Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

I built a desktop app (Poker Copilot) in 2008. I figured if I did it well, I'd have my own one-person software company supplying a steady stream of income with little ongoing effort. My product would be so intuitive that it wouldn't need a user guide. It certainly wouldn't need marketing because everyone in my target audience would spread the word that my product was what they needed!

Ha, what a fool 2008 me was. What I didn't realise was that my two main tasks for years would be marketing and customer support.

Coding new features (of which many were requested) and fixing bugs (of which there were many) had to be scheduled around the twice-daily customer support windows and the marketing efforts.

Nine years later, and still the stream of customer support requests has not relented! Nine years and still I'm focusing on marketing one day a week!

And of course, there are still bugs.

It's almost pathos at this point in the hacker community that if you do any marketing or promotion you're a shill and wantrepreneur at best and a charlatan and huckster at a minimum.

I know I used to feel this way before I really tried to launch a product. Now I know that there is no such thing as a product that is so good that it sells itself. In fact the best technical solutions I've seen have failed because the market doesn't care about perfection, it cares about mind share.

There is still a stallmanesque anarchist quality to some engineers that view commercial success as tainted. I think I can appreciate that in some philosophical senses, but let's not get too high on our horses.

There are other myths.

6) What if someone steals my idea and beats me to the market?

Due to the culture of secrecy propagated by big companies like Apple we too believe our ideas are unique and need to be secret.

If anything, the best ideas are usually incremental changes to already existing ideas but I digress. The point is being first to the market means squat but if you have a solid marketing plan and a consistent supply of leads (+ good relationship with your list) then you will make money. period.

7) A big launch is the end goal

Even a big launch is only 1% of your total traffic put leniently. So many people put all their hopes on a big launch.. So you're on Techcrunch, big deal. I've had many sites on TC, Mashable, etc but the traffic usually means nothing. You get a burst of signups (probably 1k+ in a week IIRC) but that is like a drop in the ocean and just like posting on a Forum, the moment your post drops from homepage - it's history. On the other hand, good SEO, and consistent supply of leads (say 100 leads a day = your big launch on TC in 10 days) is what will keep you in the game and make you money everyday.

8) If I have more traffic my site will grow

Getting traffic is half the job. Converting that traffic into paying leads is where the money is. If you think your lead will buy from you the moment it lands on your site, you're being naive. You have to romance your subscribers, give them free bonuses, educate them and then one day when you have something they need, they will buy from you - even if you're last to the market or are charging them more. When people trust you, you will get more repeat business than the new orders. I bet people with iPhones are the biggest consumers of the next iPhones too. Never ever underestimate the power of up-selling (though this one I think you only learn from experience).

> Great products deserve great marketing—Tweet this

For early-stage founders, this is a misleading suggestion. Yes, it's true that if you could have great marketing without any cost, you'd want to have it.

But this misses the point that if you put $5k into marketing every month, then you're putting $5k less into the product.

So the real question is, would you rather have a good product and great marketing, or a great product and good marketing? I will concede that some founders don't put enough emphasis on marketing, but quotes like this overlook the basic cost-benefit balancing act that early-stage founders live and die by.

Also, I cringe every time I see a "Tweet this" link. Especially in a piece about marketing, it reminds me that this guy wants to build up his personal brand, which is why he's blogging in the first place. I understand that, but this in-your-face reminder (3x in one blog post) makes the piece come across as less of a "I learned some lessons I want to share" post and more of a "I'm trying to build a brand so I blog a bunch, and this is what I came up with for a post."

It kills the authenticity and makes the whole thing suspect (and then when I read trite stuff like the above quote, that confirms that the information contained within isn't thoughtful—it's largely filler).

I jibe with the article but I disagree that marketing is something that should be pursued from Day 1. As Jessica Livingston has noted umpteen times, the first thing you need is product that delights users. Marketing activities around an idea that might not have a useful market is a bit wasteful.

I don't imply that marketing is pointless at early stage but time-consuming marketing channels (blogging, social media) are best avoided at that time. A detrimental mistake that I made when I was making a product was to think that I need 'marketing' to get more (beta) users. I started writing blog articles without understanding that I needed at least a baseline of users who really desire the product. Reading about some of the SaaS successes, I think that a lot of entrepreneurs get their initial users from people they know / ads / reachout. Strong marketing effort kicks in when the product seems useful for a market and organic growth doesn't feel enough.

Lately I started to understand more and more about the benefit and importance of marketing and starting to market early. This article summarizes the benefits in a clean and easy-to-read items.

I think, hiring a marketer is a big problem. Let's say you are a group of engineers building a good product and you know you need to hire marketers. The questions are, how do you hire a marketer? What criteria do you seek in a marketer? How do people become marketers? One obvious choice is trying to find someone who marketed a similar product before but it is not always easy. I think this is also the case for hiring sales people.

> Someone with less understanding of how a product actually works is often better equipped to communicate what it does than someone stuck in the weeds.

This is so true!

Yet, it took me a lot of time to understand this. Maybe because this is not always easy to see that the shift perceived, between what I said about my product and how my interlocutor reworded it, is in fact a move from details to the product's essence.

As a founder myself I find it's more about the difficulty in finding a marketing strategy that has an effective ROI without increasing your burn rate to a point of failure.

