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Comment by endymi0n | Hacker News Reader

To paraphrase my brilliant cofounder, mentor and tough sparring partner:

"The biggest lie you techies tell to yourselves is 'Build it and they will come'. Nope. Nobody ever comes by. I've beaten competitors with the better product again and again. Know why? Because marketing builds growth, growth builds revenue and revenue enables hiring brilliant people to fix your product, all the while the brilliant product people are still waiting for customers."

Let's say I've have been having kicked my ass more than I can count on some beliefs I've had, but I yet have to regret working with him.

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This also works for non-startup stuff. Every new Patreon supporter, every album sale came from talking about it on Twitter or Mastodon. A few have come by way of HN.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30343207.

(There's nothing wrong with it, the subthread just ended up veering offtopic.)

"Build it and they come" works, for example Hotmail and Google did not invest into marketing initially. But it works in non saturated market with a few players.

Wasn't there a waiting list for Hotmail/Gmail in the beginning?

Gmail users initially had to be invited by existing gmail users.

That in itself is marketing.

They didn't need to; Hotmail offered free e-mail accounts which was unheard of at the time; Gmail went viral for offering 1GB of storage which was unheard of at the time. The latter also had scarcity with its invite system, I'm not sure if that helped make it more popular or not. Definitely helped prevent it from collapsing under its own success though.

Anyway, I think any service now that shows up offering something used by many that is now paid for free will become popular on its own.

Gmail didn't just offer 1GB, it also offered the ability to search through emails which I don't think any free service allowed you to at the time

In 2004 that was pretty amazing

Yahoo had search. The Gmail one worked a bit better, mostly because you could automatically tag things, but it was not unheard of.

That 1GB storage comes at a cost, which is basically a marketing cost. You give something away for free, in the hope it will generate word-of-mouth marketing. That free thing you're giving away is coming out of your marketing budget.

Gmail had plenty of marketing when it started: Both the '1 GB account' and the "Search don't Sort" snippet where heavily pushed through several marketing channels at the time (paid articles, Google search homepage, among others). Not all marketing is "ad banners". For example, all those Businesswire articles are pure marketing and advertising.

The killer feature was archive.

Growth was viral. Only cool people had Gmail.

I'm too young to remember Hotmail launch but GMAIL did market. Their marketing investments were

1. Free Storage an order of magnitude larger that anything anyone provided at that time which was an unbeatable proposition. I'd say they ate the costs of storage as marketing investment.

2. Viral invitation format -> exclusively perception

> Free Storage an order of magnitude larger that anything anyone provided at that time which was an unbeatable proposition

Gmail's free storage was two orders of magnitude better than the competition. Nearly three orders of magnitude bigger than Hotmail. They launched with a gigabyte against Hotmail's 2 MB and Yahoo's 6 MB.

We're so used to not worrying about email storage anymore that it's easy to forget just how small they used to be.

Playing the lottery works too. Evidence: I see lottery winners. Therefore it must be a good business plan.

Hotmail did a fair amount of commercials https://youtu.be/IQRZcfAwn0g

Also if I remember correctly every email sent from an Hotmail address had something like "this email was sent with Hotmail" at the bottom.

Also email services advertise themselves in the email address!

I was quite young and things seemed shinier when I was young, so take this with a grain of salt. But I remember google differently. Gmail invites were a big deal, even amongst less technical people. Adding that sense of exclusivity to something they would use to advertise to us was remarkably smart.

In marketing there’s owned media, earned media, and paid media.

Google initially focused on the first two. They promoted new products like Gmail or Chrome on their search home page, and in the press. It worked well for them because they were already a newsworthy company with a lot of web traffic.

Today, they work quite hard at all three.

Like another poster said, Hotmail offered free email accounts. Google offered 1GB of storage. Both of those things are "marketing".

Guys, you learned nothing ! You are the top comment on HN, you should share the link to your project :)

Remember the ABCs

A - Always

B - Be

C - Selling

That is, seize the opportunities of presenting your work and your company.

