How to outsource marketing for your side project | Hacker News Reader

How to outsource marketing for your side project

111 pointsdmrschmidt48 comments

Outsourcing development is still a common topic. But how about outsourcing marketing?

I'm faced with the (I'd guess also rather common issue) that I'm sitting on a - what I believe to be - cool side project that should be capable of generating some recurring income. Not a lot, but some. I am absolutely not the kinda person enjoying the marketing side of things though and I lack people in my circle of friends for this too.

Does anyone have experience with outsourcing this somehow? I'm thinking someone who'd do social media and promotion and we'd collaborate on a revenue share model of sorts.

Is that a thing people do?

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If you have product market fit i.e. you know exactly what your product is and who your customers are (which can take months to years), you may outsource it afterwards. However until then, you will be wasting money.

There is no shortcut to this. If you want to create recurring income (no matter how small), you have to work your ass off yourself initially. You need to learn how to find initial customers yourself. If you cannot, it's most likely game over. You cannot just build a cool side project and expect it to magically find customers using outsourcing. No such thing. Now, you could find someone else to help you with skin in the game but then that's different. You still need to get a few customers yourself in the beginning.

So initially, the goal is to find your first 1-10 paying customers yourself. In the process of doing that, you will learn a lot about the product and the market. You will then adjust things. Anything else is premature and you will just get burnt with the outsourced marketing crowds that are plenty.

"find your first 1-10 paying customers yourself". I agree with this. Going through this will show you whether your product is really ready for the market and customers perceive enough value to pay for it. This part cannot be outsourced. This is the founding teams job and is as important as creating a product (sometimes even more important).

I agree with this to an extent. It is good to have a product and some initial paying customers to understand who your customers are and how they are using your product before ever contacting a marketer, but a good marketer will be able to help you refine and position the product as well. Beware of the promotion only marketer. Promotion is just one part of marketing, but many—dare I say most—marketers see it as their only role.

Yea you make a good point. There are different types of marketers and it cannot be generic. Some are very good at using an existing brand and just generating tons of traffic to it. Some are good at helping you build an organic ranking slowly over time.

So to hire a marketer, you need to first understand the stage you are at. For OP, it is early stage which means it is all about discovery and creating a brand around it. You cannot just throw PPC money at that.

The main issue with hiring an agency to do marketing is that your incentives are not aligned.

They almost always charge based on your marketing spend. Which means it's in their interest to make you spend as much as possible. They are only rarely willing to base a part of their compensation on your conversions. And often that's only structured as a bonus.

They are never willing to base on it CAC.

So, you often end up in a situation with thousands in ad spend that is basically useless.

That's what I've been struggling with as well. I know I need to learn to do it myself but it's quite time consuming.

> The main issue with hiring an agency to do marketing is that your incentives are not aligned.

The same could be said for IT and software development but for a strange reason lots of people are doing it.

In general, when in-house capability doesn't exist, things are outsourced. But I don't think that comparison is entirely equivalent.

I think for software it's easier to specify requirements that more closely relate to goals. Then you pay for the complexity they entail. For instance, you can say I want to replace this form with the objective of eliminating paper and improving efficiency. The dev shop might charge you more than the market rate but they'll still have to deliver you something that's relatively close to what you imagined.

Furthermore, it would be in the interest of an honest dev shop to advise and build something really useful for the client so that they come back.

So you're assuming that marketing agencies aren't honest?

I'm struggling to understand what are the differences - why isn't the best interest of a marketing agency to generate good results to a business? What's not aligned in that?

Like... it's cheaper to find clients, fool them into getting a chunk of their marketing budget, and dump them? I don't see how this is good business.

Why can't a dev shop just do a bad job, hide behind poor requirements, and keep a infinite scope of work after you're too invested in them?

Well compare it with a big software consultancy outfit. You will pay and hardly get anything and yet they remain big and keep their name. Same goes for many big name marketing agencies: pay a lot, get nothing and they go on to business as usual. I am not sure it is not honest: it is, at least, lazy. I have seen it with so many software, marketing, investor relation, lawyers, accountant etc companies: they do the absolute minimum they can get away with, possibly just copying all from a previous client and charge the world for it.

That was kind of my point, it's a behavior across any industry, it's not specific to marketing, or dev shops, finances, law...

The thing with consultancy it's kind of what you've said: they've built models/systems that kind of work with minor tweaks and sell it to other companies.

