11 ms·

Diary of a programmer with no clue about marketing

307 points by basil 13y ago

joeblau 13y ago
If anyone knows some good iOS game marketing techniques/tips, please drop me a line--My email is in my profile. I'm trying to market: http://appstore.com/xo9 http://appstore.com/xo9
vertis 13y ago
This looks like something I could actually use. I've just downloaded it. My take from the website, there is no price on the main page. I have to click 'Buy Now' with no idea whether I want to actually purchase. Which is a commitment (in my head) that I'm not prepared to make without knowing the price.
- jthomp 13y ago
  I thought the same
- douglasheriot 13y ago
  I didn’t even realise it wasn’t free until reading your blog listing 'sales' separately to 'downloads'. Price needs to be way more obvious up the top. Only now just seeing it’ll cost $50, is a disappointment after thinking it was free.
  - calinet6 13y ago
    $50?? Wow. This person needs to learn more than just marketing.
trustfundbaby 13y ago
"So now after years of neglecting anything to do with marketing. I get it. Marketing is hard. So crushingly hard.Also I was incredibly naive in thinking that the product was so good that the marketing would just snowball itself into action" This right here ... a 1000 times. I've been a developer for years now and I always held onto the same fantasy of launching something so good that marketing would take care of itself. After building a couple of products and being involved in a startup or two I've found that getting software built is not usually as hard as marketing it successfully
- quaffapint 13y ago
  I don't mean to reply with just a me too - but, absolutely agree with you through my own spend a year developing a product I can't market experiences... Software Development = Easy Marketing that Software = Wicked Hard
  - cageface 13y ago
    Software Development = Easy This is only true because most people are building fairly trivial software.
    - trustfundbaby 13y ago
      Fairly trivial software sells too, my friend.
      - cageface 13y ago
        Sure. Trivial software + heavy marketing seems to be the quickest path to software riches lately. But that doesn't mean we should make blanket statements that building software is easy. Because it's only easy if the problem you're trying to solve is easy.
    - jimbokun 13y ago
      Was talking to an extended family member a few months ago, who had built up a large marketing channel for a potential new game, and was frustrated because he couldn't find a developer to build the game at a price he was willing to pay. So I would say, it's only true because Hacker News consists mostly of people who already know how to build software, but far fewer of us know how to market.
    - PeterisP 13y ago
      The size of a need and the complexity of software for that need tend to be completely unrelated. People are paying in proportion to the pain/joy you solve, not in proportion to how hard it is to solve that. The difficulty affects only supply - i.e., if you do make it, how large the competition will be.
holgersindbaek 13y ago
I'd love to follow your journey of marketing your product. If you intend to go hard on marketing this app and exploring ways to do that, can you put up an email form, so I know when your next blog post is?!
- ptr 13y ago
  I'd also be interested in following your work; it's a great product to learn marketing from.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Nice. So one of the things that happened to me when I came to the Bay Area was I was working at Intel and I had to talk to a lot of marketing folks (who were talking to 'the public' about Intel's chips). I realized I didn't have a clue what they did. I set out to correct that before I started my own company and looked for a job that would let me work closely with marketing but still be engineering based. I found one at Sun which was effectively a 'technical marketing engineer' although at the time I joined the marketing folks just needed an engineer to translate what the competition was doing into something they could argue about. I too was amazed at how much more complex it was than my simplistic assumptions had been. I moved over into the kernel group later (they too had offered me a spot when I had interviewed) and have been pure engineering ever since but never forgot the lessons of that time. Things I learned, 1) Marketing is not sales - Sales is the process by which you convince someone with money to give it to you in exchange for a good or service. Marketing is the thing that happens before that which informs you why you might want to talk to a sales guy. A guy marketing a car will tell you that the car has the highest safety rating ever, the guy selling the car will tell you if you write a check right now he will take an additional $1,500 off the sticker price. 2) Marketing is about perception, and perception is personal. The job of a marketeer is to communicate an idea so that you can see it and perceive it the same way the marketeer does. That requires that you first discover the perceptual language of the target, then translate the message into that perceptual language, communicate it, and then test again for understanding. Marketing a car that smells like bacon to a vegetarian just doesn't work. If the biggest chunk of car buyers are vegetarians, and your car consistently smells of bacon, you need to translate that into something positive somehow. Not simple :-). 3) Marketing is ubiquitous - one of the interesting conversations with my daughter as a teen about what to wear, your clothes give others an impression of you, you cannot prevent that, all you can do is control it. People are constantly taking these bits of information in and reasoning about them consciously and unconsciously. To be successful you have to have influence over as many of those information channels as possible. Getting that influence can be tricky. Basically, it isn't as easy as it looks like it should be was my conclusion.
- davemel37 13y ago
  A few notes... Marketing for large enterprises is a different challenge than promoting a product on your own, so insights from working at SUN might not translate into street level marketing. 1) marketing is not sales - This is absolutely incorrect. Marketing is any communication that touches a prospect or customer. Copywriting is salesmanship in print. Sales is absolutely a key ingredient of marketing! 2) Marketing is about perception - Partially true... Branding is about perception, marketing is about much more than just perception. 3)Marketing is Ubiquitous - This time you got it right!!! Marketing is influencing every possible touchpoint with consumers.
robotys 13y ago
Reason dev-ing a software is not that hard = computer is consistent and feedback is instantaneous. Reason marketing is effing hard (for us programmers) = human is fickle and feedback is sporadic.
stu_k 13y ago
I've been using Bee for the past week to avoid interacting with Jira's slow interface and it's been absolutely excellent. It's a polished app, and the one bug I encountered was fixed within a day. Just waiting for the trial to finish.
markbao 13y ago
Nice work. I've also recently released my first Mac app [0] and I'm working on getting the word out about it by making it free, the idea being that if it's known by people, it can be spread through word-of-mouth, especially if it becomes indispensable. GitHub's API currently reports 600 users, and I'm working on increasing that to 1000 before making it a paid app and marketing it. Nice to see both approaches here; I wonder which truly works better in the long run. [0]: http://issuepostapp.com/ http://issuepostapp.com/
- _neil 13y ago
  I've been using your app a little bit since I saw it mentioned on HN. Really well done. It's simple, intuitive, and gets out of the way as soon as I'm done using it. Thanks.
  - markbao 13y ago
    Thank you! This is amazing to hear—those qualities of the app (simple, intuitive, gets out of the way) are exactly the points that I want to target, so I'm really glad that it's hitting on those. Cheers for the feedback.
- davidjairala 13y ago
  Really liking the app. Also enjoyed the "free for a limited time", adds a bit of a time component where you download it quickly and then maybe get hooked to it for when you have to pay later on.
  - markbao 13y ago
    Thanks! Totally agreed, I think that psychologically, 'free for a limited time' makes people have to make a decision on whether they want it now or not, which is an interesting behavior.
- crisnoble 13y ago
  That intro video says it all. Beautifully done.
danso 13y ago
