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Comment by joshaidan | Hacker News Reader

> It's just a wordpress website. You don't need nothing fancy to be successful.

I've observed similar products myself, often ones that are more successful versions of my own creations. I've seen stuff built with spaghetti PHP code, yet it was marketed well and more people were paying money to use it than my own. Yet when I looked at it, the first thing I saw was an SQL injection vulnerability that would allow me to drop the entire database.

It makes me wonder though, if instead of looking at entrepreneurship from the software development side of things, maybe instead I should be trying to build a marketing and advertising agency that builds software. These types of companies seem to make more money than I do.

Yet at the same time, in the marketing companies that come to my mind, the weaknesses in their products tend to be sustainability. I think overtime customers are going to become frustrated with their lack of good support and ability to maintain code and add new features.

Just my thoughts when reflecting on all of this. :)

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As an engineer I find it an appalling when you realize that quality engineering means nothing in terms of financial success. I used to think that if you build a quality product the users will pick it up and it will become successful when in fact it couldn't be further away from reality.

Thus, bugs and quality are secondary. Why spend $ on engineering and fixing bugs when you can spend that on marketing for much better ROI.

I'm willing to entertain that this is true, but it's also possible that the companies that sacrifice good engineering are setting themselves up for big costs later, like, for example, if someone uses one of your security holes to destroy your site and you can't easily fix them because they are so numerous. It could also presumably cause major scaling problems (if you are lucky enough to have that problem), which could impede growth significantly at a critical time.

That said, as someone who highly values a well built product, this may be wishful thinking.

That's the geek fantasy: that a security vuln will take BigCorp to their knees and they'll finally accept how important it was.

But the reality is that companies are getting pwned over and over and nothing bad happens to them. Actually looking at cost-benefit it still makes sense to get to market quickly.

Time for some irresponsible disclosure: https://medium.com/@xParXnoiAx/irresponsible-disclosure-52d0...

Very provocative!

An interesting counter-point, but rather poorly written, and far too short. You need to flesh your ideas and accusations out properly, and your ending line makes for a lazy and frankly rather pathetic conclusion. You should invest a lot more time into editing and review.

Doesn't matter if it is long or short, as long as people understand it.

It matters if you're actually formulating an argument. I understand what you are saying and am unmoved. Preaching to your choir is amateurish.

It matters if you're actually formulating an argument. I understand what you are saying

What is the argument? If you start thinking about it, I think you'll find it's actually quite hard to create a coherent counter-argument.

Very true. I have to admit to having had similar fantasies when I was a younger software developer working for BigCorps who just didn't care about the things I cared about. "One day, the company will collapse in ruin because we ignore the 800+ compiler warnings in SoftwareProjA, and have memory leaks. KILOBYTES of memory leaks! Soon, I will walk among the rubble of this once-great company and tell all you managers 'I told you so!' SOON!"

Of course, as we all know, it never happens. BigCorp continues to churn out buggy, leaky, unoptimized code, and customers keep giving them money for it. I suppose you can handle this in a number of ways: 1. You can accept this and re-adjust what you consider to be "good enough to ship", 2. You can get jaded and dismiss all software customers as morons, or 3. You can start your own company that TAKES SERIOUSLY the proper use of namespaces, and see if that lets you outcompete the competition.

I used to thing like this, until I started working in the fun world of enterprise consulting in markets not related to software product development.

They just don't care.

Yeah I totally agree. Personally I want to find a way to do both. Build a great product that's well marketed. If anything, when you build something great, don't totally ignore the marketing side of things like I often do.

I think one way to do both of these is market your product well, yet at the same time develop it in a sustainable way so that this piece of crap is becoming something that eventually looks great on the engineering side of things.

As ever it depends.

To use the ever-present car analogy, shoddy engineering didn't harm British Leyland - until it did. And now there's no native British car industry to speak of.

But people don't care about engineering - they care about how your product will affect their lives today. If you can prove to them that it will solve that problem they have, they don't care that it's made out of biscuits.

I would encourage you to think os engineering as a necessary but insufficient state for a company to thrive. At the end of the day you still need a functional product that solves a real problem in a novel way. Even the best marketer in the world can't hold a gun to people's heads and force them to buy.

With marketplaces in general, it is not about what you know, it is about who trusts you to reliably solve their problems.

Often, that requires the technical skills to reliably solve their problems.

