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Comment by scapecast | Hacker News Reader

What’s the product?

Homechart, the all-in-one household data management solution. Keep your household in sync and have all of your household data in one simple app. https://homechart.app.

Right now it's at this awkward stage where it doesn't make enough for it to be my full time job and I don't have the skills/budget to market it effectively. It keeps growing month over month via organic search traffic though, so I must be doing something right.

(Assuming you would want it to be your full-time job if it could get there): how close is it to making enough for it to be your full-time job? If it's profitable, one way to look at it is that you have an unbounded timeline for learning/figuring out the marketing to grow it. You don't necessarily need to raise a VC round for it.

Indeed, the problem I run into with marketing in general is building a brand is _expensive_. Either you spend a lot of money or a lot of time to build a brand, neither of which I have an excess amount of at the moment. So I'm trying to split the difference by having a marketing firm help me build the brand while I continue building the product.

Ideally I'd have a co-founder or something to take care of this part of the business, fingers crossed that I find someone at startup school speed dating tomorrow!

I don't think you need to build a brand — you say that you're already getting organic search traffic, so you can probably just focus on performance marketing (i.e. figuring out what other things people are already searching for and bidding on those keywords). Building a brand is a roundabout way of doing that (get people to know about your brand, and then hope that they search for your brand to find your product).

I am not a marketer though, so take this comment with a big grain of salt.

I don't think you hit product market fit, though. It should be pretty obvious. If you had, and the market was as big as you say, then people would be flocking in just by word of mouth. I would suggest to iterate on product, talk to your users, get some good metrics on usage, etc. There's great content about that at the YC YouTube channel.

https://youtu.be/C27RVio2rOs https://youtu.be/FBOLk9s9Ci4 https://youtu.be/0LNQxT9LvM0

By this logic, all startups that have achieved PMF have only done so via word of mouth / organic growth. This is false.

There are a class of startups that do grow this way to PMF (Dropbox, slack- typically multiplayer tools). The rest do so via traditional sales and marketing (mulesoft, launchdarkly - enterprise saas).

So many features..can you simplify? Food planning seems like feature creep

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