What I would like to read is why the OP put his time into building a task app. Not because the world doesn't need another one (I'm not being sarcastic here...)...but if you don't have much talent or time for marketing, then something must have been guiding you, right? I would think that without any other external guidance, it's the programmer himself who finds the product useful and uses it everyday as he develops it. So, did the OP find his own product useful?
- basil 13y ago
  Yes. I work on contract iOS jobs and I need to track my time to invoice my clients. It sucks using my web browser to start and stop the timer. I also wanted quick access to all my tasks, past and present without going through a slower web UI. Also the app comes in handy when I need to jot down a quick note or remember something. Maybe I should incorporate some of that ^ on the site.
  - w0rd-driven 13y ago
    Forgo the maybe and do it. We use a redmine clone at my current employer and opening a tab or a billion is still rough. I've always preferred clients. If I could live in visual studio like I wanted when I started, there's a decent open source one for that. Also tortoisemine helps with respect to linking checkins but I'm still on a text file keeping track until I get around to putting stuff in. Its never exciting or useful. There does seem to be a saturation of apps on my platform: windows phone to where just another makes no sense. Mostly devs make it for themselves and since we're all unique, these things are like snowflakes too.
  - joe_inferno 13y ago
    That is what I do as well, I'm considering purchasing Bee based on my trial of it this morning. My only concern is in keeping enough clients around that I need to use it! But actually, for me, this is the kind of native client I didn't know I needed (I spend way too much time in Jira...) and that it hooks into GitHub as well is a big selling point, since that's pretty much how I divide my personal work from client work. The interface is slick, although there seems to be some stuttering when I move the window. I'll probably buy it when I get my next paycheck. And maybe if I write a blog post about my own app that has sold 12 copies, I'll sell a few more! ;)
sarreph 13y ago
One of my biggest takeaways from WWDC, as a student, was that even really great products don't launch themselves; they need an immense PR effort to get them off the ground — however, this doesn't mean a big budget. In my opinion (of limited authority), a lot of 'spin' can be spun, mostly for free, that can generate a great buzz pre-launch. It's something I'm going to invest a lot of time and effort in next time I do a launch.
gk1 13y ago
This is the second or third post I'm seeing today where a dev person could use some help with marketing their product. This is what I consult in, so I'd be happy to try and answer any questions you or anyone wishes to ask. Fire away! If the answer requires more information then I'll ask you to email me instead.
- melloclello 13y ago
  Oh man nobody replied, guts
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
GuerraEarth 13y ago
Just sent you an email with wording "marketing" that can help. I'm interested to see that good things don't languish and I am a strong writer--happy to give.
jaunkst 13y ago
Have you tried using google news api to find articles in your market? You can turk out compiling a authors contact list and prepare a press release package for the few hundred writers to publish. Some will not respond but some my write for established sources or even many. This will help get attention and increase your ranking.
wwwong 13y ago
Nice! Great to read your experience from creating a product to launching it. Also glad to win over another developer to not thinking that all marketing is BS ;-) Some tips from a marketer: +Get analytics set up! I see that you've only mentioned the top of the funnel (traffic) and the bottom of the funnel (downloads). I'm assuming you don't have tracking for the full flow (traffic > install > activation > day 1-30 retention > Sales). Get this set up pronto. It's crucial to understand where the bottlenecks are and to also segment traffic to know which efforts are working. +Marketing starts before you launch. You'll get a far stronger reaction from blogs, sites, and other people when you contact them 2-3 weeks before launch. Creates a sense of exclusivity and plus gives you some momentum to develop an installed base from Day 1. In light of this, perhaps you should call the current app an 'alpha' and re-launch to get some buzz :-) +Major sources for you to consider: Organic: SEO Referral: Blogs, 3rd Party App Stores, Tech Sites, Forums, Quora, Stack Overflow, and where ever people who have the problem you're trying to solve is asking for help. Partner: App stores, resellers, etc... Paid: Facebook, AdWords, LinkedIn, GDN (I advise you to do thorough research before starting. It's easy to launch poorly designed campaigns and get the misinformed idea that these channels don't work) Viral: Add any social sharing anywhere you can. +App Review sites review 100s of requests each day. I ran FreeiPadApps.net for 2-years and received 20+ app review requests/day. Mostly from indie developers, agencies, and bots. Try instead to reach out directly to an editor or writer by email/twitter/linkedin. +SEO: Get up to best practice (title tags, headings, kw research and mapping to content), but don't bank on it. The gold rush for SEO growth circa 2007 is largely over :-( +Look heavily into any type of 3rd party app stores for free promotion. +Not sure of JIRA/Github has any 3rd party app pages. Worthwhile to look into this and seeing if you can get included. With all that said, doing everything above will get you on par with what everyone else is doing. To separate yourself from the pack, the awesomeness of the product needs to take over :-) Best of luck!
- w0rd-driven 13y ago
  I hate to admit I'm mostly posting to remind myself of this comment but all of this advice is pure gold. You can almost never have too many metrics and you can always dial it back. Not knowing is the worst feeling and there's so many ways to track in apps like this, it always makes sense unless you pay per volume. Hitting that volume would most likely be a great problem to have anyway so there's very little to lose, I think.
skulquake 13y ago
I for one will thank you for your admittance that marketing a product or service to a prospective target audience is indeed hard, and for along time here on HN, many would say oh your just the marketing guy what do you have to offer or bring to the table if it's not marketing and programming then why do I need you on the team? I'm just glad that both sides of the table are seeing that we should all work cohesively to our strengths to reach the end goal of a particular project or startup.
ahunt09 13y ago
Did anyone else have their display get corrupted by opening this site, opening Chrome dev tools, and closing chrome dev tools? My screen started putting up random squares of color and other artifacts and I lost keyboard control.
kybernetyk 13y ago
> Are people waiting for the trial to run out (14 day trial) ...? People who buy your software usually do so during the first few days of a trial. Only a small percentage of those who let the trial go to the end will buy. Source: My (and fellow [m]ISV's) experience over the years. /edit: Oh, btw: A search in the mac app store for "github issue tracker" (and other similar terms) won't show your app.
gojomo 13y ago
Congrats on your launch! Be careful about your plan to "…keep pushing out updates to the app to fill out the feature requests existing users have". It's easy to fall back to strengths – adding fun features, responding to tangible requests from existing customers. But clearly your priority should be getting the word out. Maybe commit to yourself: no new features unless you're certain they will close new sales?
bcbrown 13y ago
One small tip - your page links to the app page, but doesn't otherwise say anything about what it does, just calling it "this thing". That diary page is marketing too, include a summary of what it does there!
- icefox 13y ago
  And it talks in the end about how users can't provide feedback, but the blog entry doesn't let you comment or even give a way to email, just a link to his twitter account.
Geee 13y ago
Downloaded, installed, tried. Created a new task and drag'n'dropped it inside the another one. Couldn't drag it out again. Closed the app. Seems very nice though, I'll give it another try after a while.
azio_m 13y ago
Don't forget to update us with the results of getting to Hacker News Front Page!
pnathan 13y ago
This is really awesome. I'm almost at the beta point with my own side project, and I'm realizing it's time to do some marketing (virtual pet game for FireFoxOS/browsers - goal is to be interesting to smart people). I'm realizing I simply don't know how to do this marketing thing (yeah, emails, landing page, etc, but those only work when people get there.)