Always, that requires the communication skills to pursuade someone you can solve their problems.

It's not even about marketing, just building something of actual value. I doubt this girl has spent much if anything on marketing.

I encourage you to stop thinking about the world in binary terms. how much engineering matters for financial success is a continuous function of several parameters. It's never about either not mattering at all or mattering 100%

I agree, and to carry it a little further: the essence of engineering is good tradeoffs (can I build an adequate bridge for the needed cost? If I can carry more cargo in this plane, can I make the fuel requirement grow linearly or better? zip we cut the range 10% we can cut the op ex 20% -- will that still work? Do I really need to spec precision resistors or can I compensate somewhere else?

The trade off skills apply outside the engineering domain as well.

Except with engineering you're often dealing with non-monetary tradeoffs. The plane serves a valuable purpose outside of making someone some money. The quality work/better marketing tradeoff is all about making someone money by providing negative real-world value to others.

> The quality work/better marketing tradeoff is all about making someone money by providing negative real-world value to others

I don't think a blanket put-down of all marketing as negative value is really true.

Of course there are instances where marketing is dishonest or harmful, but by and large, how do you expect people to discover goods and services if there isn't someone who's willing to pay for the cost of dissemination of information, whether it's a marketer, or Google's search algorithm, or the consumer?

I think bringing up marketing-as-information-dissemination is a red herring, because it's only a small fraction of the whole thing. The cost of telling people about a product/service should obviously be paid by the product/service provider - but we've solved that thing with a printing press, in the form of yellow pages and newspaper classifieds. Google's costs per company indexed are probably even cheaper.

Marketing is by and large about gaming the way people select goods and services, so that you can sell more regardless of the quality of your offerings, or of whether the client actually needs it.

> Marketing is by and large about gaming the way people select goods and services, so that you can sell more regardless of the quality of your offerings, or of whether the client actually needs it.

That may be the objective function of the marketer or salesperson, but it doesn't follow that marketing itself is a simple net transfer of wealth from consumers to producers.

> I think bringing up marketing-as-information-dissemination is a red herring, because it's only a small fraction of the whole thing.

The marketer is not paying to move bits to a consumer, the marketer is paying for the consumer's attention, which is much more limited than our ability to move bits around.

Do you have an alternative fair and equitable way of allocating that scarce resource? For example, if we went with your suggestion and restricted marketing to only classifieds and other forms of print advertising, then we would expect the cost of placing ads there to skyrocket as everyone competes for scarce space. Also, the same risks of manipulation and dishonesty apply just as well there:

https://www.google.com/search?q=snake+oil+ad&espv=2&biw=1440...

> Do you have an alternative fair and equitable way of allocating that scarce resource?

Yes. Not allocating it. What you call trying to "allocate" consumer's attention is, from the point of view of a consumer, people purposefully attempting to distract you from living your life in order to extract money from you. In all other contexts of life we would call such people "assholes". Classifieds have the benefit of consumers paying attention only when they want to pay attention.

Time is the most precious thing we have in life. Attempts to take it away from other people should be treated more seriously, IMO. It's never just one marketer - they're competing for attention just as they would compete for classified space.

> Not allocating it.

I'm not sure what you mean by not allocating it.

Even if we restricted all advertising to classifieds, we still need to decide whose ads get shown, how many pages they get, etc.. That's what I mean by allocation.

And that would still be subject to the problems you identified: the advertiser might be dishonest, they might not have the consumer's best interests at heart, etc.

As for how to achieve this objective--have the government rigorously define advertising and ban it in all forms? That just shifts power from advertisers to bureaucrats then, with all the risks of regulatory capture that implies.

Let me pose the question in a different way: let's say there are a hundred different kinds of toothpaste. There is a cost to figuring out which kind is the best kind(s), and then letting everyone know the ordering. Who does the work of figuring that out, and then how do they get compensated for that work?

Advertising and marketing is one possible answer by creating a signalling equilibrium (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signalling_(economics)#Introdu...): all else being equal, the better toothpaste should have access to a larger marketing budget. If consumers know this, then seeing someone's ad is actually a (perhaps weak) signal of quality.

There are also other models, like Amazon reviews; but there are plenty of ways to game that system, and you're really depending on Amazon to police it effectively.

Or you can actually pay someone to review products, like the Consumer Reports model, where you only get access if you pay up.

