons why people often pass on opportunities — they see the risks and they wish to avoid them." And here's me trying to say the thing in still other words: Most people are not stupid. If they've chosen to make their product a certain way, it's probably for a real reason. If your marketing implies that they're stupid, people will assume that you can't see their real reason, and assume that you're stupid. It's better to phrase things in terms of trade-offs instead, and let your market decide whether the trade-offs you've made are more appropriate for their use-case than the trade-offs your competitors have made. For an example from a project I just released: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209908 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6209908 (Incidentally, almost all the comments on Gumbo were of the vein of "Why should I use this?" until I started making replies like this, saying "Here's what html5lib does, here's why they made the choices they did, and here's how Gumbo differs from those choices. Here's what validator.nu does, here's why they made the choices they did, and here's how Gumbo differs. Here's what Hubbub does, here's why they made the choices they did, and here's how Gumbo differs."

mhartl 13y ago
*Marc Andreessen

jonp 13y ago

I'd come across a similar suggestion in a political context. Saying "we want a fair tax system" is meaningless, because any political party could say that. Saying "we want higher taxes on the wealthy to help the poor" or "we want lower taxes on the wealthy to encourage investment" is meaningful and distinctive.

pmarca 13y ago

Hard won marketing lesson: being different is way better than being better. Scott McNealy polarized this further -- he would say, I want half the potential customers to hate my products but half to love them.

philsnow 13y ago
Ahhh, that reminds me of the wonderful success that was OS/2. Makes perfect sense now, thanks.
- pmarca 13y ago
  Yep. Scott's nightmare was that everyone would think his products were fine.
elamadej 13y ago
You can be better only for so long. Being different can be timeless if you're only different enough.
wmougayar 13y ago
Actually, being "differentiated" is what's needed, not being different. There is a difference :) sorry for the pun. Differentiated means that your statement is very defensible, and the competition cannot copy it or it will backfire on them. Differentiated means very unique to you, and it creates a position in the minds of your prospects that lodges you there and keeps you there. For e.g., "“a16z enables entrepreneurs to utilize expertise from Operating Partners who specialize in business development, technical talent, executive talent, market intelligence, marketing and brand building” is a differentiated statement, but "Andreessen Horowitz is a venture capital firm that provides seed, venture and growth stage funding to the best new technology companies" is not. I wrote a long post on Positioning: The Battle for Your Startup- that explains a modern version of Positioning, http://startupmanagement.org/2013/04/18/positioning-the-battle-for-your-startup/ http://startupmanagement.org/2013/04/18/positioning-the-batt...

mattlutze 13y ago

Here's a go... Everyone gets innundated with marketing and communications, so the things you say about your product / company have to be maximally valuable to you. I think, the goal is to use marketing to: 1. define a market, 2. define yourself within the market. If performance isn't a differentiator, talking about it doesn't help to further define your market or yourself within it. It becomes noise and hurts the clarity of your product. Python vs Ruby, however, defines discrete boundaries between what your product is and isn't with respect to the differentiators your market cares about. This makes the idea of your product / company more clear. A small set of direct, differentiating messages can be internalized by an audience. A broad set of tangential messages are hard for an audience to adopt.

loumf 13y ago

I like this explanation http://www.ericsink.com/item_10174.html http://www.ericsink.com/item_10174.html from 2004 from Eric Sink, and this recent application of his own advice http://www.ericsink.com/entries/mobile_database_sync.html http://www.ericsink.com/entries/mobile_database_sync.html

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

jfarmer 13y ago

I actually disagree with the advice. Well, I'll walk that back: the advice is sound but too specific. I think it's more like, "Don't say things unless it's hard for your competitors to disagree." If your competitor is insisting on the opposite it would of course be hard for them to disagree, but I think that obscures what's really going on. Take Volvo, for example, a brand strongly associated with safety. They'd never croon about how slow their cars were, of course. It's more like they've chosen a third route -- in the "fast vs. slow" game they've decided to not play. In a world where Volvo was the only car brand, there is an opportunity for a competitor to differentiate themselves from Volvo by focusing on speed over safety, even though Volvo isn't claiming "the opposite." In fact, this works really well because the type of people who are attracted to raw speed will probably be turned on by the idea of their car being a little more dangerous. I don't need the same protection my grandmother does -- I want something exciting! You see how even though in some sense being "less safe" is objectively worse, it might nevertheless resonate with the customer psychologically? Once consumers reflexively think "Volvo" when one says "safety," however, you're never going to out-safety them. It's better to compete in a different game than compete in the game they've won. That's what folks mean when they say "Being different is more important than being better." I think engineers have a hard time with branding because they imagine building a brand or a product involves maximizing some utility function. People don't work like that, though. They operate in terms of narratives and stories and identity. Who am I? What does using this product say about me? They generalize their utilitarian temperament to everyone else, when in fact that temperament is just one of many. If you tried to out-safety Volvo you wouldn't be known as the "safer brand," you'd risk being known as "the brand that claims it's more safe than Volvo." But is it really? I don't know, man, I'm scared of buying a car that might not be safe. I'm going to stick with Volvo.

pmarca 13y ago
My view -- which marketing people frequently yell at me for having, so take it for what it's worth -- There are product categories outside of tech (in particular) that are sold to consumers, whose products are more or less interchangeable. Those products get marketed and sold a lot more on how they make the buyer feel, than anything about the actual product. So Volvo is bought by people who want other people around them to think they're the kind of person who would prioritize safety (and therefore boring/conservative) over other attributes -- even though none of those customers, and none of us, actually have any idea whether Volvos in 2013 are actually safer than any other car. This is classic brand marketing -- it's how Coca-Cola, P&G, bottled water companies, etc. make a living. And it's fine for them. BUT in the fields in which we operate -- both enterprise tech and consumer tech -- the customers more often actually care about the products. So marketing that is disconnected from actual product differentiation generally doesn't work. The clearest illustration of this in the past decade is mobile handsets. There's been a series of dramatic (and catastrophic) rises and falls of mobile handset companies -- Motorola, Nokia, RIM, HTC, Samsung, Microsoft. Each of these companies, when they were on top, had state of the art marketing teams and advertising agencies doing classic brand marketing at huge scale -- and none of it did any of them any good when the product trends turned against them. I know a lot of the people at these companies and in each case they were utterly shocked when their brands and their marketing budgets were not more effective buffers against big declines when technology shifted. So my general MO is -- admire companies outside of tech that are really good at consumer marketing, daydream about someday being in a business where I can pull a Don Draper and sell a product on the basis of it being "toasted" (the classic Lucky Strike cigarettes positioning -- even though all cigarettes are toasted), but never assume that I can get away with marketing a technology product on the basis of anything other than real product differentiation. p.s. The pushback I often get on this is, oh, no, I drink Coke vs Pepsi or Pepsi vs Coke because I like its flavor better. Same with bottled water and all the rest. To which I say, you are fooling yourself -- in any double-blind study you'd never be able to tell the products apart. Hell, people can't even tell white and red wine apart when they can't see it.