Avoiding Startup Tarpits

Hiring for marketing is incredibly tough. I’ve yet to work with a marketer I would recommend.

Re your situation I’m not sure there is much you can or should do with $300. It’s too small an amount to make a dent in any paid channels for sure.

Hire a marketing/growth coach is probably the most cost effective way to spend a budget like that imho

I like your comment and a lot of your thoughts are common. Allow me to help alleviate some of your concerns. I think the root of the issue is that many "Startup Tarpits" are not talking to the right customers early on. I also think you have only worked with marketing people who didn't use a methodical, scientific approach to user acquisition.

Don't hire a marketing expert. This is a bad first step. You should define a very specific subset of customers and talk to them. Find out their problems after talking to 10 very targeted people that fit into a user profile. I recommend reading "The Mom Test" (it's a book about how to phrase customer development interview questions) as a basis for how you talk to potential customers.

User acquisition efforts are not only measurable on a larger scale. You may have this idea because the people you worked with may have had a big company background. For a startup, it is very necessary for your advertising campaign to define a cost per click, find a conversion rate, and then test many different advertising phrases and avenues. This helps put a direct cost per user acquisition price on each campaign and you can compare apples to apples. It takes "voodoo money burning rituals" and turns it into numbers that are measurable.

If you rely on free marketing channels without a clear focus on who is using your product, it is very likely that you have 10 customers who fit 10 completely different segments with 10 different ideas of which features will give them value.

They key is learning. When you estimate future software releases, you typically point a story using things you have learned from previous, similar stories. When you attempt a new advertising campaign, you should use past learnings to determine which ads and messaging will work for different segments - how much they will cost, and how many users you can expect to get based on past results.

In summation, startup marketing should have a focused, scientific, numbers driven, methodical approach - just like writing software. If your marketers are not doing that, you probably aren't working with the right marketers.

Well, you can do baby steps.

There are so many ways to promote stuff.

For example content marketing. Start writing a blog, when you get the ins and outs of blogging, start to use it to promote your product.

This year I wrote a blog article almost every week. Then I started to promote some educational videos I recorded for Skillshare. Made a few bucks on the side with that.

Just focus on some "type" of marketing that is easy for your and try it.

In my experience (this is something I'm in the midst of and still working on), the key to early low-budget marketing is establishing a feedback cycle. More important than reaching large numbers is gauging the reaction across a reasonable cross-section of the market. Apart from figuring out what's working and what isn't, it's also critical for zeroing in on who your early adopters will be.

Ads are an anonymous and low-touch acquisition channel, making them great for growing once you've got product-market fit, and (mostly) terrible before that point. If you're really clever with AB testing, analytics, lifecycle emails, etc., you may be able to get some useful info out of an ad campaign, but I think it's unlikely to be cost effective compared to higher touch options like networking, cold emails, posting on forums, meetups, conferences, etc. where it's easier to establish a line of communication and find out what people really think.

I don't think this is something you can hire for. Honestly, while it has its moments when things are going well, overall it's just not very fun work. It's tedious, frequently discouraging, and puts you in a lot of uncomfortable situations. It takes founder-level motivation to push through. Once you've done the hard work and have the machine running, there are tons of people who will be happy to scale and optimize it for money. Before that, I think a co-founder is probably the only realistic option if you're looking for someone to completely own early-stage marketing.

The problem is that you think about marketing from the end rather than from the beginning. Spending money with FB or Google is one possible end. Another one would be inbound / content marketing. Another one would be trade shows. Etc.

However the beginning of marketing is researching how your product interacts with the market, which problem your product solves and for whom. A lot of times who you think your customers are isn't really who your customers are and why you think they buy your product isn't really why they buy it. And many times your product is capable of solving a problem for a much larger user group which however you just don't know about yet (but should definitely find out about).

Getting all these variables right is how marketing starts and besides your own time it doesn't cost you a dime. Once you have better knowledge about the market (who you target, at which price point, with what message, etc..) you will have a much better feeling on how to target that market and spending actual dollars on a marketing end (ads etc.) at that point will feel much more satisfying and less "voodoo".

Replying to myself, after 11h. There is a good number of replies, and they mostly underscore my point: I do not know how to deal with the problem and there is no defined way to go about it.

Most replies focus on "talking to your customers", validating your idea, etc. I know, you should talk to your customers. It's all good. I do. But this won't get you out of the tarpit. Talking to your customers mostly gets you new feature requests, so you end up building new features.

Also, once you have a business with a bunch of paying customers, the situation is different. You know the product can sell. If you can get 10 paying customers, you can also get 100, and probably 1000, too. That was what the original article was about.

There was precious little practical advice in the comments, apart from "content marketing" and guerilla marketing. One is something pretty much everybody does, and the other is difficult to pull out for B2B.

libertyEQ has a great point: we know so little about the whole subject that we even don't get the naming right. Sorry. For the moment I'll just keep calling all this stuff "marketing", until I understand it better.

My original point still stands: the article got it right, and the reason why we hackers build features instead of doing marketing is because marketing is hard, poorly defined, and there is so much fluff, myths and cliches around it. I'm still looking for a solution.

Resources are obviously a constraint, but in my opinion the "right person, right time, right message" thinking is the best thing our marketing team taught me.

We used to run paid social/adwords campaigns, but once we were able to identify segments and customize the message, we ran smaller, more targeted campaigns.

I don't think having huge campaigns is as needed as figuring out your customers and how the present your product in a way they are ready to receive it.

We initially didn't have as much data to help us understand our segments, but we got a marketer that really had amazing intuition and experience. She was able to help us develop these targeted campaigns before we had the resources to really invest in better marketing software and bigger campaign budgets.

Many months we spend less than $300 on paid adverts and we're growing our customers and revenue. We've also got many good customer who advocate for us.

