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Comment by andrewmcwatters | Hacker News Reader

Sounds like the position of a developer who has never had to advertise. Building things doesn't automatically make people gravitate toward them. Believe it or not, you have to go places and promote things.

Yes, talking about or inserting something into conversation is promoting. It's advertising. And guess what--almost none of your users or buyers are going to say a word about your product.

People need to stop believing this stuff and just accept the dirty fact that if you want something to get used, you HAVE to advertise. You HAVE to promote.

Edit: You know what word of mouth is? Worthless for people who don't have eyeballs on a product.

Go read around HN and tell me about a product you just heard about being praised that you don't already know about today that is not already the de facto solution or product in a space.

You know what word of mouth is? Word of mouth is a signal you have already won. It is absolutely nothing for growth.

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Spoken like a marketer / salesperson. I am indeed a developer and run a successful, bootstrapped software business. I agree that you need to initially get the word out that your product exists at all. However, this can be so targeted and the scope so small that I doubt most people would put it in the same category as the advertising practices that many find objectionable.

Once you've got some interest bootstrapped, you CAN in fact rely on unprompted word of mouth for growth. My users and buyers spread the word about my product simply because they find it useful. Many bring it to their new employer when they switch jobs.

So no, I disagree with the blanket position that you have to advertise -- especially in the intrusive fashion that's the subject of the article -- to get people to use your product. (Though I don't dispute that doing so can be a good shortcut.)

But all that is irrelevant to my claim above: my position is simply that a dearth of advertising options is what drives product innovation, by necessity. And hence, limiting advertising is likely to actually be good for consumers.

Many products require massive investment to get to the point of being able to sell a product. Waiting around for word of mouth means your debt will overwhelm the business.

Bootstrapping only works if you haven't taken on much debt to finance the development and manufacturing of the product. Software can be developed with very little debt (which is what I did).

So, then... why not leave those product categories to bigcorps who can reinvest their existing treasury by chasing such risks?

We don't expect a small company to be able to make a Hollywood movie, or a new medicine... and that's just fine, isn't it?

I wonder if there are generalities about the products that "require" advertising and those that don't. Perhaps we would find that, on the balance, those products are not worth their externalized costs.

My project (a new kind of data management system designed to replace file systems and relational databases) is a bootstrapped project. I self funded it, but that means it has taken several years to get it to its current state. There are many features still on the TODO list, but it can do some amazing things so far. The 'if you build it, they will come' is a great movie line, but rarely works in business.

It is difficult to raise awareness for it. Newsletters, blogs, demo videos, presenting at conferences, etc. are all means for trying to spread the word. I have considered taking out some paid advertisements, but you wonder if anyone but bots will actually see them.

> You know what word of mouth is? Worthless for people who don't have eyeballs on a product.

As a customer, I'm tired of hearing this excuse. I get wowed by free, open-source software dozens of times a week. You want me to put eyes on your product? Wow me! I'm tired of "enterprise-grade fart apps" and "B2C photo storage" garbage getting touted as life-changing or impressive technology. If you want to compete, do something impressive. If you want people to look fondly upon your product, consider giving back to the community instead of paying to become their adversary.

And guess who funds most development for the free open source software you use?

Given that most of the software I use consists very clearly of one-man passion projects where the author struggles to support themselves: nobody. (Remember OpenSSL?)

Most software you use including your web browser? Your operating system?

Yes, most software. A piece of software being bigger or doing more things, does not make said piece of software count more. A program is a program; it's something you learn how to use separately, download/update separately; something which is separate from a project-maintainership and bug-filing point-of-view; etc.

I use four big fat codebases (browser, OS, etc); maybe 10 decently-sized language runtimes like the JVM; and then 800+ rinky-dink CLI utilities. Half of which came from a Github Gist, or which I had to compile from source from a repo containing just some bare source files and no documentation. Yet many of these little CLI utilities individually take up just as much mental space as my browser or OS does; and I get just as much use out of them professionally as I do my browser or OS. (In fact often more, because many of these utilities are multi-platform, such that I use them regardless of which browser or OS I happen to be using.)

Individuals do, clearly. I don't use Google-funded malware. I suppose the Linux kernel may qualify, but plenty of people in real industries also work on that.

From what I've seen, github sponsors, patreon, donations, or nobody.

> You know what word of mouth is? [...] It is absolutely nothing for growth.

When I joined the company some years ago, we were the 5th largest in our sector. We since grew to 2nd largest using almost entirely word of mouth for sales. We didn't have any dedicated sales people, and did hardly any advertising.

Instead, users would call friends in the industry and tell them to get our software. If they switched jobs they'd persuade their new boss to get our software.

Since reaching #2 spot we got some sales and marketing people, and we're now at the top.

So while I'll disagree that word of mouth can't be used for growth, I've seen first hand how good sales and marketing can put you on a steeper curve.

> Go read around HN and tell me about a product you just heard about being praised that you don't already know about today that is not already the de facto solution or product in a space.

Easy. This morning in the "Ask HN: So you moved off Heroku, where did you go?" thread I saw multiple users mentioning a open source project I have never heard of but seemed very close to what i was looking for. I have it now running since 12 hours and I already recommended a friend to check it out.

I reckon about 70% of things I use are from recommendations of people (but usually not from the internet). From what command-line shell I use to what music I listen to.

> You know what word of mouth is? [...] It is absolutely nothing for growth.

I don't recall seeing TikTok billboards or banner ads.

I've never seen a Tesla ad.

Did Facebook advertise? Instagram?

GMail throttled demand with limited invitations.

Until this week you had to apply to get a Dall-E login. Heard of it?

Rolls-Royce and Tupperware do not advertise.

I'm not saying advertising isn't important for products. But it's easy to find enormously-grown counterexamples to your blanket claim.