imron 13y ago
Your website is a perfect demonstration of your title. A nice funky starfield with a pretty logo taking up half of the page, and a partial screen shot taking up to the rest of my screen space (1920x1080). Nothing about what it does instantly pops out. Then I realise there's more, so I scroll - Something, something, JIRA, GitHUB, FogBUGZ, something something. Hmm, ok, based on that probably not something I'd need. Close the page (before even getting to any of the other stuff). Come here to read the comments, and buried away here, I found this comment by you https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6686624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6686624, which says: "I work on contract iOS jobs and I need to track my time to invoice my clients. It sucks using my web browser to start and stop the timer. " And I think, this, yes, a thousand times yes, and am now downloading it to try it out. The takeaway from all this, I shouldn't have to find out about that from a comment tucked away on HN, but your website is not arranged in a way that makes it immediately obvious that I want this product.
- imron 13y ago
  And now, the download finishes and I run it, and it turns out it won't run on Lion. It would have been nice to mention somewhere what versions of OSX it runs on.
bstar77 13y ago
I want this, it looks awesome, but I can't justify $50 on it. A shame.
Elizer0x0309 13y ago
Shortfalls: 1. Didn't implement metrics to detect delete, trial to get that feedback. 2. Giving up and ranting too early! Marketing is perception, so make sure you make whatever N users happy then tell them to share (it's as simple as this), rinse and repeat. After a ~100 happy users, you'll have a good sample of customer base and it should steadily grow to market potential from there. 3. First release is just the beginning. Your idea is but a hypothesis. As long as they're is still legitimate feedback to work on, the product is still not reaching it's potential (again, ranting too early!).
austenallred 13y ago
This is exactly why I've been writing "The Hacker's Guide to User Acquisition" (first chapter: http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-the-first-1000-users-twitter/ http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-the-first-1..., next chapter will be about getting press). I would point out a few things. 1. The notion that you "build a better mousetrap" and people will beat their way to your door is true maybe 1% of the time. Many more companies have had to fight a little to become successful than just said, "This is so awesome that everyone loves it." That being said, no amount of marketing can make up for a crappy product. 2. Marketing should be baked into the product itself. If you're figuring out "now how do I get this out to people" after everything is finished, except in some rare circumstances it's too late. Explosive growth almost never happens by virtue of a product being so good that everybody shares it and it goes viral. Yours might, but you can't count on that happening. So how can you leverage your existing user base to create more users? 3. Getting press is more than emailing a couple of bloggers. And emailing bloggers has to be done in a very specific way to get their attention. It's difficult, because you only have one shot: Think about having to run some code and if there are any errors it all falls to pieces. That's what emailing bloggers feels like. But when it works, it works. And when one place picks you up, the others jump on board really quickly (they're kind of like investors in that way). 4. A lot of the "marketers" you've talked to might suck. It's a lot easier to pretend to be a marketer than it would be to pretend to be a programmer. And just as a non-technical person would have a difficult time trying to figure out if a programmer is any good, it will be hard for you to tell the difference between a good marketer and someone who has no idea what they're doing 5. You need a critical mass of users to determine if your product sucks. When I started marketing my first product, I couldn't pay people to use it. It wasn't that people were saying, "I don't like this," but I couldn't get anyone to try it to say whether they liked it or not. Then after months of grinding and trying to figure things out, we found the sweet spot. Thousands of users per day jumped on board, to the point that our biggest problem became scaling. (A good problem to have, but certainly a problem). If I had given up one day earlier I would have thought that no one cared, but really there was no one to care. There's a difference. 6. 99.99% of the time doing marketing is spent figuring out what works. Once you know (and it's different for each client/customer/app), it's really easy. Don't discount it when someone says "Oh you just do this and this, and boom, users." The same as you wouldn't look at a designer and say "Well you just designed that really simple logo, that can't be hard," you can't just look at the work they're doing -- you have to consider the work they have done. And getting to simple is hard. So the moral of the story: Don't give up yet. It's too early to know if anyone will care about what you built; you have to get it out to more people. And the next time I hear someone say, "You don't need a marketer, it's all about the quality of the product," I'll point them to this post. Thank you for your honesty, and best of luck to you.
CrashOverride17 13y ago
People do not want to know who made it but they just think how they enjoy it. In this world, there is no second place or second champ, the world is a kind of binary system, 0 or 1, we just choose death or life. "quote on Hackers 3 [2011]
segphault 13y ago
I'm one of those people who downloaded the trial, ran it for a few days, and then deleted it. I liked a lot of things about the app, but there were a few bits that I found unintuitive—particularly around managing multiple projects from different sources. I decided to pass, but I bookmarked it so that I'll be able to find it again in the future if I ever find that I really need a quick way to access my Jira issues from the desktop. The $49 price is entirely reasonable considering the breadth of the feature set and the target audience, but it does put it outside the impulse purchase comfort zone. It might have been helpful to put it on sale at launch with a discounted price in order to build some traction and lower the barrier to adoption for people who are on the fence.
tunesmith 13y ago
Hrm... random impressions I had: 1) The above the fold stuff sort of showed me what it describes itself as, but not what it really is. A looping animation or video would have been really helpful. 2) The below the fold stuff originally came across as separate products. Like I thought it was your catch-all page for a few other products you've made. So maybe you could make it clearer that they are all components of Bee. 3) Just my own reaction that I noticed - when you demonstrate compatibility with several outside services, there might be a weird disincentive to try it out if the potential customer doesn't use all of those services. Like I immediately had a suspicion that since I use Jira but not Github or Fogbugz, that the other focuses of the tool would get in the way or make it feel unwieldy. (I didn't download it to disprove that feeling.) 4) Time/task tracking is a REALLY crowded space, and I imagine it is really difficult to convince someone to try out a new tool, partly because of switching costs. For instance, for me, I use Quickbooks on the Mac, and I'm pretty married to Intuit's "My Time" since it's the only tool I know of on the Mac that will automatically transfer time records to Quickbooks, which I then use to make invoices. And then if someone asks me why I create my invoices from time records in Quickbooks, then... heck, I dunno, I made the decision at one point and it works for me. I could do a whole first-principles analysis I guess that might lead me to a completely different way of working that might lead me to being able to using a different time-tracking app like Bee, but... I don't like going that low on my e-Maslow's hierarchy very often. 5) No obvious mention of price on the front page... no obvious indicator of what clicking the "Buy" button will do or where it will take me. I moused over it, looked for an info tip, and didn't click. (I'm one to just buy rather than deal with download/try/maybe-buy.)
mattm 13y ago
I recently read the book "Cashvertising". It's very good at breaking down how to sell in print. I recommend you read it. For example, your headline "Better task tracking on your Mac" offers no real benefit. What is good about task tracking? What is the benefit it offers? Make that answer your headline. Read the book. It helped me immensely.
