What I know so far about marketing a small software company | Hacker News Reader

What I know so far about marketing a small software company

chrisashworth.org

52 pointsmmc8 comments

You have no idea how many times I've seen variations on that sales graph -- a few years in the coding salt mines with gradually increasing but sporadically up and down sales, followed by new version and a step function increase.

Incidentally, contra the article, if you get advertising on the Internet right its a fairly low-stress way to make a lot more money than you would otherwise for a small software company. Sure, Google gets 50 cents on the dollar from my last $1000 of sales every month... still, 95% gross margin exclusive of advertising, you do the math. (This is a complementary strategy to wowing customers and having an unpaid sales force of fans. You now have more customers to wow and more unpaid fans. What is not to like?)

Another note against the article: if you're doing software over the Internet, I beg you, please get over your hangups about SEO. You may think its about being an evil spammer. It isn't. (Well, OK, it doesn't have to be.) You can do great SEO for your business and still touch holy water without suffering 3rd degree burns. (In a nutshell: publish useful stuff, get linked, win. You'll note how this dovetails very nicely with constantly positively surprising people and extracting value out of folks who are unwilling to pay you money.)

I'm still in the salt mines but 3.0 is coming out any week now. I'm cautiously optimistic. ;)

The "Make your mistakes visible" advice seems to have merit based on the offered axion: "Telling the truth even when you don’t have to is good evidence that you’re trustworthy."

But I can't think of any marketeers that have taken this advice. I wonder how effective it would be if Microsoft ran a campaign saying: "although we enabled user account control by default to increase security, we admit that it came across as 'chatty and annoying' for most users."

Such a strategy may be especially useful to reduce impact of a competitor using a mistake in negative marketing.

A friend of mine was talking just this morning about how he had thought about keeping a blog to go along his learning of iPhone development but was worried about being public about basic stuff, thus making him look bad. (like it happened to a certain dev from Pownce) And even though I believe being candid about what you don't know or your mistakes should be generally laudable (because you're not pretending, are just honest about your pitfalls, and willing to work on them), it can very easily backfire.

It's very similar when a company acknowledges their mistakes: some smart people would look at it and praise the company for it, others will just continue the bashing. It can work but it's tricky, and the bigger the company, the trickier it gets.

in a previous post about marketing, i placed a quote from bill hicks that if your in advertising, kill yourself.

i like this guy, though. he's not marketing scum.

this leads to my question: are there terms that distinguish between what this article is promoting, this idea of marketing and the more common ideas: 'public relations'/edward bernays/manipulation? Something other than 'being cool' vs 'being a jerk'?

if not, if both are just 'marketing' - then a terms should be made to distinguish the paradigm difference.

i major in advertising at the university which started the first advertising department of any ;)

much of what he's saying is taught in the books--the emphasis on making a connection. the ironic thing is that 99% of all ads and marketing suck, so you interpret that as a flaw in advertising schools. it's the classic debate of "suits vs poets." suits just want to do something to get your attention, they don't care if it's obtrusive. poets want to go crazy, but stay relevant and humorous. not like a joke, which gets old. but they want you to look at their ad or campaign and ask "how did they do that" or laugh and want to see it again. part of marketing is about making a connection with the person on the other end. it's ironic that the more you try and "define" these silly things, like advertising, the less personable they become. it's like the academy is trying to create some science around what started and flourished as an art form.

there are scum everywhere, especially in advertising. but the top schools don't teach you the crap tactics that car salesmen use. it's just like any profession, you have good ones and bad ones. but yeah, it makes you want to say go kill yourself to the people who put zero effort into the whole thing. it becomes too much about sales and numbers for some people, and that becomes obtrusive and annoying. advertisers almost always get flack because they're seen as carrying out the corporate mission of increasing profits further. but believe me when saying that most companies' best advertising and marketing campaigns were created on the brink of product destruction, not as an attempt to generate enormous masses of profit.

All the lessons sound great, but in lieu of advertising or conferences, how do you make the first 10 sales? The first 100?

Surely it's not sufficient to simply "build it and they will [magically] come" unless your product is incredibly niche and solving a very painful demand.

Is the author a superb personal marketer, or did he literally sell 2 copies of his software to friends and then everything snowballed from there?

The sales graph suggests there's something else going on, and I really want to know what it is!

Without specific anecdotes from his experiences running his company, this reads like a chapter from preachy marketing book.

interesting graph of timeline to profitability. would have been more useful with actual figures, but the trend line is interesting too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com