I see product/idea validation as part of the marketing process, too.

In the intro to marketing course I took in college, one of the points they really tried to ingrain in everyone was that the market research you do before you create a product or feature is one of the most important parts of marketing.

I believe the first validation of product must come regardless of marketing skills. If you built a side project and no one is using it, it is a product problem, not a marketing problem.

Actually, I believe a clever marketing tactic can be counter-productive in such an early stage, as you might lure customers to a product that doesn't deliver value.

So, your first few paying customers should come from building the product and putting it in front of few people (your personal and professional network, Show HN, Reddit).

After you have these first customers then it is time to stop underestimating the marketing effort a successful product demands.

I can't speak for most devs with a side project, but for me specifically, market validation and marketing don't feel like real work. I know it's real work and it's necessary work, but they don't feel like it. They feel like goofing off on the internet without the fun. I don't get the immediate gratification of posting on Hacker News or the satisfaction of coding up a new feature.

Then there's the added fear of being really bad at a new skill. It doesn't help that the iteration cycle of market validation and marketing is extremely long compared to programming. You could be screwing up for months and not have enough clear data to know you're screwing up.

To clarify, this is not me complaining. I realize I need to get over everything I've listed, press forward and learn a new (lucrative!) skill. But I can't be the only dev who feels this way about marketing.

Average CAC in terms of dollars depends entirely on your industry/product. A good number is all relative.

That's an interesting point that I hadn't really considered. Our startup never got to that stage. We raised money, burnt through it and then had to figure out how to salvage the situation being gritty.

Absolutely. This is very common in consumer products where the burden of moving over to the competition is minimal (think food delivery, ridesharing, home maintenance etc.).

Additional symptoms are relatively low retention or no retention at all, and aggressive marketing tactics to the point where as a customer you're not sure how can they be possibly making money.

Interesting, I wonder if you can set that up as a marketplace connecting successful marketers to recurring revenue.

I hear you and I'm in the same boat lol. Except that, I have been engaging potential customers prior to a launch.

I am having 30 minute conversations and asking THEM things like:-

1) What their process looks like. 2) What pain-points they have. 3) What they are actually using and paying...

We then brain storm what potential solutions could solve these pain points and move onto:

4) How much they would be willing to pay to solve these problems. i.e, if their ROI could increase by a certain % is paying the $$ a no brainer. 5) More importantly, how much time they would be saving and is the $$$ a now brainer now?

Features are great, they differentiate between yourself and your competitors. But they aren't the goal. What is the goal, is making those features part of a process flow and achieving a result that your customers want AND will be willing to pay for, compared to your competitors.

What's the point in building a feature a potential customer won't use or understand? Or even worse, is too complex and when they use it they leave frustrated?

Bottom line is, you don't know if you have something because you aren't talking to your market.

So stop what you are doing. Nowadays it's really easy. Go on Facebook, start searching for some groups. Sometimes the gold is there because people are asking questions and you can get a sense of where your product fits. Then insert yourself into the conversation and start asking questions.

Start adding people and trying to engage them directly. Say you'll send them a coupon or buy them lunch for 30 minutes of their time. You can setup a Skype conversation and then glean lots of knowledge.

I would also suggest doing this with those who are experienced and in the weeds. Because they could give you actual insights over what people THINK they need.

Best of luck! :)

I can't help you with that, but since your product for programmers, I have a suggestion: show an example of the markup of a page. Doesn't have to be very complex, but not an hello world either. You've essentially built a programming language, and there's a reason why most of their sites have code examples on the homepage :)

> I am willing to split the profits for the lifespan of a user if you can help me acquire new paying users!

This is what affiliate programs (and networks) are for!

I am the author and I do agree with what you are saying. Our story was different. I mentioned that one of the original sins of our company was how we budgeted solely into product development. The other original sin was that the idea for the company was ill conceived. We had been working on tech at another company why not release as stand alone product. The idea frankly wasn't that differentiated enough from other products out there. When you don't have a truly differentiated idea like the companies you brought up, then marketing becomes more and more important to get peoples attention. Part of what made the examples you brought up special is that what they were working was so unique. That differentiation/uniqueness makes it a lot easier to market (the virality piece is more likely). In our case because we didn't have that. The way to survive was that we had to fight it out bidding for ads on Google. I would not recommend that path for anyone. It was just the environment we were in. I would say even for those companies to focus on marketing will not be a disservice, but focus on the initial conception of the idea even more. It makes a world of difference in determining what kind of head winds you'll face.

No one would ever have heard about Woz and his logic board hacking if Jobs hadn’t decided his target market was non technical people in the home and office, insisted the products contain features targeting their needs (no kit, a working computer packaged to connect to a TV, disk drives instead of tapes, etc, etc) and then created massive awareness of Apple using great PR, advertising, and a worldwide sales network of resellers.

>I think one of the challenges I personally face is that building more features feels safe. You can spend a whole day trying to reach out to more people to validate the problem and come away with nothing. A day of coding gives you something tangible.

Coming away with nothing and then to keep on trying. This has been the hardest thing for me too. Coding/designing/building is way more fun and easy (in the short-term).

It seems that you add more features, you attract more users, but I think that if you've prioritized your features 'right', each additional one makes your product attractive to fewer and fewer marginal users.

Also, when you get really down in the weeds, I bet it's easy to have a daunting feature list that people bounce off of, especially if you don't have a clear separation between marquee/headline features and detail features, meaning you might make your product attractive to an additional 1% of users, but 5% of your existing potential users fall out of the funnel because of the word soup.

If a products target customers think it has deficiencies, you need to reemphasixe marketing. Researching and understanding your target customers needs and wants is the first, and by far most important part of marketing.