RobSpectre 13y ago
I'm with you dude. This shit is hard.
jorde 13y ago
Bee seems awesome and while Basil might not get marketing, he gets it now: after a week of resultless marketing efforts he writes a blog post about it, posts to HN and scores the #1 position. Kudos.
pteredactyl 13y ago
For your web design, which is part of marketing - namely perception and eye-grabbery - there's too much white space. Too much white space, to me, equals yawn. I'd make the starfield extend further down the page, past the first screenshot. Then I would somehow frame the other sections of the page. Maybe by adding an interior border or some sort of texture. Marketing is a cousin of visual design.
- joe_inferno 13y ago
  I, for one, enjoy the liberal use of white space. No academic reasoning for it. I think it's a pleasing aesthetic in general.
spacecowboy 13y ago
Came across an insightful video and presentation given at the Konsoll 2013 conference on "marketing indie games on a $0 budget" that might be of interest to folks. It was given within the context of indie game development but its really addressing a common problem. video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkEQtMP2CuA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkEQtMP2CuA slides: http://www.indiegamegirl.com/konsoll-2013/ http://www.indiegamegirl.com/konsoll-2013/
kposehn 13y ago
You don't need AdWords right now. This comes from an AdWords guy. Seriously, work on marketing to the community and with content, not with paid ads. Paid ads come in when you've identified a market, medium to reach them and what your message is. Have that nailed before you spend a dime :)
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
joeblau 13y ago
Try hitting up Reddit. The Reddit community is one of the most active and engaging communities out there. The only challenge is that they are brutally honest so only use Reddit if you're ready to hear the truth. You could also try getting a promotion from apple in the App Store. Another thing you should do is incorporate some sort of analytics in your app. Most users wont tell you ANYTHING about your app. I'm running Google Analaytics and I can tell that the average user spends ~7 minutes in my game which lets me know that each session is pretty engaging. That's also 7 minutes that they are getting hit with iAd's if they didn't upgrade. Metrics are key, so add something to track app usage. Your application is niche so you need to target spaces where people that use your the services that your app integrates with hang out.
programminggeek 13y ago
Start collecting emails using autoresponder courses. Think of collecting emails as asking a girl for their number. If you want a date, you're going to call them, talk to them, get to know them, and ask them out. If you want a sale, you need to develop a relationship with a customer. Collect email from potential users on a landing page. Then, send them email to let them get to know you and you know them. After a few emails, say 5-7, you could say "hey I have this great product that makes doing X way easier!". A number of potential users who get to say the 5th or 7th email will then trial or purchase your product if you ask them to. That's like getting the first date. Your product ultimately still has to be good for it to be a long term relationship. Pretty much any email newsletter software worth anything supports some kind of autoresponder series functionality.
salilpa 13y ago
so if nothing work out. blog about it and submit it to HN about your failure and hurray you are a success :)
mczepiel_ 13y ago
Coincidentally just the other week I got stuck using Jira and it's abysmally slow/buggy interface. FWIW I was very excited to see Bee but haven't done the work to setup a password for my account on our Jira ondemand instance. I wonder if some of the slower adoption for you has been people like me using a google account to log into Jira and simply not having a real Jira credentials. I'll get around to it but I suspect I'm not the only one that didn't feel like mucking around in the Jira account settings to setup credentials for Bee to connect with. I assume there's no way to access the Jira API otherwise?
mladenkovacevic 13y ago
Don't just "try AdWords", "try social", "try inbound marketing" or any of those things you think you're just supposed to do for some reason. Think of a strategy and then come up with an offer that presents a compelling value proposition. How will you show your product to your customers before they decide to buy? Who are you customers anyways? Come up with a few customer profiles. One you figure these things out, creating campaigns that accomplish your marketing objectives will be more natural and less like a stab in the dark.
Void_ 13y ago
There you go - your article doesn't really provide any value to us, yet you are on the frontpage of HN. Nailed it, now do the same thing over and over again.
codecrusade 13y ago
Getting to the top of HN should fix a lot of your user issues. I like your UI Style, but maybe the product is not very clear to me. Im not a pro perhaps, but you could still work a lot on your product site, make it more concise and easy for an idiot like me to understand too? Are you on the Mac App store? If I were you and If I had a product half as good as this, Id relentlessly blog about it with gorgeous screenshots till around 500 people bought this-Takes patience. Marketing ooutput = Intensity* Focus
codecrusade 13y ago
Continuing.. 1. Use Cases- If your product aint selling, you need to illustrate use cases for your product. If you manage to showcase a very contextually relevant use case, it could literally explode. Like Youtube instant- Its a relatively unused but incredibly useful feature that got its share of sun because it came quick on the heels of Google Instant.
woodylondon 13y ago
First impressions are good, the main additional thing I would have done is to create a "video" overview. Most people just don't have the time to download, install, work out what is going on, etc etc. I do have 5mins to watch a quick video to see if this is for me. You can just do a screencast, voice it yourself. Keep it simple.
manmal 13y ago
Wow that's the first non-crappy Mac app with JIRA support that I've heard of. While I'm really glad that I found out about Bee now, you should really dig into this pain point, IMO. JIRA is terribly slow, and in times of faster tools like Trello or Blossom people are really getting fed up with that. I imagine that marketing it mainly as JIRA client could work well.
brandoncarl 13y ago
Basil - beautiful aesthetic. A few thoughts for you: 1. You are currently marketing the features of your application. Consider instead marketing the problem that you're solving. Demonstrate that you understand the problem and then show why Bee is the solution to it. 2. Which value proposition are you competing on? Clayton Christensen suggests that often markets move through functionality, reliability, convenience, and price. For software professionals, that probably looks like functionality, usability, reliability, convenience, and price. 3. As a gut reaction, your price to feature set seems off. How did you originally come up with the price? It's one of the hardest and most difficult things. If I were you, I'd set up an intro price of $19 while you're on HN front page, and advertise that right on the landing page.
strikespeed 13y ago
What most programmers/writers/innovators often forget is that unless they spend time/effort and money on getting the word out about their products, the world will never see it. It surprises me how often I come across people that believe their product "will sell itself" and totally ignore marketing. Computers world wide are filled with great projects that not more then a handful of people will see. Whatever your idea is, make sure to spend as much time as you spend creating it, thinking and planning out your marketing of same product. Without it, your idea will still be "the best in the world" but nobody will ever know about it.
pbnjay 13y ago
It looks like a great tool, but like others have mentioned, I just can't justify a $50 price point in my head. I don't really "need" a new app to update my issue tracker, I've already got the browser open which I'm using for other concurrent tasks (and a browser tab with a familiar HTML interface > learning a new tool and remembering to keep it open). However, if you could pull out the "flight path" feature ONLY into a separate app at say a $10 price point, I would probably jump. Something unobtrusive in the menu bar that tracks my time on task AND automatically pulls up what I should work on next, quickly and easily, would be great.

