Comment by cdnsteve | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cdnsteve | Hacker News Reader

If you seriously invested 6 months already, stop everything and ship it in the next 5 days Cut out anything/everything feature wise you had planned and focus on shipping, now. Competing products are offered all the time, everywhere you look. It's because there is a strong problem area and demand for them.

What makes them better/different or noticeable? Marketing. Take a look at the web hosting industry. There are literally thousands and thousands of web hosting companies all offering (nearly*) the same thing. They differentiate by reputation and marketing. Ask any small business owner if they have a website, then ask them have they heard of AWS? I bet they won't. They'll be use Joe Host down the street from him or GoDaddy or won't have a clue and they have a "web person" to take care of that.

A product idea only gets you so far. Now you need to master how to get people to find it, tell them they need it and get them to sign up by hopefully providing you their credit card for X service/product. Your journey is just starting.

> If you seriously invested 6 months already, stop everything and ship it in the next 5 days

In particular, keep in mind that a project going through Kickstarter now will likely not ship for at least 6 months, if not a year or two. (Some exceptions exist, such as products that have already done the work and just need to scale, but even then they usually take months after funding completes to sort out the logistics.)

So if you can ship within a week or so, long before the project finishes funding, you'll take advantage of the interest.

Your other alternative would be to decide that you care more about seeing the idea succeed than you do about winning by yourself. You could contact the Kickstarter project team, tell them that you've been working on this for six months, and tell them you'd like to join forces to bring a product to market faster. If they're just raising funds and don't already have the details worked out that you have, they'll likely welcome the help, and you might welcome the funding, interest, and marketing.

> In particular, keep in mind that a project going through Kickstarter now will likely not ship for at least 6 months, if not a year or two

Let's face it, never is also high on the probability scale.

Agreed, but the probability of not shipping at all is high for any startup.

Especially when the competitors on Kickstarter are demoralized by learning about competing product already entering market and starting incremental updates.

Would you have any recommendations for resources that an engineer who has no idea about marketing can use to learn how go about marketing a product?

Some useful resources: https://www.devmarketingguide.com/

There is also an edX course for this @ https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-marketing-ubcx-marke...

Yes, go out and have a coffee with every business owner you can find! Hairdressers, Accountants, Financial Advisers - ask them what they did!

Go find a business coach! Look at their marketing, pay attention to what marketing works for you.

Check out Mixergy[0]. They will definately have something for you. Listen to the interview on Mafia Wars[1].

[0] https://mixergy.com [1] https://mixergy.com/interviews/roger-dickey-mafia-wars-inter...

If you want an absolute starter guide, I wrote one: https://quicknotes.io/n/wrWe-a-short-guide-to-marketing-for-...

as a web developer i can recommend this course by Justin Jackson. http://devmarketing.xyz

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