It's done because the perception of building those systems from the ground up seem more expensive then to get it "installed"... which might be true for many scenarios, but for others, it might not.

You're right about honesty. It's in the interest of both to be honest and do a good job. That wasn't a necessary segue.

It's that specifying the meaning of a "good job" is much more difficult when it comes to ads.

Good job in software means do what I want and do a great job means accomplish what I want but do it more efficiently. (And on budget ofc)

For ads do a good job means give me most customers for my budget. And the measure of that is CAC. But I've yet to come across an ad agency that bases it's compensation on CAC.

>It's that specifying the meaning of a "good job" is much more difficult when it comes to ads.

Well that's the crux of it: it's about people and people aren't input/output machines. One message (input) doesn't predict a behavior (output).

That's why I think that anyone that promises specific results in marketing, you should step away from it. I think the best stance is that they will work with you to achieve something, and "work with you" means literally that - try to figure things out with you because your brand/product is it's own thing.

>For ads do a good job means give me most customers for my budget. And the measure of that is CAC. But I've yet to come across an ad agency that bases it's compensation on CAC.

Ok, now I think I understand you...

From the moment you're dependent on a 3rd party, basing your compensation on their work it's just soaking up risk. This goes for both ways: it's the same of some marketing agency saying to a dev shop hey guys, our marketing is solid, don't worry, we will pay you in rev share until the bill is settled... why would you take this deal?

Same goes for marketing: how can they know that you have a good sales dpt. to close leads? How can they know you have a good on boarding? Is the price competitive? They could be throwing you the best ads, getting top notch potential customers, and your product just sucks. Now what? Why should the agency pay for your bad job?

This is true, they can't be dependent on how good your processes are.

BUT they can establish a baseline CAC over the first couple of months and then work on improving it.

Take a look at this comment as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27645674

The digital marketers I've known typically just configure ads in marketplaces not controlled by them, plus use questionable (both in terms of ethics and impact) SEO practices and dubious statistical analysis of poorly verified third party analytics to fool clients into thinking they're doing useful work. It's a lot of smoke and mirrors with a sheen of respectability because it's backed by household tech company names. But there's rarely with a sufficient look at the funnel or actual user/customer/market research or weeding out confounding variables. They mostly just do the sorta stuff you can do yourself after a few hours on LinkedIn Learning. IMO doing this the right way takes someone who both understands the tech stack of it, including tracking prevention nuances, and the marketing side of it, and the statistics side of it, and the business side of it. People like that are rare to come by and don't typically enjoy working for advertising firms for small time small business clients because it's mostly just tedium and limited room for innovation and growth. Like managing the back pages of a local magazine, I imagine.

I've spent years at the intersection of dev work, marketing, advertising, analytics, SEO, etc. for small businesses. Now the I know how terrible a job they usually do, I'd never pay a consultancy to do that work. I probably wouldn't even bother with it myself. It's mostly just faith based prayers to a few ad marketplaces who's interests are inherently in conflict with yours. It's a shitty marketplace all the way around.

Dev work has a higher barrier to entry, for now, so it's less easy to bullshit your way through with clients. The resulting software either does what it's supposed to (with bugs, of course) or not. Whereas the successful or failure of many digital marketing campaigns are largely matters of faith and not evidence.

You'll find bad professionals everywhere you'll look. The difference is that a marketers job is more visible then a devs, because most of it is to get in front of people's eyes balls.

That's why it's easy to perceive that marketing is mostly shit... because it is, and no wonder, it's not "hidden" in the backend or in some git repo.

Ads live in public scrutiny.

A lot of the dev work would probably just make you cringe just like many ads. You just don't see it.

With that said, you're right that the barrier of entry it's lower, and I don't think the hard part of marketing/advertising is the campaign setups - that's mostly being reduced to a step-by-step wizard. Thankfully! But that won't make marketing any good, in fact, you'll just see more of the bad stuff.

It's less about transparency and more about the culture. Developers sell deliverables and marketing consultants sell attempts. As the GP said very few are actually willing to charge based on conversions, because they know they won't make many. Smoke and mirrors.

As someone in marketing. You are right. Many in the field only understand promotion. And that doesn’t make a good marketer. Sometimes it is intentional sliminess, but often it is just a lack of understanding how everything fits together. It is compounded because every client thinks marketing is advertising and advertising is 1:1. It rarely is, but no one wants to hear it. So agencies lie and say it is to get your business, because if they don’t the client will go to the person that tells them biggest lie most convincingly. No one can promise results. It is impossible to say an ad spend of X will lead to sales of Y unless they have already run a similar campaign with your business or product before. Even then it is merely an educated guess.