307 points by basil 13y ago

If anyone knows some good iOS game marketing techniques/tips, please drop me a line--My email is in my profile. I'm trying to market: http://appstore.com/xo9 http://appstore.com/xo9

vertis 13y ago

This looks like something I could actually use. I've just downloaded it. My take from the website, there is no price on the main page. I have to click 'Buy Now' with no idea whether I want to actually purchase. Which is a commitment (in my head) that I'm not prepared to make without knowing the price.

jthomp 13y ago
I thought the same
douglasheriot 13y ago
I didn’t even realise it wasn’t free until reading your blog listing 'sales' separately to 'downloads'. Price needs to be way more obvious up the top. Only now just seeing it’ll cost $50, is a disappointment after thinking it was free.
- calinet6 13y ago
  $50?? Wow. This person needs to learn more than just marketing.

trustfundbaby 13y ago

"So now after years of neglecting anything to do with marketing. I get it. Marketing is hard. So crushingly hard.Also I was incredibly naive in thinking that the product was so good that the marketing would just snowball itself into action" This right here ... a 1000 times. I've been a developer for years now and I always held onto the same fantasy of launching something so good that marketing would take care of itself. After building a couple of products and being involved in a startup or two I've found that getting software built is not usually as hard as marketing it successfully

quaffapint 13y ago
I don't mean to reply with just a me too - but, absolutely agree with you through my own spend a year developing a product I can't market experiences... Software Development = Easy Marketing that Software = Wicked Hard
- cageface 13y ago
  Software Development = Easy This is only true because most people are building fairly trivial software.
  - trustfundbaby 13y ago
    Fairly trivial software sells too, my friend.
    - cageface 13y ago
      Sure. Trivial software + heavy marketing seems to be the quickest path to software riches lately. But that doesn't mean we should make blanket statements that building software is easy. Because it's only easy if the problem you're trying to solve is easy.
  - jimbokun 13y ago
    Was talking to an extended family member a few months ago, who had built up a large marketing channel for a potential new game, and was frustrated because he couldn't find a developer to build the game at a price he was willing to pay. So I would say, it's only true because Hacker News consists mostly of people who already know how to build software, but far fewer of us know how to market.
  - PeterisP 13y ago
    The size of a need and the complexity of software for that need tend to be completely unrelated. People are paying in proportion to the pain/joy you solve, not in proportion to how hard it is to solve that. The difficulty affects only supply - i.e., if you do make it, how large the competition will be.

holgersindbaek 13y ago

I'd love to follow your journey of marketing your product. If you intend to go hard on marketing this app and exploring ways to do that, can you put up an email form, so I know when your next blog post is?!

ptr 13y ago
I'd also be interested in following your work; it's a great product to learn marketing from.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Nice. So one of the things that happened to me when I came to the Bay Area was I was working at Intel and I had to talk to a lot of marketing folks (who were talking to 'the public' about Intel's chips). I realized I didn't have a clue what they did. I set out to correct that before I started my own company and looked for a job that would let me work closely with marketing but still be engineering based. I found one at Sun which was effectively a 'technical marketing engineer' although at the time I joined the marketing folks just needed an engineer to translate what the competition was doing into something they could argue about. I too was amazed at how much more complex it was than my simplistic assumptions had been. I moved over into the kernel group later (they too had offered me a spot when I had interviewed) and have been pure engineering ever since but never forgot the lessons of that time. Things I learned, 1) Marketing is not sales - Sales is the process by which you convince someone with money to give it to you in exchange for a good or service. Marketing is the thing that happens before that which informs you why you might want to talk to a sales guy. A guy marketing a car will tell you that the car has the highest safety rating ever, the guy selling the car will tell you if you write a check right now he will take an additional $1,500 off the sticker price. 2) Marketing is about perception, and perception is personal. The job of a marketeer is to communicate an idea so that you can see it and perceive it the same way the marketeer does. That requires that you first discover the perceptual language of the target, then translate the message into that perceptual language, communicate it, and then test again for understanding. Marketing a car that smells like bacon to a vegetarian just doesn't work. If the biggest chunk of car buyers are vegetarians, and your car consistently smells of bacon, you need to translate that into something positive somehow. Not simple :-). 3) Marketing is ubiquitous - one of the interesting conversations with my daughter as a teen about what to wear, your clothes give others an impression of you, you cannot prevent that, all you can do is control it. People are constantly taking these bits of information in and reasoning about them consciously and unconsciously. To be successful you have to have influence over as many of those information channels as possible. Getting that influence can be tricky. Basically, it isn't as easy as it looks like it should be was my conclusion.

davemel37 13y ago
A few notes... Marketing for large enterprises is a different challenge than promoting a product on your own, so insights from working at SUN might not translate into street level marketing. 1) marketing is not sales - This is absolutely incorrect. Marketing is any communication that touches a prospect or customer. Copywriting is salesmanship in print. Sales is absolutely a key ingredient of marketing! 2) Marketing is about perception - Partially true... Branding is about perception, marketing is about much more than just perception. 3)Marketing is Ubiquitous - This time you got it right!!! Marketing is influencing every possible touchpoint with consumers.

robotys 13y ago

Reason dev-ing a software is not that hard = computer is consistent and feedback is instantaneous. Reason marketing is effing hard (for us programmers) = human is fickle and feedback is sporadic.

stu_k 13y ago

I've been using Bee for the past week to avoid interacting with Jira's slow interface and it's been absolutely excellent. It's a polished app, and the one bug I encountered was fixed within a day. Just waiting for the trial to finish.

markbao 13y ago

Nice work. I've also recently released my first Mac app [0] and I'm working on getting the word out about it by making it free, the idea being that if it's known by people, it can be spread through word-of-mouth, especially if it becomes indispensable. GitHub's API currently reports 600 users, and I'm working on increasing that to 1000 before making it a paid app and marketing it. Nice to see both approaches here; I wonder which truly works better in the long run. [0]: http://issuepostapp.com/ http://issuepostapp.com/

_neil 13y ago
I've been using your app a little bit since I saw it mentioned on HN. Really well done. It's simple, intuitive, and gets out of the way as soon as I'm done using it. Thanks.
- markbao 13y ago
  Thank you! This is amazing to hear—those qualities of the app (simple, intuitive, gets out of the way) are exactly the points that I want to target, so I'm really glad that it's hitting on those. Cheers for the feedback.
davidjairala 13y ago
Really liking the app. Also enjoyed the "free for a limited time", adds a bit of a time component where you download it quickly and then maybe get hooked to it for when you have to pay later on.
- markbao 13y ago
  Thanks! Totally agreed, I think that psychologically, 'free for a limited time' makes people have to make a decision on whether they want it now or not, which is an interesting behavior.
crisnoble 13y ago
That intro video says it all. Beautifully done.

