Developer, you may need a co-founder in marketing

I think most technical solo founders know they need a co-founder with expertise in marketing and sales, the problem is actually finding them.

I definitely could use one but it's been impossible to find someone both serious about it and experienced at the same time. Especially if you're based in Europe.

Unfortunately, majority of "marketers" are hungry people who don't really know much about real marketing. This might offend the real marketers (hungry part) but it is true.

I worked with countless e-commerce companies who hired these "marketers" and failed miserably. I would say 1 in 100 marketers really knows what they are doing. Majority of these fake marketers think having Instagram their phone gives them the marketer status and posting on Instagram is what marketing is. They do not know, they keep using crappy buzzwords. It is much more (nearly impossible) to benchmark marketers' talent until spending $$$ for their 6-12 months salary. It is much more easier to find a developer because they do not need to lie about their talent, you can just check their work and see the quality.

Fake marketers can disguise their fakery so easily because it is just words until really working with them. When I say 1 in 100, I am really being optimistic. As a developer I had to teach maybe 100+ "marketers" how to use google analytics. That's how miserable they are. It is not my fault these ecommerce companies hire fake marketers because job market is full of them and they lie very nicely. Their career is job hopping every 6 months and find new companies to lie to them instead of really learning marketing.

If I can find someone like marcosaric to make my graphs look like theirs, I would happily give one of my kidneys. It is so rare. So rare.

I think one of the biggest failures of developers is thinking that tech means anything when launching a business. Tech that works is table stakes. If nobody knows about your product then it may as well not exists, from a business perspective. If you want to start a business, the marketing and customer acquisition strategies are as important (if not more important) than the tech. Someone has to make sure your potential customers know your solution exists. It can be the founder or it can be a VP of Growth, but it is a job that must be done or else you may as well not waste your time writing the code in the first place.

It's not only about skills - it's about focus.

At one point I (as a bootstrapped solopreneur, profitable for a long time) decided the bottleneck in my career is not technical ability or features. I sorely lacked business depth, marketing and sales skills. In shifting my focus, I read a ton of books and learned about SEO, email marketing, PPC, lean startup, etc.

It turned out that I managed to fare even worse than before. Instead of having stellar products with lousy marketing - I spread myself thin by adding marketing on top of development, customer support, website maintenance etc. If I were able to find a cofounder I like, someone with deep knowledge of the niche we are in (databases), with great work ethics and presence in database communities, it might well be one of the best things for the business. I would focus on the technical side, that person would be the bridge to the community.

It's hard to find someone with deep database knowledge who wants to be a marketing and community building cofounder. These people are paid a lot for their expertise. With more money now, I am focusing on being the architect and write more, with my team handling the development more and more.

So yes, it would be good to have a cofounder. It may simply be too hard to find a person with complementary skillset to join, so we developers have to keep paddling until we reach a point where we have enough time to focus on marketing. Or, simply hire a great marketer with good track record in our industry. Money fixes many problems.

No doubt.

Developer, you also may need to learn marketing. Here's why. A co-founder is your first fanatical customer. Without that first fan, your work will go unnoticed. To gain that first fan, you need to learn how to do a few things well:

1. Create a One-Liner that tells the primary reason your offering needs to exist and be adopted by your customer. 2. Associate each Feature with a Benefit, all pointing back to the One-Liner. 3. Create a Landing Page that proves 1 and 2.

So, after your offering is ready for people (preferably before, TBH), get 1, 2, and 3 in place.

Going through this exact same situation myself. No, developing the app is not the hardest part. If you build it, they won't come. Much better to hire/find a cofounder with a marketing background instead of YOLOing money into the advertising dumpster fire as you learn how it works.

I’d say that “sales” or “marketing” are indeed valuable skills that developers may lack, but I think you would be doing yourself a disfavor if you’re only looking for those skills.

In the end, what I myself realized, is that the real gap is not just sales/marketing; it’s about someone that figures out product-market fit. It’s somewhat sales, it’s somewhat marketing, it’s somewhat strategic. But an average marketeer or sales representative will have a terribly difficult time figuring out PMF.

We know.

