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Comment by themanmaran | Hacker News Reader

Marketing.

The one thing I pushed off for as long as possible. Because it was always easier to build more, than it was to go into marketing / sales.

No clever tricks, or growth hacks. Me and my cofounders just connected with everyone we could on LinkedIn, twitter, discord, etc. and talked to people about the product: https://rysolv.com/.

In fact, part of the reason we delayed marketing was looking for some clever way to 10x, or make it go viral. A big motivator was Paul Graham's "do things that don't scale" post [1]. So we just sat down and talked to people.

[1] http://paulgraham.com/ds.html

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I kinda expected this as the top comment. It's just so simple stupid yet it's a wonder that a lot of people discover it the hard way and most still haven't.

I think it just comes down to fear of rejection in the end. Making a product, adding features, working on things and even showing your "cool" demo to friends isn't same as asking strangers for money.. because people can say a million nice things about what you have to offer until you ask them to put in their credit card number. Then the you get to know what they really think.

> a lot of people discover it the hard way and most still haven't

Some of it may be "morality" component, for lack of a better word. Some people want the world to be one where people and ideas advance on merit rather than via popularity or "knowing the right people", and act upon that hope subconsciously or as a justification for avoiding unfamiliar risk.

I'd wager it's also a bit more common among software developers.

Every job sooner or later is a sales job. If we're not teaching this in the education system, I'd argue we're doing a poor job of teaching morals in the education system - although the American system - at least in the better schools - does a much better job of this than systems in Asia.

Agreed. Life in general is sales. Job interview? Sales. First date? Sales. Sales is more than "Here's my product/service. Give me money". It's the art of getting someone to do what you want. I can only speak to American culture, but I feel like most people feel icky about that because the first thought that comes to their mind is the car dealership guy that's trying to sell you garbage like gap insurance that you don't need. Kind of like networking, it feels by definition manipulative when it doesn't have to be.

I agree with everything except the 'first date'. I'm trying to find a person I'm compatible with, and who I can trust completely with who I am. Rough edges and all. I would much rather torpedo date 1 or 2 with a person I'm not compatible with than string things along for a couple of months and break up when she suddenly discovers those rough edges. This has not been a recipe for quantity, I'm hoping it's one for quality.

That's still sales. People focus on "bad" sales, but "good" sales is about being honest about the capabilities of your offering and finding people who honestly need it. It's a bad practice long-term (both in business sales and dating sales) to be over-focused on short-term closing and not focused enough on long-term satisfaction.

Then where is the threshold for 'sales'?

As in, what is "sales"? It's the presentation of that offer. That might be an offer for a product, for companionship, for an intimate coupling. All of those are a form of sales.

> Life in general is sales

Life in a society... where people are divorced from all material realities and only interface with the social... but that's not life in general. There are, for example, wars.

But then resolution of the conflict is sales.

Wars don't end when people put down the guns, it's when people can reconcile their differences.

War probably wasn't the best example because, although I wasn't thinking of it, there's still that social element.

My point is that war involves people directly interacting with physical reality in ways that aren't mediated socially. Modern high tech people live in a world where popular illusions and perception are much more important than gravity and inertia, but reality still exists somewhere, and sometimes it matters.

I agree that "life is sales". But I disagree with the "it's the art of getting someone to do what you want". I'd argue seeing it that way is THE problem and the reason why people find it icky. Sales is about helping people. About finding people's pain and fixing it. Even if you cannot fix it you still might have helped them - maybe now they understand their pain better. Maybe they didn't even know it existed.

It's common everywhere, I think. There's just a general, pervasive myth around "discovery". Famous artists, great products, even people with enviable romantic situations—most folks think these things were just "discovered". They don't see the hours of practice, the thousands of phone calls, or the hundreds of failed pick-ups in the process.

Seneca once said "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." Too many people focus on the preparation and not nearly enough on increasing the likelihood of opportunity.

I think it's because most tech/product people incorrectly assume that other people also search for the best products to solve their problems

Very true. There is a huge disconnect between what people say and what they do. Especially when they say "I would definitely pay for that"!

My CEO spends half of his time acting as a sales rep, writing blogs, hosting workshops, et cetera. Honestly this would overwhelm me after a while and I'm glad he's there to do the job.

In the space we[1] operate, there's no shortage of competitors. Over the years, I've seen that those who can unlock marketing see a lot more success, even with a shittier product.