danso 13y ago

What I would like to read is why the OP put his time into building a task app. Not because the world doesn't need another one (I'm not being sarcastic here...)...but if you don't have much talent or time for marketing, then something must have been guiding you, right? I would think that without any other external guidance, it's the programmer himself who finds the product useful and uses it everyday as he develops it. So, did the OP find his own product useful?

basil 13y ago
Yes. I work on contract iOS jobs and I need to track my time to invoice my clients. It sucks using my web browser to start and stop the timer. I also wanted quick access to all my tasks, past and present without going through a slower web UI. Also the app comes in handy when I need to jot down a quick note or remember something. Maybe I should incorporate some of that ^ on the site.
- w0rd-driven 13y ago
  Forgo the maybe and do it. We use a redmine clone at my current employer and opening a tab or a billion is still rough. I've always preferred clients. If I could live in visual studio like I wanted when I started, there's a decent open source one for that. Also tortoisemine helps with respect to linking checkins but I'm still on a text file keeping track until I get around to putting stuff in. Its never exciting or useful. There does seem to be a saturation of apps on my platform: windows phone to where just another makes no sense. Mostly devs make it for themselves and since we're all unique, these things are like snowflakes too.
- joe_inferno 13y ago
  That is what I do as well, I'm considering purchasing Bee based on my trial of it this morning. My only concern is in keeping enough clients around that I need to use it! But actually, for me, this is the kind of native client I didn't know I needed (I spend way too much time in Jira...) and that it hooks into GitHub as well is a big selling point, since that's pretty much how I divide my personal work from client work. The interface is slick, although there seems to be some stuttering when I move the window. I'll probably buy it when I get my next paycheck. And maybe if I write a blog post about my own app that has sold 12 copies, I'll sell a few more! ;)

sarreph 13y ago

One of my biggest takeaways from WWDC, as a student, was that even really great products don't launch themselves; they need an immense PR effort to get them off the ground — however, this doesn't mean a big budget. In my opinion (of limited authority), a lot of 'spin' can be spun, mostly for free, that can generate a great buzz pre-launch. It's something I'm going to invest a lot of time and effort in next time I do a launch.

gk1 13y ago

This is the second or third post I'm seeing today where a dev person could use some help with marketing their product. This is what I consult in, so I'd be happy to try and answer any questions you or anyone wishes to ask. Fire away! If the answer requires more information then I'll ask you to email me instead.

melloclello 13y ago
Oh man nobody replied, guts
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]

GuerraEarth 13y ago

Just sent you an email with wording "marketing" that can help. I'm interested to see that good things don't languish and I am a strong writer--happy to give.

jaunkst 13y ago

Have you tried using google news api to find articles in your market? You can turk out compiling a authors contact list and prepare a press release package for the few hundred writers to publish. Some will not respond but some my write for established sources or even many. This will help get attention and increase your ranking.

wwwong 13y ago

Nice! Great to read your experience from creating a product to launching it. Also glad to win over another developer to not thinking that all marketing is BS ;-) Some tips from a marketer: +Get analytics set up! I see that you've only mentioned the top of the funnel (traffic) and the bottom of the funnel (downloads). I'm assuming you don't have tracking for the full flow (traffic > install > activation > day 1-30 retention > Sales). Get this set up pronto. It's crucial to understand where the bottlenecks are and to also segment traffic to know which efforts are working. +Marketing starts before you launch. You'll get a far stronger reaction from blogs, sites, and other people when you contact them 2-3 weeks before launch. Creates a sense of exclusivity and plus gives you some momentum to develop an installed base from Day 1. In light of this, perhaps you should call the current app an 'alpha' and re-launch to get some buzz :-) +Major sources for you to consider: Organic: SEO Referral: Blogs, 3rd Party App Stores, Tech Sites, Forums, Quora, Stack Overflow, and where ever people who have the problem you're trying to solve is asking for help. Partner: App stores, resellers, etc... Paid: Facebook, AdWords, LinkedIn, GDN (I advise you to do thorough research before starting. It's easy to launch poorly designed campaigns and get the misinformed idea that these channels don't work) Viral: Add any social sharing anywhere you can. +App Review sites review 100s of requests each day. I ran FreeiPadApps.net for 2-years and received 20+ app review requests/day. Mostly from indie developers, agencies, and bots. Try instead to reach out directly to an editor or writer by email/twitter/linkedin. +SEO: Get up to best practice (title tags, headings, kw research and mapping to content), but don't bank on it. The gold rush for SEO growth circa 2007 is largely over :-( +Look heavily into any type of 3rd party app stores for free promotion. +Not sure of JIRA/Github has any 3rd party app pages. Worthwhile to look into this and seeing if you can get included. With all that said, doing everything above will get you on par with what everyone else is doing. To separate yourself from the pack, the awesomeness of the product needs to take over :-) Best of luck!

w0rd-driven 13y ago
I hate to admit I'm mostly posting to remind myself of this comment but all of this advice is pure gold. You can almost never have too many metrics and you can always dial it back. Not knowing is the worst feeling and there's so many ways to track in apps like this, it always makes sense unless you pay per volume. Hitting that volume would most likely be a great problem to have anyway so there's very little to lose, I think.

skulquake 13y ago

I for one will thank you for your admittance that marketing a product or service to a prospective target audience is indeed hard, and for along time here on HN, many would say oh your just the marketing guy what do you have to offer or bring to the table if it's not marketing and programming then why do I need you on the team? I'm just glad that both sides of the table are seeing that we should all work cohesively to our strengths to reach the end goal of a particular project or startup.

ahunt09 13y ago

Did anyone else have their display get corrupted by opening this site, opening Chrome dev tools, and closing chrome dev tools? My screen started putting up random squares of color and other artifacts and I lost keyboard control.

kybernetyk 13y ago

> Are people waiting for the trial to run out (14 day trial) ...? People who buy your software usually do so during the first few days of a trial. Only a small percentage of those who let the trial go to the end will buy. Source: My (and fellow [m]ISV's) experience over the years. /edit: Oh, btw: A search in the mac app store for "github issue tracker" (and other similar terms) won't show your app.

gojomo 13y ago

Congrats on your launch! Be careful about your plan to "…keep pushing out updates to the app to fill out the feature requests existing users have". It's easy to fall back to strengths – adding fun features, responding to tangible requests from existing customers. But clearly your priority should be getting the word out. Maybe commit to yourself: no new features unless you're certain they will close new sales?

bcbrown 13y ago

One small tip - your page links to the app page, but doesn't otherwise say anything about what it does, just calling it "this thing". That diary page is marketing too, include a summary of what it does there!

icefox 13y ago
And it talks in the end about how users can't provide feedback, but the blog entry doesn't let you comment or even give a way to email, just a link to his twitter account.

