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Comment by jklinger410 | Hacker News Reader

If the problem is worth solving, from a monetary standpoint, then sharing is actually more important than building.

I know that's heresy here on hacker news but I am an internet marketer and I have not seen the "if you build it they will come" mentality work very often.

In most cases it's "if they want it you should build it."

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I know that's heresy here on hacker news

I don't think we're visiting the same HN.

I once worked for a client that was so certain they were going to get millions of users within three weeks of launching their mobile app with nothing more than about $100 in Facebook ads marketing.

That didn't work out too well for him.

I also don't agree with the 'Field of Dreams' marketing strategy. I've seen it fail too many times.

Doesn't "If they want it you should build it" already assume "if you build it they will come"?

If you don't think they will come, why are you doing it?

The key point here is that you need to have contact/communication with the “they” (either they already contacted you, or you need to put a lot of work into marketing to them). Otherwise “they” are going to ignore you.

Because somebody has offered you a fat stack of cash to do it?

My company does all kinds of shit that we wouldn't necessarily ever think to do if we were dogfooding it for ourselves, but customers have requests, and once in a while, they're even good ideas that are worth building into the product. The best is when they agree to pay extra for that custom development.

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