But geek profiles and marketing profiles have often huge differences in life styles, ethics, rhythm, objectives, etc.

It was visible at university, it's still is in social life and work life.

Diversity enrich your life up to a point, after which cost/ratio plummet. I rarely see those profiles going along and having fun sharing time together. It's not impossible, but it's not common, so you won't get a lot of co-founders that will match, or that did, but will last.

It's not that geek are completely oblivious to their shortcoming.

A marketer is of no use if nobody needs your product. This developer was lucky that he built something that people wanted. He just failed to reach them. He could have just hired a marketer with right incentives. No need for a co-founder in marketing. You need to talk to customers, which is not optional.

An extremely hard problem . As you can read from the post, he had to approach someone directly based on what they saw about them online. This requires you to be constantly looking around and reaching out to people yourself instead of a usual job post. In other words, you have to be selling (yourself and your company) to attract a potential co-founder in general.

The challenge is that most good marketing people are either working at or running their own agency. The ones that you usually find either have no experience or are very raw which could be a gamble. Secondly, they have to really align with your vision and idea (a co-founder problem in general, not just related to marketing). All this makes it tough especially if you are bootstrapped and don't have a lot of money to play with.

Can relate so much to this. Noone will come once you have finished coding your product, you need a marketing strategy that is proven to work before you start coding a single line.

Ugh this one hurts. I'm a developer whose launched something I'm quite proud of but flailing at the marketing end. I've even been on the front page of Hacker News. I can write code till the cows come home but I've agonized over content and marketing and the proper way to market and promote the app.

FYI if you're at all curious the app is called Keenforms, it's a form builder with a no code rules engine.

https://www.keenforms.com

Why get a marketing co-founder instead of a business co-founder? I feel as if marketing have marketed their own profession to such a degree that people believe they have super powers.

I've spent two years building a new social network idea that I wanted to use myself, and now that I'm finally feeling good about the site's development, I realize that the _real_ challenge begins - marketing. It's kind of daunting and I'm frequently thinking how I'd like to find a cofounder with business/marketing experience.

a long time problem I've had as a founder, is that I have never encountered a prospective co-founder who could do marketing, who is willing to just work for equity. everyone needs to pay their bills, and equity is not enough. the only exception is ultra rich people who are in it for fun, and are already rich because of a previous startup or a family with deep pockets. and those people you won't find unless you are already very well connected, which only happens if a) you can spend all your time networking instead of building a product b) you have a family that is ultra well connected / rich. in europe, I could never find someone who would work for just equity. so I moved to the US. then, I came to the conclusion that it's the same situation in the US, and location actually doesn't matter even though I was told it's all different in the US.

At the end of the day, technical solo founders need to have some idea of who is going to buy/use what they build and how they're going to get paid. The type of person you need follows from this.

Some businesses actually need sales more than they need marketing. While there's often a lot of overlap for many tech businesses, it's worth noting that the techniques mentioned in this post (blogging, posting on social media platforms, appearing on podcasts, etc.) don't work for all businesses.

The blog post doesn't reveal anything about how the marketing achievements translated to sales. Hypothetically, for all we know, a small number of customers could make up the majority of this startup's revenue and how they were acquired might have been totally random if not based on sales and marketing channels unrelated or only loosely related to these marketing achievements.

It’s great this worked for them!

But I don’t see a comparison to the obvious counter argument that you could hire marketing instead.

I am a solo tech founder. I am fortunate I suppose that my product is something that fills an actual need. I get about 125-150 people to the site organically every day, with about 25 people logging in, and then 1-3 people putting down their credit card for a trial. I feel like I did the real hard part and that while a marketing person might be able to hep increase these numbers, that if I keep on refining and bettering the product, I will solve for it myself. Maybe I am delusional, but at least I am having fun doing it!

I'm not a fan of how Plausible seems to straight up copy everything that Fathom does. From features to announcements to landing pages. I could imagine copy-cats are hard to deal with as founders, but man, it seems like Plausible copies every little thing Fathom does. That isn't to detract from Plausible's success, which is undeniable and impressive in and of itself, but it has always irked me.

p.s. I'm a Fathom customer, so take this as you will. Obviously biased.