Geee 13y ago

Downloaded, installed, tried. Created a new task and drag'n'dropped it inside the another one. Couldn't drag it out again. Closed the app. Seems very nice though, I'll give it another try after a while.

azio_m 13y ago

Don't forget to update us with the results of getting to Hacker News Front Page!

pnathan 13y ago

This is really awesome. I'm almost at the beta point with my own side project, and I'm realizing it's time to do some marketing (virtual pet game for FireFoxOS/browsers - goal is to be interesting to smart people). I'm realizing I simply don't know how to do this marketing thing (yeah, emails, landing page, etc, but those only work when people get there.)

imron 13y ago

Your website is a perfect demonstration of your title. A nice funky starfield with a pretty logo taking up half of the page, and a partial screen shot taking up to the rest of my screen space (1920x1080). Nothing about what it does instantly pops out. Then I realise there's more, so I scroll - Something, something, JIRA, GitHUB, FogBUGZ, something something. Hmm, ok, based on that probably not something I'd need. Close the page (before even getting to any of the other stuff). Come here to read the comments, and buried away here, I found this comment by you https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6686624 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6686624, which says: "I work on contract iOS jobs and I need to track my time to invoice my clients. It sucks using my web browser to start and stop the timer. " And I think, this, yes, a thousand times yes, and am now downloading it to try it out. The takeaway from all this, I shouldn't have to find out about that from a comment tucked away on HN, but your website is not arranged in a way that makes it immediately obvious that I want this product.

imron 13y ago
And now, the download finishes and I run it, and it turns out it won't run on Lion. It would have been nice to mention somewhere what versions of OSX it runs on.

bstar77 13y ago

I want this, it looks awesome, but I can't justify $50 on it. A shame.

Elizer0x0309 13y ago

Shortfalls: 1. Didn't implement metrics to detect delete, trial to get that feedback. 2. Giving up and ranting too early! Marketing is perception, so make sure you make whatever N users happy then tell them to share (it's as simple as this), rinse and repeat. After a ~100 happy users, you'll have a good sample of customer base and it should steadily grow to market potential from there. 3. First release is just the beginning. Your idea is but a hypothesis. As long as they're is still legitimate feedback to work on, the product is still not reaching it's potential (again, ranting too early!).

austenallred 13y ago

This is exactly why I've been writing "The Hacker's Guide to User Acquisition" (first chapter: http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-the-first-1000-users-twitter/ http://www.austenallred.com/the-hackers-guide-to-the-first-1..., next chapter will be about getting press). I would point out a few things. 1. The notion that you "build a better mousetrap" and people will beat their way to your door is true maybe 1% of the time. Many more companies have had to fight a little to become successful than just said, "This is so awesome that everyone loves it." That being said, no amount of marketing can make up for a crappy product. 2. Marketing should be baked into the product itself. If you're figuring out "now how do I get this out to people" after everything is finished, except in some rare circumstances it's too late. Explosive growth almost never happens by virtue of a product being so good that everybody shares it and it goes viral. Yours might, but you can't count on that happening. So how can you leverage your existing user base to create more users? 3. Getting press is more than emailing a couple of bloggers. And emailing bloggers has to be done in a very specific way to get their attention. It's difficult, because you only have one shot: Think about having to run some code and if there are any errors it all falls to pieces. That's what emailing bloggers feels like. But when it works, it works. And when one place picks you up, the others jump on board really quickly (they're kind of like investors in that way). 4. A lot of the "marketers" you've talked to might suck. It's a lot easier to pretend to be a marketer than it would be to pretend to be a programmer. And just as a non-technical person would have a difficult time trying to figure out if a programmer is any good, it will be hard for you to tell the difference between a good marketer and someone who has no idea what they're doing 5. You need a critical mass of users to determine if your product sucks. When I started marketing my first product, I couldn't pay people to use it. It wasn't that people were saying, "I don't like this," but I couldn't get anyone to try it to say whether they liked it or not. Then after months of grinding and trying to figure things out, we found the sweet spot. Thousands of users per day jumped on board, to the point that our biggest problem became scaling. (A good problem to have, but certainly a problem). If I had given up one day earlier I would have thought that no one cared, but really there was no one to care. There's a difference. 6. 99.99% of the time doing marketing is spent figuring out what works. Once you know (and it's different for each client/customer/app), it's really easy. Don't discount it when someone says "Oh you just do this and this, and boom, users." The same as you wouldn't look at a designer and say "Well you just designed that really simple logo, that can't be hard," you can't just look at the work they're doing -- you have to consider the work they have done. And getting to simple is hard. So the moral of the story: Don't give up yet. It's too early to know if anyone will care about what you built; you have to get it out to more people. And the next time I hear someone say, "You don't need a marketer, it's all about the quality of the product," I'll point them to this post. Thank you for your honesty, and best of luck to you.

CrashOverride17 13y ago

People do not want to know who made it but they just think how they enjoy it. In this world, there is no second place or second champ, the world is a kind of binary system, 0 or 1, we just choose death or life. "quote on Hackers 3 [2011]

segphault 13y ago

I'm one of those people who downloaded the trial, ran it for a few days, and then deleted it. I liked a lot of things about the app, but there were a few bits that I found unintuitive—particularly around managing multiple projects from different sources. I decided to pass, but I bookmarked it so that I'll be able to find it again in the future if I ever find that I really need a quick way to access my Jira issues from the desktop. The $49 price is entirely reasonable considering the breadth of the feature set and the target audience, but it does put it outside the impulse purchase comfort zone. It might have been helpful to put it on sale at launch with a discounted price in order to build some traction and lower the barrier to adoption for people who are on the fence.

tunesmith 13y ago

Hrm... random impressions I had: 1) The above the fold stuff sort of showed me what it describes itself as, but not what it really is. A looping animation or video would have been really helpful. 2) The below the fold stuff originally came across as separate products. Like I thought it was your catch-all page for a few other products you've made. So maybe you could make it clearer that they are all components of Bee. 3) Just my own reaction that I noticed - when you demonstrate compatibility with several outside services, there might be a weird disincentive to try it out if the potential customer doesn't use all of those services. Like I immediately had a suspicion that since I use Jira but not Github or Fogbugz, that the other focuses of the tool would get in the way or make it feel unwieldy. (I didn't download it to disprove that feeling.) 4) Time/task tracking is a REALLY crowded space, and I imagine it is really difficult to convince someone to try out a new tool, partly because of switching costs. For instance, for me, I use Quickbooks on the Mac, and I'm pretty married to Intuit's "My Time" since it's the only tool I know of on the Mac that will automatically transfer time records to Quickbooks, which I then use to make invoices. And then if someone asks me why I create my invoices from time records in Quickbooks, then... heck, I dunno, I made the decision at one point and it works for me. I could do a whole first-principles analysis I guess that might lead me to a completely different way of working that might lead me to being able to using a different time-tracking app like Bee, but... I don't like going that low on my e-Maslow's hierarchy very often. 5) No obvious mention of price on the front page... no obvious indicator of what clicking the "Buy" button will do or where it will take me. I moused over it, looked for an info tip, and didn't click. (I'm one to just buy rather than deal with download/try/maybe-buy.)

mattm 13y ago

I recently read the book "Cashvertising". It's very good at breaking down how to sell in print. I recommend you read it. For example, your headline "Better task tracking on your Mac" offers no real benefit. What is good about task tracking? What is the benefit it offers? Make that answer your headline. Read the book. It helped me immensely.