I will jump in and add to this as someone who is in marketing and has worked in an agency.

Marketing work is never ending and very fluid. There is always more you could be doing and you could always be doing something better with more time. It inherently doesn’t work well as spec work. And yet that is how marketing agencies operate.

Agencies are best hired when you do need something very specific done that you don’t have the expertise to do in-house. A video, a new website, a very specific, time-limited marketing campaign.

If the work is continuous, it should be moved in-house ASAP and it is better to wait then pay an agency to do it in the short-term.

This is *exactly* my experience.

What is cac?

Customer acquisition cost. Basically: total spend / total new customers.

(N.B.: I've done over a half dozen startups, and exited two of them, but didn't make much.)

Yes, this is possible, but really, if done correctly (and most of the time, it's not), getting a good marketing strategy and plan in place and successfully executing it is the hardest part of getting a startup going. As the CTO/technology guy in all those startups, it pains me to admit that, but it's true - the biz part is way harder than the technology/product part in almost all cases. The biz side challenges are responsible for way more of my gray/lost hair than building awesome products...)

If you already know who your customers are, how to identify them, and have at least a clue how to reach them, then outsourcing this is more straightforward. If you don't, and especially if you don't have any marketing chops yourself, you'll definitely need to learn enough to not get taken advantage of, and then hire someone to help do that for you. Early/existing traction with PAYING customers is a big help here.

Dynamitejobs.co is one good place to find such people, but be aware that even hiring remote workers in another country may not be all that cheap, and you're making a commitment that's right up there with taking on a key employee or cofounder.

(FWIW, I plan to do this next year, once my new startup is off the ground, and flowing enough cash to pay for remote team I'll need. Interestingly, this is a small automated mfg play, and almost all the software dev (much of what I'll want to outsource) can wait until we're making money.)

> done over a half dozen startups, and exited two of them

That's a lot of experience.

What is your experience with affiliate marketing, pay-per-subscriber or outsourced sale with commissions?

Good luck with your master plan!

Before you outsource, I suggest you figure out the following:

- Value proposition. What's your unique advantage?

- Target market. Is it a new segment of an existing market? An existing segment? Mass market? Don't worry about age groups, but know who is best for the problem and solution.

- Revenue model. Freemium? Microtransactions? Licensing? Ads?

- Customer relationship. Do you need to build trust? Do they need an explanation/demo? Community? Will they buy In my previous startup, they won't buy directly from advertisers, but will buy from a third party blog talking about the app. If you're making a database, they might need to see it used in production by a big company, and test it with a hackathon.

You'll have to figure this out first, then scale. If you outsource too early, they will drag your business to pivot to their marketing expertise and it might not even work. For example, selling a database or analytics tools through FB ads wouldn't be ideal even if they reach the right customers.

I don't think it'd be very effective. Running the marketing and seeing what works is a critical feedback loop for finding product market fit. Someone who can do that on your behalf is probably expensive. You could probably find somebody to do social media or whatever for you, but there's no guarantee that's the most effective channel and, again, if you don't have product market fit you'd be shoveling money into a firepit.

Better than marketing? Sales.

Much more at small things.

I have a partnership with a friend, it take care of sale stuff. The deal is simply: I get X and he can sell more than it as he please.

A good salesman will instantly see how much nice the deal is! (btw: I know all his deals and customers: I host them. We were before partners in our first and failed startup and split to make things leaner and flexible - not more cost for office and all that-, and have worked for us)

Other very simply, is get % off the sale. Most I know work like that, and prefer it to a salary.

You need a co-founder with marketing experience. You do not want to outsource, because you need alignment of incentives and a person to reflect and iterate upon the entire business model.

If you decide that you are looking for a co-founder, HN will be the perfect place to pitch your project and describe what exactly you are looking for.

EDIT: I might actually be interested myself depending on the nature of your project.

The only way I have ever heard of people doing this successfully is to kinda cheat. Get a co-founder who has strong marketing skills and just as much ownership as you.

It's not technically outsourcing, but it does remove the task from you directly, and gives it to someone far better suited for it, with properly-aligned incentives.

Plus, would you rather have 50% of something, or 0% of nothing?

This seems like the most actionable / non-gatekeeperie advice here.