I had 4 failed attempts to monetize side projects, before finally stumbling upon something that doesn't need marketing at all. However, it does require competing at the absolute top level, all the time.

What's the catch? You find these things almost exclusively in zero sum games. But since we are talking money here, as a solo dev I pick this over marketing, every single time.

The best technical people may consider the marketing more important than the tech. I'm quite certain I can build a great system for any needs, but no confidence I can sell it enough to support a business.

In fact I'd probably be skeptical of a tech person who greatly emphasizes the challenge of the tech effort over the challenges of the sales effort.

5 years into a bootstrap, yup. this is true.

The good news is, with the dev side covered.. I have an actual product to sell, and have actual paying clients. Without dev I would have nothing to sell (reskinned sugar water I guess?). But I am seeing the limits of what a crappy $35 theme website can sell. Onwards and upwards!

If as developer you find a sales/marketing cofounder that’s really putting in the work, you are golden.

I have partnered a few times with sales guys but they all quickly lost interest once it became clear that they would have to put in a lot of work without any immediate payback.

Any recommendations for how a developer can learn a useful amount of marketing?

If you had someone who could do this marketing, how do you propose to measure/value their contribution to your company?

Note: I used to work with tradeshow/event marketing folks.

Great read. If only finding a co-founder wasn't so hard. And also -- this website is great! Looks like Indie Hackers before it transformed into Product Hunt 2.0.

First, product-marketing is the most important skill in forming a company. You might get lucky without it, but success rate will be low.

I don't agree. Using the argument of 'i need to have a sales guy' is usually just saying your product isn't good enough. Before you downvote me. I have 2 successful companies and many failures. From those failures I I initially had the same statement. Give me a good marketing guy and I will conquer the world. Nonsense. You can do it yourself if the product is good

Yep, the emphasis is on "may". Of note that Marko is very technical himself.

After almost 10 years in tech marketing, here is what I see, especially on the early side of things:

1. A lot of marketers are afraid of tech (yes, even if they've worked in tech for years). Or, they won't take the time to learn it, even at the most fundamental level. It doesn't help that in their always stressful first months there is zero room for this. Everyone wants results, but how do you actually learn the thing you are marketing = at a more fundamental level than "positioning".

It doesn't help that marketing leaders are not focused on this, even when their teams tell them loud and clear that they need a better understanding of the product.

2) Technical cofounders expect marketers to learn--I don't know-- by osmosis ?

IMHO, there should be a product/landscape training geared at the marketer for every new marketer joining. In the early stages, that means the technical cofounder spending a lot of time with their marketing cofounder, and the marketing cofounder taking the time to learn and absorb.

3. Technical cofounders put marketing on the back burner. They want results, but are not willing to put in the time. And of course, they have zero time with all other priorities. But this is the #1 priority!! You should forever be a core marketing team member, and the face of your company. Establish that trust and open the door for your marketers to come to you for hands-on help. Write (content is key), speak, check in.

I highly recommend one of my favorite reads about tech marketing:

http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2010/09/startup-marketing-2nd...

"Here are some things I’d suggest you look for in your first marketing hire.

--wants to know how the product works --is endlessly curious, and isn’t afraid to ask a lot of questions --never has to be told the same thing twice --will stay up all night while the engineering team races to ship --is always thinking about how to simultaneously increase throughput and ROI, while decreasing operating expense (definition of “lean”) --loves customers obsessively, and doesn’t have a cynical bone in their body --knows when to be a bulldog -- is humble – for example, they would clean the bathrooms when they can’t afford a janitor --understands the tradeoffs of time vs. money, and values both someone who is a logical decision maker and isn’t afraid to argue for what’s right, or back down if it’s not worth the fight"

How big a share does the co-founder get? 50%?

Yes, I do.

Marketing is the entire game once you get your product/service to where you believe it should be.

Is there an award for "No shit Sherlock"?

Marketing is one of the most overrated functions. You don’t need a founder whose sole function is to hack marketing. It’s a deadweight. There’s a reason why there are so many unemployed MBAs. You’re much better off finding someone who can do finance/accounting and market as an added bonus. Buying into someone who can only market is same as buying into a ponzi scheme.