RobSpectre 13y ago

I'm with you dude. This shit is hard.

jorde 13y ago

Bee seems awesome and while Basil might not get marketing, he gets it now: after a week of resultless marketing efforts he writes a blog post about it, posts to HN and scores the #1 position. Kudos.

pteredactyl 13y ago

For your web design, which is part of marketing - namely perception and eye-grabbery - there's too much white space. Too much white space, to me, equals yawn. I'd make the starfield extend further down the page, past the first screenshot. Then I would somehow frame the other sections of the page. Maybe by adding an interior border or some sort of texture. Marketing is a cousin of visual design.

joe_inferno 13y ago
I, for one, enjoy the liberal use of white space. No academic reasoning for it. I think it's a pleasing aesthetic in general.

spacecowboy 13y ago

Came across an insightful video and presentation given at the Konsoll 2013 conference on "marketing indie games on a $0 budget" that might be of interest to folks. It was given within the context of indie game development but its really addressing a common problem. video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkEQtMP2CuA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkEQtMP2CuA slides: http://www.indiegamegirl.com/konsoll-2013/ http://www.indiegamegirl.com/konsoll-2013/

kposehn 13y ago

You don't need AdWords right now. This comes from an AdWords guy. Seriously, work on marketing to the community and with content, not with paid ads. Paid ads come in when you've identified a market, medium to reach them and what your message is. Have that nailed before you spend a dime :)

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

joeblau 13y ago

Try hitting up Reddit. The Reddit community is one of the most active and engaging communities out there. The only challenge is that they are brutally honest so only use Reddit if you're ready to hear the truth. You could also try getting a promotion from apple in the App Store. Another thing you should do is incorporate some sort of analytics in your app. Most users wont tell you ANYTHING about your app. I'm running Google Analaytics and I can tell that the average user spends ~7 minutes in my game which lets me know that each session is pretty engaging. That's also 7 minutes that they are getting hit with iAd's if they didn't upgrade. Metrics are key, so add something to track app usage. Your application is niche so you need to target spaces where people that use your the services that your app integrates with hang out.

programminggeek 13y ago

Start collecting emails using autoresponder courses. Think of collecting emails as asking a girl for their number. If you want a date, you're going to call them, talk to them, get to know them, and ask them out. If you want a sale, you need to develop a relationship with a customer. Collect email from potential users on a landing page. Then, send them email to let them get to know you and you know them. After a few emails, say 5-7, you could say "hey I have this great product that makes doing X way easier!". A number of potential users who get to say the 5th or 7th email will then trial or purchase your product if you ask them to. That's like getting the first date. Your product ultimately still has to be good for it to be a long term relationship. Pretty much any email newsletter software worth anything supports some kind of autoresponder series functionality.

salilpa 13y ago

so if nothing work out. blog about it and submit it to HN about your failure and hurray you are a success :)

mczepiel_ 13y ago

Coincidentally just the other week I got stuck using Jira and it's abysmally slow/buggy interface. FWIW I was very excited to see Bee but haven't done the work to setup a password for my account on our Jira ondemand instance. I wonder if some of the slower adoption for you has been people like me using a google account to log into Jira and simply not having a real Jira credentials. I'll get around to it but I suspect I'm not the only one that didn't feel like mucking around in the Jira account settings to setup credentials for Bee to connect with. I assume there's no way to access the Jira API otherwise?

mladenkovacevic 13y ago

Don't just "try AdWords", "try social", "try inbound marketing" or any of those things you think you're just supposed to do for some reason. Think of a strategy and then come up with an offer that presents a compelling value proposition. How will you show your product to your customers before they decide to buy? Who are you customers anyways? Come up with a few customer profiles. One you figure these things out, creating campaigns that accomplish your marketing objectives will be more natural and less like a stab in the dark.

Void_ 13y ago

There you go - your article doesn't really provide any value to us, yet you are on the frontpage of HN. Nailed it, now do the same thing over and over again.

codecrusade 13y ago

Getting to the top of HN should fix a lot of your user issues. I like your UI Style, but maybe the product is not very clear to me. Im not a pro perhaps, but you could still work a lot on your product site, make it more concise and easy for an idiot like me to understand too? Are you on the Mac App store? If I were you and If I had a product half as good as this, Id relentlessly blog about it with gorgeous screenshots till around 500 people bought this-Takes patience. Marketing ooutput = Intensity* Focus

codecrusade 13y ago

Continuing.. 1. Use Cases- If your product aint selling, you need to illustrate use cases for your product. If you manage to showcase a very contextually relevant use case, it could literally explode. Like Youtube instant- Its a relatively unused but incredibly useful feature that got its share of sun because it came quick on the heels of Google Instant.

woodylondon 13y ago

First impressions are good, the main additional thing I would have done is to create a "video" overview. Most people just don't have the time to download, install, work out what is going on, etc etc. I do have 5mins to watch a quick video to see if this is for me. You can just do a screencast, voice it yourself. Keep it simple.

manmal 13y ago

Wow that's the first non-crappy Mac app with JIRA support that I've heard of. While I'm really glad that I found out about Bee now, you should really dig into this pain point, IMO. JIRA is terribly slow, and in times of faster tools like Trello or Blossom people are really getting fed up with that. I imagine that marketing it mainly as JIRA client could work well.

brandoncarl 13y ago

Basil - beautiful aesthetic. A few thoughts for you: 1. You are currently marketing the features of your application. Consider instead marketing the problem that you're solving. Demonstrate that you understand the problem and then show why Bee is the solution to it. 2. Which value proposition are you competing on? Clayton Christensen suggests that often markets move through functionality, reliability, convenience, and price. For software professionals, that probably looks like functionality, usability, reliability, convenience, and price. 3. As a gut reaction, your price to feature set seems off. How did you originally come up with the price? It's one of the hardest and most difficult things. If I were you, I'd set up an intro price of $19 while you're on HN front page, and advertise that right on the landing page.

strikespeed 13y ago

What most programmers/writers/innovators often forget is that unless they spend time/effort and money on getting the word out about their products, the world will never see it. It surprises me how often I come across people that believe their product "will sell itself" and totally ignore marketing. Computers world wide are filled with great projects that not more then a handful of people will see. Whatever your idea is, make sure to spend as much time as you spend creating it, thinking and planning out your marketing of same product. Without it, your idea will still be "the best in the world" but nobody will ever know about it.

pbnjay 13y ago

It looks like a great tool, but like others have mentioned, I just can't justify a $50 price point in my head. I don't really "need" a new app to update my issue tracker, I've already got the browser open which I'm using for other concurrent tasks (and a browser tab with a familiar HTML interface > learning a new tool and remembering to keep it open). However, if you could pull out the "flight path" feature ONLY into a separate app at say a $10 price point, I would probably jump. Something unobtrusive in the menu bar that tracks my time on task AND automatically pulls up what I should work on next, quickly and easily, would be great.