The article implies that all marketing will be effective, or at least that you can easily have a positive ROI just by hiring a marketer.

This is not necessarily true, especially with the limited capital that many bootstrapped startup may have available.

Experincing negative ROI (or even hearing experiences about that) seem more likely candidates for why it isn't done than the "Myths" listed here.

If you have the product on the app marketplace and it's growing and generating money, there's no reason to bleed money. And it's absolutely no reason to shut it down. Make your operations more efficient. That will also help when scaling up.

Oddly enough, the only somewhat successful project ($20k/month peak passive income) I've ever had was when I didn't know how to code. I spent all my time on marketing and built the site in Wordpress + Plugins in 1 day.

>5) Hiring a marketer takes too much time

Is there any recommendations for all in one turnkey service for marketing? So that i just pay money and they do the rest.

I fell very much in to the trap of his second point there. Mind you, I would never hire a marketer (not enough money is involved in my startup), so this "marketer" would of course be "me". I decided there was no point telling people about my web-based startup until I had a working site that they could see for themselves.

So indeed, by the time I was ready to let beta testers in, I had no real network on which to rely on to get it in front of peoples eyes. As a not-for-profit, I don't plan to make money off it (and hence don't plan to spend much on it), and am not interested in the VC side of things.

I remember initially reading BetaList's requirement of submitting to them before you actually launch and I found it ridiculous. Now I realise, if done right, it's the proper way to go about things. And I missed that boat badly.

I would say that one of the most common problems is unrealistic expectations placed on Marketers for highly technical products. Successful technical companies realized long ago that they must use teams which combine skills to tackle individual projects in Marketing & Advertising. There is some magic combination of experience, luck, and process - and usually many projects in parallel are required so that ineffective approaches can be quickly discarded and another tried. I've been involved in successful marketing efforts - and the failed ones were usually doomed from the start by executives with unrealistic expectations - resulting in process and organizations which can't work.

I call it the "Build It And They Will Come" Hollywood myth.

Marketing is important, however more important is to build in a viral loop into your product, that for every new customer x>1 new customers are contacted.

This is how social networks work, invite your friends systems, etc.

However, even then marketing is still important. But too often marketing is seen as: Spend huge amount of money on ads.

No: marketing is market research, choosing your target audience, branding, image building, tone-of-voice etc.

Most times there is not a market for a decent ROI and unfortunately there will never be, it would really cost too much terraforming your niche.

I always say coding is the easy part of your SaaS. Marketing is hard. Don't forget customer support, which if you are really good at can fuel your sales and act has it's own marketing channel. Let's not even mention all of the other things that come into play with running a business.

Coding is the easy part!

It surprises me to see so many comments about this article. I couldn't get past the grammar problems in the first paragraph. The most compelling thing at the beginning of this article is the stock photograph of a pretty girl seemingly praying in a coffee shop.

"Founders predictably underestimate the importance of hiring marketers."

They do? Who are these founders? Founders of what? And who are these people predicting the estimations of these founders? How did you learn of these predictions? Are the predictors publishing their founder predictions somewhere?

"As a result, many startups don’t get round to marketing their product until it’s too late."

I realize I'm being pedantic now, but "get round" threw me for a moment. It's another break in the flow of reading his message. I wondered what's "get round" mean? Is that like getting fat? Like getting "round about the middle"? Oh. he means "get around to". Googling "get round" returns 400k results. Googling "get around": 55M. I guess some people do say "get round." 1 out of 137 people. Word choice matters.

"This happened to me and I’ve thought long and hard about why this happens."

What's he referring to? What is "this" that happened? I had to stop and reread the previous sentence to figure out what "this" and "happened" refers to: "startups don’t get round to marketing their product until it’s too late." So a start up didn't get round to marketing a product. Okay, so I guess that implies that a startup was lazy and irresponsible by not getting around to marketing a product. In short, the problem is that something bad was done to a product. That's what happened to you? Inflicted upon you? David Bailey is a product and a startup didn't market him responsibly.

I stopped reading at this point. He put so little care into editing and proofreading his article, I figured he probably put just as little effort into crafting a meaningful message and formulating logical conclusions.

I guess I'll never find out what the pretty girl is praying for.

I think the founders that fail to market their products are those who take marketing as something external to product development. Those who consider marketing as introducing and explaining their product features to the world - are successful.

Great write-up. As a marketer (independent consultant for years and now founder of a digital agency), I cannot tell you how many times I have had to tell clients, "If you build it, they will not come" if they do not know your product even exists. Even so, many technical startup founders still place marketing low on the list of things to focus on early on. And I'm saying this as someone who started out on the tech side and moved to the business and marketing side later.

Such great insight here. This could have been an article that I wrote since I've gone through nearly everything Dave has gone through. As some have already commented it's something a lot of folks struggle with. You build a great product, perhaps you get a good initial bounce, but struggle to keep the growth going. You really need a lot of stamina and patience to grow a product to critical mass. You can never predict when it'll happen.

Read The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company by Steve Blank — it teaches founders how to achieve product-market fit.

Once you have that, marketing is easy and cost effective. Until then, it's usually a waste of money.

For me it was always because - they know how the meat is made.

i have built products that went to millions of users, zero marketing. If the product is inherently viral, you don't need to market. Othwerwise, you do.