But each of these models has a tradeoff; Consumer Reports works best when everyone subscribes, but then as it becomes more popular, producers will be tempted to buy them off; Amazon reviews are subject to bandwagoning and cheating; classic marketing is expensive (in time and cost) and unreliable.

Isn't the market itself supposed to sort this problem out? To take your toothpaste example - customers will pick different types, perhaps randomly, and slowly gravitate towards best quality/price option. The word of mouth is pretty effective locally.

Now obviously, humans being humans, there's no way to prevent companies from trying to influence that word of mouth mechanism. But there seems to be a benefit from keeping it a shady (or perhaps illegal) practice - the society in general will shun corporate shills and attempts at influencing people's opinions. Which seems to be a better option than what we have now, where marketing is actually a respectable occupation, and people get assaulted with advertisements.

> all else being equal, the better toothpaste should have access to a larger marketing budget

This doesn't work because the definition of "better" for the market is different than "better" for the consumer. A market!better product is the one that sells more than alternatives, while the consumer!better product is the one of greater quality/usefulness. Market!better gives you profits which increases your marketing budget which increases market!better - you have a positive feedback loop here that bypasses the consumer!better variable entirely - hence the observation that investing in marketing has better ROI today than making something that's actually useful for the consumer.

> Isn't the market itself supposed to sort this problem out? To take your toothpaste example - customers will pick different types, perhaps randomly, and slowly gravitate towards best quality/price option. The word of mouth is pretty effective locally.

> This doesn't work because the definition of "better" for the market is different than "better" for the consumer.

I think these two points of view are incompatible.

The first quote implies that consumers can distinguish between two toothpastes, and moreover, they prefer the better one by being willing to pay more for it.

If that's the case, then given two initially otherwise identical companies, the one making the better toothpaste will have more sales, and then a larger marketing budget, etc. -- basically, the initial condition of producing a better toothpaste, combined with the positive marketing-sales feedback loop that you identify, leads to the better product winning.

Of course, this only works if consumers can tell which product is better, and there might be other factors that prevent product quality from being a strong enough initial condition (e.g. it's really hard to displace incumbents even with a better product).

> the society in general will shun corporate shills and attempts at influencing people's opinions. Which seems to be a better option than what we have now, where marketing is actually a respectable occupation, and people get assaulted with advertisements.

People who use aggressive tactics like cold-calling usually get paid minimum wage precisely because the signal-to-noise ratio is so low. In a sense, the market already strongly discourages blindly blasting people with noise.

Compare to the success of Adwords--advertisers only want to show ads to people who will be interested. The tradeoff here, of course, is reduced privacy for the consumer.

You're making a false dichotomy.

Engineering tradeoffs are very much about costs. I could (well once upon a time I could :-) design a bridge that's stable up to a (not very) nearby atomic blast; more stable than the bedrock it's built on. But that would require an unnecessary level of resources (unless atomic resistance is in fact a design requirement). I could design the most super-awesome web site that scales to 40 billion unique visitors...but it's unlikely to be needed (though if some of the uniques are robotic, perhaps it is). Simply choosing an alloy that's simpler to work with the tools on hand is a rescue tradeoff, and those resources are time and money.

Likewise, the plane (I assume you mean airplane) has only one valuable purpose (transport people or goods that someone wants transported) and that is denominated in money. Make it cheaper and more people can fly, or pay less for their gadgets or fresh shellfish.

It's incredibly naive to to say that marketing is some zero-sum game. If you have an amazing bandage that is cheap and saves lives you still have to get the word out.

> If you have an amazing bandage that is cheap and saves lives you still have to get the word out.

The core topic in this subthread is focusing work on marketing the bandage instead of making it cheaper/save more lives, because marketing has much better ROI than actually providing value to people.

And the word can get out fine by itself, actually. The word of mouth is a pretty effective thing - and a lot of marketing is trying to game it, getting increased profits by destroying its usefulness.

Here's an example with the metaphor where marketing is not zero-sum:

1) Person A makes a crappy bandage (Y units of quality) with X units of budget and markets with 9X units of budget

2) Person B makes a decent bandage (5Y units of quality) with 5X units of budget.

If person B were to also market the bandage with 5X units of budget, they will take a larger fraction of person A's market share than if they don't, thus providing more value to people. Yes you can argue that if person A didn't exist, then they wouldn't need to spend this money and the bandage could be cheaper, but this is clearly an example where adding marginal marketing can be a net benefit to society.