TikTok advertised on Facebook.

Tesla used to run billboards in LA and SF and paid influencers to shill their cars. They still market quite heavily today though not through billboards (AI Day is a marketing event.)

GMails invitation system was it's marketing, back in the day when people were excited about Google products.

Rolls Royce sponsors athletes, which is considered marketing. They also bring cars to auto shows and to various events targeted to the luxury crowd.

Tupperware's original business model was literally 100% about marketing. Most people would call it a multi level marketing scheme today.

Well there is now a massive group of people that never sees online advertising anymore. Due to adblockers and piholes. Thanks Raymond Hill <3

For me the only advertising I see is on billboards because I never watch live TV either (and haven't for years). And many products are way too niche to advertise that way.

This group will get ever larger because it's just a great thing to live in an advertising-free world. If your business can't cope with it I would suggest making that a priority to adjust to :)

Food for thought: The user you're responding to is the founder of Reviewable. I use his product and found it through word of mouth. It is not the de facto solution in the space.

Now compare the revenues and profits of his company to the largest advertisers in the US…

https://www.statista.com/statistics/286448/largest-global-ad...

It's almost as if there's more to life than maximizing revenues and profits.

I’ve never heard of it.

I'm not seeing how it's relevant whether or not the word of mouth of this particular product has reached you.

You were telling someone that he's out of touch for thinking that he can sell a product on word of mouth alone. I'm providing evidence that he can sell a product through word of mouth because I bought his product based on word of mouth.

Whether or not you've also heard of his product is irrelevant. There's a near infinite number of successful products in the world that you've never heard of, so you being unaware of a particular product does not indicate anything about whether that product is successful.

> Building things doesn't automatically make people gravitate toward them.

No, but the two barber-shops in towns spending $X each on net-even advertising is a net-negative for me, because the only thing I get out of it is a higher bill when I cut my hair.

Some advertisement creates new markets. Some is a negative-sum game. None of it can be assumed to be honest, because of the obvious profit motive involved.

> None of it can be assumed to be honest

Who do you assume to be honest? The politician wanting your vote? The prospective employee telling you about his job skills? The public schools telling you they do a great job? Dr. Fauci? The customer who tells you "the check is in the mail"?

Honesty is a spectrum, and someone being paid to shill should, all else being equal, be met with more skepticism than someone who isn't.

You can get all philosophical and start splitting hairs about what we can truly know, but whatever it is, I doubt I'll find it in an ad.

There's a lot more than just getting paid that motivates people to shade the truth.

You are begging the question, in the logical fallacy sense. You have to advertise and promote because advertising has been allowed to grow unbounded like a cancer and drown out everything else. It's a tragedy of the commons.

If advertising were toned down a couple orders of magnitude, word of mouth might actually get more traction.

While that's obviously true, I'm not sure it's some sort of optimum state. I think if you're in the ocean, it is understandable that you would keep treading water to stop yourself from drowning, but perhaps a better solution is to look for ways to leave the ocean. I'm entirely unconvinced that this isn't a local maximum that we're stuck in.

Even if I leave room that advertising (and capitalism) is the only stable system, that doesn't mean it can't be limited and restricted for better outcomes for people on the whole.

This is complete and utter BS. 100%.

I get if you're trying to starve for a buck out here in a crowded space like tech, but on the consumer side of things I have never put deep use in any product that was marketed (i.e. someone paid for it to get to my eyeballs.)

It may be true that for a bunch of you to make money, you need to put money in marketing. But for us who want good products, marketing mostly only gets in our way. Good products really do sell themselves with word of mouth, or me actively seeking out good things.

Look at Rockstar's Red Dead 2. Cost about $540 million to produce. Split almost down the middle for advertising and development costs. For every dollar spent on dev, a dollar was spent on advertising.

It's now one of the most successful games ever made. The advertising did nothing to hurt innovation, and in fact proved Rockstar's hypothesis that the market is ready for this kind of innovation, but needs to be sold on the idea.

The boundary between useful advertising and word of mouth is exceedingly thin and contextual. When Uber turned off $100m of advertising and found no meaningful change to its installation growth, had it already won? Clearly not then and not now; it's barely posted an operating profit and it still a couple billion away from positive net income. Rather, it's in a duopoly in the US and an oligopoly in some other markets and facing a pretty gnarly advertise (defect) or not (cooperate) prisoner's dilemma. Word-of-mouth can be a form of promotion. Most products have obvious entry pathways which smart and experienced marketers will readily identify; few of these are display ads, fewer still are billboards.

The space of advertising decisions is high-dimensional and dependent on too many factors to succumb to generalization. Many awesome businesses have thrived without it; others would've starved without it.

>Uber turned off $100m of advertising and found no meaningful change to its installation growth

This is misleading. Ad networks were defrauding Uber by generating fake clicks so such that organic installs of Uber would be attributed to these ad networks despite the install not being from an ad.

The problem was the ad networks and not advertising itself.

I'm not a parasite, so telling people about something I did by myself is fine, and I'm not asking for money anyway.

> is promoting. It's advertising

Those two notions aren’t the same, nor interchangeable. Advertising is about pushing something to a public and expanding the attention the product receives. “ There's no such thing as bad publicity” is advertising.

Promoting is about making a product’s (alleged)merits better known and enticing people to use said product for their benefit.

As a society, we want promotion, not advertisement.

Not all advertising is the same. Yes every product needs to promote itself, but there are countless organic ways to do so, most of them being industry dependent. How many of the most popular tech products today got to where they are because they put up billboards in the middle of cities?

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EYthp3TU0AYgbty.jpg

Would you be in favor of, in principle, obtaining consent from the people you market to? If what you say is true (people want to learn about new products) then surely most people would consent to these promotional messages.

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