As a developer-turned-founder, a lot of marketing feels sleazy. Was it always this way? So much link-bait, fluffy posts that are really big ads, shallow content just for SEO, upvoting-rings on platforms, etc. There's so few who seem to put in an honest effort. I'm sure part of this is because Google is letting all this low quality stuff rank.

From day one, we've focused on honestly taking care of customers. Pushing customer visible bugs to the top of the list, following up when requested features are released, reprioritizing the roadmap to accommodate growing pain points, etc. It has has paid dividends over the years in the form of very strong referrals. Which are effectively pre-sold trials.

[1] https://enchant.com

For every one of these stories though, is there a 'we pushed too hard too soon, the product wasn't ready, people were already turned off it by the time it was'?

But aren't there red flags?

How can you push too hard too soon, if people were turned off by the product?

Unless you're burning budget in an unsustainable manner... but that's not what OP said.

What I mean is if it's not ready enough, not a good MVP essentially, and then people who see it in that stage might not be inclined to try it again later when you're still pushing it but it is more developed enough now.

I get your point and provided a couple of examples of failed products. But there’s always another path. Depending on your personality, one approach is to take the people who complain and level with them. Yeah, this product sucks. It’s brand new. But does the problem exist? Is it important enough to you to want to solve?

If so, how can the founding team save the relationship? If someone is motivated enough to tell you your product sucks, they’re potentially great beta users!!

The thing is, if your market is so small that you can’t burn out a few people on your product and still have potential customers, you’ve already lost.

Maybe the first 10 will leave while you figure out where to go. That sucks, but it’s fine.

Coca-Cola’s New Coke may be an example of this, though New Coke may have actually been the best marketing campaign possible for Coke Classic.

Crystal Pepsi was another example. Budgets couldn’t overcome the fact it tasted like nutmeg.

Modern era, I worked for a startup that got national media coverage before it was ready. I’m not convinced it was the right product and I know the founder could have spent way more time talking to customers in the ideation stage. But national media coverage created some bad months. I remember a several week stretch with more than 100 support requests in queue.

Fun times, in the Dwarf Fortress sense of the term.

You don't need to start with a $1M+ Super Bowl Ad. Find 10 people, call them, learn what they need, educate them about your offer, take their feedback back to your product. The earlier you can start that process the better, without exception.

I'm not sure 'call 10 people' is the up-thread intended marketing push though? Maybe it is, but certainly not the way I read it (and hence framed my response).

It's a start. You start with 10 calls. You learn from them and build an email to send to 100 people. You book more calls and then take the feedback and put it into a social media post and get 1000 more. Then you take what you learn there and turn it into an ad to show to 10K sets of eyeballs. The up-thread focus is on starting this process early.

> For every one of these stories though, is there a 'we pushed too hard too soon, the product wasn't ready, people were already turned off it by the time it was'?

In gaming industry you can't swing a dead cat without hitting one. Anthem, Marvel Avengers, Fallout 76, that game with 2042 at the end, Amiga CD32, Ouya. A lot of games as a service(and for most of them you pay upfront and afterwards). Everything is so much hyped to be the best thing since sliced bread.

This is the whole point. You go out there and get lambasted by customers so you know what to improve upon. If you sit in the shadows tinkering until its 'perfect,' it will only be perfect to you. Whereas if you are iterating against customer and stakeholder feedback, you will end up with a refined product fit for market that may even not look like what you initially expected the perfect product to look like.

Yeah that's the lean startup model. You intentionally find people who are early adopters and offer to bring them into the beta to improve the software. Its a win win situation because the feedback gives them what they want, and gives you a marketable product.

There is always a risk that the market won't like it. If you want a steady paycheque then entrepreneurship isn't for you (or isn't for you right now).

That may be true for massive companies like Google with huge exposure. But if you are some startup no-one has heard of then you are going to be doing really well if 0.1% of your potential market has even heard of you in the first year, let alone tried your product.

Another thing Paul Graham wrote:

> Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it.

http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

I worked at a startup whose product wasn’t that great but the CEO aggressively networked and marketed and he made it work. It’s so important.

I agree 100%. I think from an investment perspective putting most of your time into marketing yields the highest return.

My biggest struggle so far is: How do I find those people to "sit and talk" to? Any advice on that?

By the way, I just learned the ABC rule in this thread (Always Be Selling) :)

So, you should go ahead and subscribe to my newsletter. It's pretty good:

https://www.shoto.io

No ABC thread is complete without this joke from my grade 8 science teacher.

What did one AAA battery say to the other?? Always be celling.

I'll be honest, I don't have a ton of experience when it comes to finding investors, and other early stage enablers. However, when it comes to your market, I think the question is better asked, who is your audience?