Yes, I agree that adding a marginal marketing can be a net benefit to society. But the problem is, in the real world, the person A wins - marketing has much better ROI than investing in quality. I argue against the marketing precisely because of its power to paper over the problems with the actual good/service.

And I'm saying that's a tradeoff (marketing, sales, engineering, development vs maintenance, etc) that's as legitimate and at least as complex as the purely engineering tradeoffs I mentioned.

> And the word can get out fine by itself, actually.

Umm, good luck with that. There are only a few, small, specialized businesses for which that is true.

> never about

In some situations, it is about 1 or 0, because the output of that continuous function at a certain time t is put through a thresholding function: either buy or don't.

I'm simply pointing out that it's more accurate to look at the world in terms of degrees.

"never" and "always" have, I believe, a high degree of built-in denial.

I learned this the hard way when I moved from a company that sold software to the manufacturing / health industries.

Companies that don't sell software, see it as a by-product and have zero worries about its quality, what matters is that at the end of the it delivers the outputs the actual business requires.

So beware of presenting prototypes in such industries, their are always the final product and code refactoring is not something that usually makes them sell more stuff from their actual products.

Also the code tends to be pretty horrible, because a lot is developed by external companies that usually tend to implement a just single set of features. It is almost impossible to write properly safe code, because no external is able to grasp the whole codebase in the required timeframes for delivering the new feature and leave to another customer.

>Companies that don't sell software, see it as a by-product and have zero worries about its quality

And increasingly, because of the 'go fast a break things' attitude, this is extending to companies that _do_ sell software.

You know what an awesome product is? It's full of bugs, lacks features and is frustrating to work with. Yet customers are ready to pay money for it. You know why? Because despite all the quality issues, it solves their problem.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_principle

That's pretty much exactly what the OP said. A completly shitty product that does just enough that people over look how shitty it is because it 'works' for them. Once it becomes embedded it doesn't even matter if someone comes along with a product that also solves their problem without the bugs and annoyances, because 'they do the same thing.' so why switch.

Engineering quality really doesn't mean much to people, so stop worrying so much about it once the core works without killing the user.

Just look at all the bugs and unfulfilled promises in games released. They make a ton of money, but as much or more money goes into marketing than into the programming.

That's because they're selling the experience of hype, not high-quality software. Nobody even cares about software quality for games. Some people even prefer buggy ones.

To an extent. I like buggy games if they let me "cheat" in the game, as long as it's single player and the game is finished besides bugs. For multiplayer, there should be no bugs or exploits and those should be fixed immediately. Honestly, I hate hype and would prefer people to stop spreading hype and promises from the devs that they may have forgotten about. I would prefer devs and designers to be the ones leading game development, not publishers that want them "as fast as possible." That mentality needs to stop and games need to possess more intention than being a semifun money grab.

they're not secondary, they just need to be sufficient.

think of the extremes; you could develop a technical masterpiece and keep it under covers, making $0, having spent every single bit of available time/money/resources on it.

that's a hobby, not a business.

There's something to be said for making something you're proud of, even if the higher quality doesn't translate to more profit.

I recommend watching Silicon Valley a HBO series which in my opinion is geared towards engineers. They have covered this topic very succinctly.

Engineering or rather sometimes over-engineering things might make it super easy but not intuitive to use.

"It makes me wonder though, if instead of looking at entrepreneurship from the software development side of things, maybe instead I should be trying to build a marketing and advertising agency that builds software."

Many people do this already and it's a highly competitive space. Stories like this are neat because it seems like a lot of money (and it is for a 16 year old), but many of these things are too small to fit into a marketing agency model to make them worthwhile.

> I've seen stuff built with spaghetti PHP code, yet it was marketed well and more people were paying money to use it than my own. Yet when I looked at it, the first thing I saw was an SQL injection vulnerability that would allow me to drop the entire database.

Ironically, unless they're doing a side business in Microsoft product keys, specialname.cn was hacked until at least a couple of hours ago (according to Google's cache).

http://archive.is/FLd2M

I came across a really ugly and badly engineered PCB the other day and it prompted me into coming to the same conclusion:

http://41j.com/blog/2016/09/ugly-solutions/

If the engineering solution is good enough (for the customer) there are other things that matter more, mostly marketing, sales and customer support.

My thoughts as well. IMO, any successful company needs to spend some money in illustrations, designs, presentation, etc...

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