A plea re: false starts, discouragement, etc.

I've just spent a few minutes looking through your previous comments. My first suggestion is to have a friendly chat with the sort of professional who has friendly chats with people for a living. Some people I know have found that to be a lifechanging experience -- for the better.

You seem to not be satisfied with working for a living. I can sympathize. That does not mean you need to totally reject working for a living: you can use it as a stepping stone to bigger and better things. A paycheck can support your wife and son while you do things on the nights and weekends.

Businesses do not magically spring up because of luck or money. They're built patiently by finding a customer, making something for the customer, and gradually improving it. If you've had a day job recently, you might have noticed something that is dissatisfying about that industry. Fix it. Sell it to one person. Repeat a lot, improving a bit at a time.

You don't have to vanish into the Batcave for 2 years and then emerge with a heartbreaking work of staggering genius only to find that no one actually wants to buy it. Make something small. Pitch it to folks who should want to buy it because it would solve problems for them. If they don't want to buy it, ask why they don't want to buy it. Iterate gradually.

Thanks for the reply. We're keeping afloat on consulting gigs right now, so I am spending a lot of time working on things that aren't contributive to a startup product.

I appreciate the advice, but I'm not spending two years in a batcave and I understand that these things don't happen by magic -- the annoying thing is that even after a lot of work, they still won't happen for me, when for many others who seem to have put much less work into something, there is a lot of money and success. I can't just work with no benefit forever ... it leads to this kind of discouragement, not to mention lack of money.

I'm releasing early and often. A few of my projects have been a couple days of work to get started. I start them and try to market them, but fail. It seems like people are pretty hostile to bootstrappers; communities disallow advertisement, people on top ignore all of your requests for help (even if these people are well-intentioned, their mail volume is so high that talking to them is useless), and I don't have much money at all for AdWords. I do try to market these things; the success rate is just so small that I get discouraged and stop.

I hate using blogs as a marketing device -- it feels really scummy to me. I don't mind blogging about relevant things, I just don't have that many relevant things to publish on a blog about my product, especially not when there's no one using it.

I have a product for bookstores. I pitched it to people, they seemed interested, but then they never followed-through with anything. I don't know what else to do. I can't keep harassing people, and I feel like putting the effort into generalizing that codebase is almost useless as I expect the same thing to happen there as has happened on everything else, i.e., unable to get any traction without significant money or significant clout.

If I had a popular blog or something, then I could promote these things and people would listen. As it stands, I just make stuff, release it, try to market in an honest, conscionable, viable, and cheap way, and the project just sits there unused and uncared, and I can't get anyone to even throw me a link.

>>>I have a product for bookstores.

Ouch. Drop it. They're all on their way to being gone in 3-5 years. Seriously. See: Tower Records/Blockbuster.

Very, very few things just "catch on." The invisible hand of marketing and PR helps that along.

I don't know, I think that there's still a lot to be said for a physical book. Not everyone is going to be carrying around a Kindle.

Blockbuster is obsoleted because there is a better mode of delivery for the same thing, and because Blockbuster was unwilling to adjust its policies or respond early enough to remain competitive.

There is still a big market for physical books, I think, and there are a lot of independent bookstores that carry things besides the next Harry Potter installment or other mainstream things like that. Rare and used bookstores contain a lot of information that isn't even going to be digitized for a long, long time if ever, even if we assume that all of the book's potential perusers would rather have a digital edition.

Big chains may start to suffer somewhat, but they're not the target anyway.

And, even if bookstores do eventually disappear from under us, the product can be abstracted into another general retail niche pretty easily. It's not too specific -- it's actually rather general and common, but there is an untapped market there, I think.

>My first suggestion is to have a friendly chat with the sort of professional who has friendly chats with people for a living. Some people I know have found that to be a lifechanging experience -- for the better.

Oh, can you explain to me what you mean here? Who should I talk to? I don't know what kind of person you're referring to.

I was obliquely suggesting that you seek the advice of a mental health professional.

--I'm not a great marketer or salesman, but I can't get great marketers or salesmen as one of the masses posting vague promises about equity, especially not in "bad" job markets.

You said it right here, If you don't get them to the front door you will never invite them in for tea. If you are not good at you either need to find someone or you are going to have to get some books and get good at it.

I used to get so mad at the fact that the sales and marketing guys where treated like kings while the developers (the guys building the sell-able product) where treated like their contribution was marginal.

It took the hammer of experience on the anvil of time to beat in to me why this was. Getting the customer is more important than the product you sell them. See for a long time I was of the superior engineering mindset, but as the markets have show time and time again the superior product does not win unless it is complemented with a superior sales and marketing force.

(Brutal Honesty) Your problem is you do not value sales and marketing and feel that it is not worthy of you time until you do you will remain in your situation as you will have only half efforts and false starts.

If I where you I would write a simple eBook or make some simple product, I am talking about a weeks worth of your time to build no more. And then I would market the hell out of it. The point is not to make allot of money but to teach you the value of marketing and to appreciate it.

You need to blog about your product, used adWords, affiliates do it all everything you can think of you need to honestly sell your item for 1 month.

I value sales and marketing. The problem is that I try to sell and market things and it doesn't work, and I get discouraged and quit.

What is there to blog about about my product? Doing that just seems so bottom-of-the-barrel marketer to me.

I have put effort into marketing things before. Most of my projects have not been up-front money-makers (i.e., they weren't projects with a traditional give me $30 and I give you this program model), so affiliate marketing wasn't possible in that way, but one of my new products is, so I will see how affiliate marketing works out there.

But besides that, I don't really know what to do. I don't have much money for ads on Google, and they don't seem effective anyway.

I would love to get marginal success on an eBook or something. I think it would help restore my faith a little bit, and help me believe that it is possible for me to make a dent again. I've just been beaten down and had my expectations fall short for so long that I feel like there's no hope in any of that.

Thanks for taking the time to write. It might be helpful to post a few links or examples to your previous work and help us understand why they didn't succeed as you'd hoped.

Building a successful company is hard work (spoken as someone working on it, but not yet there), and in my limited experience, nothing has ever just "caught on." I'd suggest that the disparity between the frustration you've experienced attempting to build these companies and the frequency of articles proclaiming just the opposite is indicative of the problem: we want to believe that it's a cakewalk, that it's merely a combination of skill and luck.

What have you worked on, and where are you headed? Perhaps others who have been down similar paths may be able to offer some insight.

Where do you live?

Maybe someone here knows of a startup accelerator program in your area. YC is just one such program, and there are many others that don't require you to quit your day job and move to the bay area.

I live in Utah right now, but I'm not too hopeful about the locals.

I actually worked at a company run by one of the area's biggest angel investors. My experience with him and his partner has contributed greatly to my discouragement; they didn't care at all about anyone who wasn't a VP and literally held a meeting telling everyone never to talk to them, only talk to your relevant VP. This company had about 40 employees. My experience with that guy is not good at all, and I don't think he likes me very much anymore, and that will probably affect my chances with local investors negatively since he is quite well-connected.