Yeah, I'd say giving up 50% of your equity is a pretty far cry from outsourcing.

Yep, that’s what I do. I’m the marketing, product and design cofounder and I pair with a dev.

The last two companies I’ve sold have had this structure and it works well.

We collaborate on wireframes, I turn it into designs in Figma, he executes with code and I sell it.

We both get feedback, build it into the roadmap, then start the next process over. He builds, I sell.

You need production and distribution, it’s hard to make it work without both.

I've never had much luck with outsourcing dev or marketing

Prob mainly because I only wanted to spend relatively small amounts

A grand a month for dev

Less for marketing

I always thought there would be people out there like me when I was younger

Hustling picking up side work on Craigslist

Often for very little money

I still think there is a way

Maybe it's just finding the right provider

I've always imagined a upwork-for-indie-hackers marketplace that provides services at some fixed rate like $5/hr, and all the money has to flow through a single payment gateway so that everyone gets paid

In theory this is what upwork and fiver and the rest already do

Minus the revenue share

Ideally it'd be revenue share and equity share over time

That's part of my motivation for most things I have ever tried to do -- find some mutually beneficial situation

I don't know what it's like for the contractor who have done work for me

Do they think I'm too cheap? Or just suck? Or I'm just a contract and if it doesn't work then onto the next one?

For my part, I often or always get work that does not work

So right now I have an app I need fixed but I don't want to go back to the dude who did it for various reasons

So my execution is shit

I've learned but it's gd expensive to learn

Sounds a bit like your wishes are unclear, and you struggle to screen the right developer that will confront you by communicating clearly what they're expected to deliver. Which I think is because the rates are too low for the wishes you have. Good work is plain simple expensive, or you need to be real lucky with finding the right person in their right stage (just starting out and not knowing their worth entirely).

Also, if taking on any work, have clear definitions on what is considered done. If it looks nice but doesn't work (like you currently seem to have), it's not done and not all money should be handed over. Good luck.

When you offer somebody a revenue share or future equity, you're proposing a very unbalanced deal.

You get a product (one that's the basis of your company, your company can't exist without it). You have it, you start making money from it. It's unlikely it can be taken away, it's tangible.

You get it right now. If the person is unreliable or doesn't deliver, you don't pay, you find someone else.

Your "partner" gets a promise of some future benefit from somebody they don't know. They have to rely on future work and investment from somebody who is currently demonstrating they don't want to work or invest. If the person doesn't produce they get nothing. There are a million ways they will get nothing even if the person does succeed.

This is not a "mutually beneficial arrangement". This is exploitation of desperate people. Furthermore, there are twenty guys a day asking "mutually beneficial arrangements" like this from programmers: it is not a unique opportunity for anybody.

Outside the work-paid-for-with-hope scenario, you're talking about $5/hour? If the going rate for landscapers is $15/hour, what quality of work do you think you'll get if you hire somebody for 75 cents per hour?

Roll up your sleeves and learn how to program. You're not going to find a sucker to do your work for you.

You’re underpaying, obviously.

The problem is that a part of the marketing endeavor requires investment namely media budget (assuming that the entity you're outsourcing to will have copy/design skills).

You can go through the route of organic reach, but that takes time to build.

Locking a deal based on revenue share might be a good way to top things off. But unless you have an extremely good product I don't see people up-fronting budget for anyone's project.

Remember that in the end it will depend on the product/service... if the value isn't there, you can have the best marketing but things won't happen.

So I think the answer is, it's too risky.

>I'm sitting on a - what I believe to be - cool side project that should be capable of generating some recurring income

This sentence could be made by a marketing guy, pitching to find a dev to build it. Same goes the other way around.

I have done some marketing outsourcing and after my experience i would not recommend it. Incentives are definitely not aligned. They charged fixed fees for services that i felt didn’t add any value but increased costs, they used up significant quantities of our time. One time while looking into why we weren’t seeing conversions i noticed there was some incorrect configs on some adgroups. A whole months budget blown in a few hours. No apologies, it was an accident. I still had a invoice from them at the end of that month. If I hadn’t dug in I don’t think they would have been forthcoming with it. Our CAC was impossibly high and in the end I struggled to see the value, i also had no control and was loosing trust. There is also the problem that marketers tend to be good talkers and they always had something to say about the results (agree they had to do this with the pandemic going on). Our budget was mid-level five figures which should have yielded some value but we have ditched all the services they setup for us (it was not done very well) and we’ve chosen new tools. For example they put us on Hubspot we have just shifted to a few replacement tools. If you do go ahead remember marketing effort is difficult to price you are paying todays income for future revenue. The results from your marketing outsourcing agency will only be known after 3-12 months. Marketing like DevOps should be a core capability of any business. You might be able to do it but it will be better via a consultant not an agency. You have more control then.