I'll be that guy. Actually it's Always Be Closing.

Obligatory Glenngary Glen Ross scene.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7y6EOGY87U&t=104s

Watch it from the beginning, its great

Yes ;) But in the context, selling makes more sense than closing.

It actually depends on if you are using ecclesiastical marketing mnemonics (soft c like in contemporary Italian marketing) or reconstructed classical marketing mnemonics (hard c).

Esoteric Latin joke? HN rules.

I find hard c marketing is still more effective in US post/pandemic economy.

Latin makes for some exceptionally esoteric jokes. This, to date, ranks among the funniest shit I have seen on the Internet: https://imgur.com/pztVEyh

I'm sure there are dozens of people who agree.

Of course, but it’s funnier and more memorable when it’s wrong.

Actually, it’s “Always be cobbling.”

https://youtu.be/J_vSirIJEsY

Depends on your product. If you're radio shack, sure, always be closing. If you're selling me an essential component of my business, and I expect to have a long term relationship with you... concentrate on the relationship and trust.

I worked for a small startup that won a HUGE contract because the big guy stopped supporting them to their satisfaction. We twisted over backwards to support their needs and they liked that.

Agreed with the sentiment that there are different kinds of clients/opportunities and sales cycles. However the idea specifically in ABC is the 'close'. 'Closing' is the act of securing payment from an entity. I've seen a lot of 'sales guys' who talk about how hard they're selling. But ultimately getting the money into your bank account is the real goal. Everything else is derivative.

Loosely quoting Eli Goldratt, "Until the money is in your bank account and there is no possibility of having to refund it to the customer, you have not made the sale."

That's literally a plot point in Glengarry Glen Ross. Al Pacino made a sale the night before, but the buyer gets cold feet and wants to back out!

Hah, we're living that right now. Big guy got bought, raised prices and removed features. Previously happy customers start looking around, find us (and others, of course).

Over the top support and flexibility are things smallcos can offer to outcompete bigcos with more $$$ and people.

It's a usual joke, based on the fact that "always be closing" is horrible advice.

It's not. It's a reminder that all of your sales and marketing efforts are wasted if you're not actually pushing towards a sale. Calls to action, follow ups, using funnels—all of these are things that increase an individual's likelihood to close. That's "ABC".

Try to close too early and any sensible customer will run away and never talk to you again.

"Always" be closing includes too early as well as too late, after the client has run away and you will gain nothing except to alienate him further.

Yes, a three-letter acronym is incapable of expressing every nuance of a complex interpersonal dance. ABC is about sales and marketing driving towards the close. It doesn't mean you turn a cold call into "Hi, my name is James, buy my product. This is what it does. Buy it. Do you want to know more? Buy it first."

It's "closing" because, from memory, they're selling junk real estate. In the US, the end of a real estate transaction is called closing, beyond which it's (mostly) irrevocable.

Hence Baldwin is effectively saying "get to the end of the transaction."

Noo! And it's too late to edit the comment.

https://rysolv.com/

I've added it for you. Let me know at hn@ycombinator.com if you changed your mind.

Building MVP and finding and tuning your market fit early - those Lean Startup ideas were popular here 10 years ago. The money flood of the recent years seems to allow that 'Build it and they will come' as well as just bulldozing your way into market.

Nah there's more nuance to it than that - it's more that customers expect a better featured solution before buying now.

It's still an MVP, but the goalposts have shifted as more folks put up "drop your email here if you're interested in uber for dogs!" type pages.

Is the idea that the product (once it's caught up) will be as good or better (and/or at least reach more people) than the original? Or is he OK with people being worse off than if your company never existed and the better product got to take the lead?

Better is a 100% subjective term and there's a huge discrepancy between what engineers believe is a better product and what users/customers do. Our product was and still is technically inferior to competition but we still have an NPS of 9 and are extremely sticky, why? Because of our amazing sales, marketing and customer success teams who've built excellent relationship with the customers.

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