Who do you expect to use this product day in and day out? And then make it even smaller and go look for those people on LinkedIn, Reddit, HackerNews, Twitter, etc.

Then just hit them up. You don't have to be selling necessarily, you can simply be asking about the problems they might have or looking for feedback on something.

Obviously this depends a lot on B2C or B2B, but there exists a community of people somewhere with the problem you're trying to solve or a company which is kind of a community :D.

If you can't find an audience, then I think that also answers your question.

Thanks!

My approach has been to put out something as early as possible and then be very responsive when people ask questions, make suggestions or report bugs. And this has resulted in lots of useful feedback for all 3 products I have developed. It takes time though and you have to go the extra file with support.

I could not agree more. I still find it difficult to talk about me providing services to others. I find it difficult, but once I do the pipeline opens up.

I was actually overwhelmed last year (my first as a freelancer on the side) and will scale back a bit to strengthen the foundations a bit better this year - but actually talking to people and when doing so always trying to create a little bit of value for them (and be it by 'oh now you mention that you need x, Paul over there is great and is actually looking for a way to sell x).

I am part of a business network and currently am working on providing a free short workshop for the people with online shops in basics about usability and conversion optimization. It will already provide them with the tools to make their shops better and also act as a marketing tool for deeper work on that topic with them (or a few of them).

And in parallel, as I am compiling the materials nonetheless I also will create additional ways to use the content in blog posts, Instagram and by creating checklists for others as a way to build an email list.

So this next to a day job and client work will probably be enough for me this year in marketing and business development work.

Let's see what comes of it.

[Edit typo]

I'm a solo developer with little marketing knowledge with a few hundred dollars to burn each month, where and how do I spend advertising money?

It strikes me as imprudent to split it between Google, FB, and Twitter ads when I don't know what I'm doing.

I would say, don't spend a dime before you read at least one marketing book. I'm now reading "Marketing Made Simple" and so far it's very insightful.

I am not an expert, but any advertising >>> no advertising. I would go with your first instincts, slap some cash down in a few different places, and start refining later.

he's not talking about ADVERTISING. You need to reach out to people yourself, cold email, tell them you have a product that does XYZ and think it might solve their problems.

As with everything to do with marketing, the answer is 'it depends'. Not much point in putting ads for an enterprise ERP system on FB.

Google Ads is complicated. Avoid it unless you are prepared to put in serious time learning how it works.

I tried Twitter ads a few years ago. Their demographics (knowledge of their customers are) was total garbage. Waste of money.

In general, do lots of small experiments and measure the results (clickthroughs, time on page, sign ups etc). If you can't measure anything meaningful, think carefully before handing over any cash.

I’m glad to see how thinking has evolved on this on HN over the last couple of years.

If you’d have mentioned marketing a couple of years ago, someone would have shared the Bill Hicks post by now.

Marketing (not just advertising) really is an essential part of building product as it forces you to confront who might actually want the product and how you best go about talking to them and finding them.

Neat story about Bill Hicks and marketing. When he was sick but still working, he appeared on the David Letterman show. At that point, he was something of a regular on David Letterman.

He did a routine with a joke that worried Letterman, so Letterman made sure the segment didn’t air. In response, Bill Hicks went on public access television - there’s a really good show from Austin on YouTube - and used that as part of his own pitch.

A number of years later, after Bill Hicks died, David Letterman had Bill Hicks’ mom on his show. They talked about Bill Hicks and aired the routine. Bill Hicks’ impression of his parents was remarkably good.

I’ll share links then make my overwhelming point:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KHbHYqfYnhg

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=B1NTmnG0hmA

When I watch Bill Hicks on marketing, I take it as being about ethics. We don’t have to monetize every little thing. And we don’t have to do awful things for pay.

There's no doubt that Letterman has had a large ego at times and acted poorly towards people. But he does contrition and humbleness so well, it's a major reason I've watched more than a few My Next Guest...

Thanks for posting those.

Damn, it’s the first time I bump into this article. Thanks for the share!

How do you do marketing when the target demographic uses adblocking?

marketing > advertising

Marketing is way more than advertising. It can be blogs (technical or general), SEO (getting your content to the top of relevant search pages), conference attendance, social media work (e.g. posting here :P ), running webinars and more...

Tried to register on rysolv with my github account, but it failed, I see animation indicating working progress, but it never finishes. It has authorised on github successfully.

Any recommendations on good books for marketing?

Exactly. If you are coding, you are losing.

+1 for successfully marketing on HN.

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