You clearly didn't get the memo. You don't outsource the business side. The business side outsources you!

There are numerous "marketing consultants" (just check your local yellow pages) who are happy to take your money and do marketing for you. The problem is that you would be outlaying several thousand dollars up front for an uncertain return. Marketing does not equal sales!

In the same way you don't outsource sales at the start, you definitely don't want to outsource marketing.

Figure out what problems people are facing, explain how to solve those problems. Eventually you create processes for this, and can delegate.

I have worked in marketing on both the agency and the client side.

This is absolutely something you can do. Freelancers are out there and so are agencies. Agencies are expensive and, in my opinion, are best for specific campaigns, not for long term management of all of your marketing efforts.

You need to find a business partner that knows marketing and that you can trust. They should ask lots of good question about your product and they should clearly be able to explain to you the why and how of what they are doing. If they can’t or you feel like you don’t understand what they are saying, they are probably not a good fit for you.

Yes, sometimes it's possible. Sometime ago, I had considered doing it because I could not think like a marketing person. So, I told a struggling startup founder that I will do grunt marketing for them, they just have to teach me the steps involved. Now, after learning , I concluded that for every problem,, by and large,, there is already an imperfect solution. It's easier to approach the solution maker to market their product and rather than build myself, one from scratch If you want someone, you should atleast drop your contact details here, so that we can contact you.

Does your product target consumers or businesses? Consumer marketing (B2C) is very different than business-to-business marketing (B2B). Frankly, I find B2B much easier and more ethical than B2C.

Most agencies charge you an hourly rate with no incentive to win. You can sometimes negotiate performance-based incentives or % of sales, but it's a bit rare. Both of these can actually bring in more money for the vendor and you're not giving up equity.

Source: I'm a B2B marketing technology consultant.

> Does anyone have experience with outsourcing this somehow?

Its very common. Marketing consultants and agencies abound.

> I'm thinking someone who'd do social media and promotion and we'd collaborate on a revenue share model of sorts.

These types of agreement exist but in my experience they tend have mixed results. It works OK in an affiliate enviroment, typically business models that have 1) a quick interest to sale window and 2) One of these two factors i) high conversion or ii) high value payouts. For example credit cards do well in affiliate environments but home loans (while they exist) dont get the same affiliate interest as there is a much higher research to purchase ratio and then proving you had a hand in that purchase decision etc.

If your business suits affiliate style results, then someone can work on promoting something and see fairly fast results. Also note social marketing can have a long term requirement to gain traction. In the partners interest they should want some ongoing claim to revenue/profit or for them its best to set up a independent site and build an audience, then direct said audience to a product. That way they retain value for the lag effect of their work. So if you want someone to do this for your website, they might spend 6-12 months working their ass off building a supply of organic people then you give them the flick now its actually bringing revenue in. Huge risk for them to take.

I think in this situation the 3 better and fairer options:

1) Pay someone for their work and you take on the cost risk as the business owner.

2) Bring in a true partner and give them a share of the business.

3) Go to the affiliate marketing enviroment and get a clear pay for performance model set up. If going down this route be careful in it doesn't suit all product and there some really shonky people in this space. It can be one of the most successful channels for the right business and model. Also people can do their dough if they dont know their ins/outs and sign up to poor terms.

Overall: yes this is a thing people do. Try to look at it form both sides and set up a fair solution vs trying to get someone to work cheap. HN is full of comments of people trying to get developers to work on a product for some mythical long term payout, this is no different.

That’s a thing people do! I can help you through my company D2Cgroup.ca.

In the same boat with zlipa.com

I believe it's got potential, marketing however is my weak spot (pathetically blowing my own horn just now serves as proof).

I really like this idea. But I can imagine that is difficult to promote it to the right people on the right moment.

Yes, it's called celebrity endorsements and expect to give up 70% or more of the revenue. That celebrity will then pretend that it was their idea and that they built it and you're just a tiny helper who assisted them with their grand product vision.

It feels a bit stupid to give up the bragging rights, but in exchange you're fully shielded from those pesky customers.

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