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Comment by Camillo | Hacker News Reader

I am surprised at how far along the PR effort is compared to the actual product development. The code seems to be still in its embryonic stage, and most of the features are simply desiderata at this point; yet there is already a catchy name, a snazzy logo, a nice website, and even stickers! And this Hacker News post, of course.

Now, it is possible that this happened by chance: for instance, perhaps the author has a friend who is a graphic designer, and this friend got really excited about the project and put together all of this as a favor. But perhaps it is a deliberate strategy, in which case I wonder: what are the benefits of front-loading the PR work like this? Did it help in securing grants, for instance?

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Substack (yes, that substack) discussed this recently:

> a slick web page - this is very often (but not always) a sign of a library that put all of its time into slick marketing but has overly-broad scope and is very likely to become abandoned

http://www.reddit.com/r/javascript/comments/2378xo/the_best_...

Hi, dat maintainer here. I made the website in a couple of hours (https://github.com/maxogden/dat-data.com/commits/gh-pages) but have spent about 9 months on the code so far (read through e.g. closed issues for an example of the scope there). I also have tried to convey that dat is still pre-alpha and that people shouldn't use it unless they wanna get involved w/ early development, but someone (not me) decided to post it to hacker news nonetheless.

I am sorry but are we looking at the same website. I see two static pages and a logo. Compared to more than 2 months of work that has been put in the code base by what seems like a very talented team, the efforts they have made on the "PR" is minimal (a few hours, probably even less). I think you are being extremely unfair.

DAT is funded by the Knight Foundation: http://www.knightfoundation.org/grants/201346305/

I have opposite problem. My project is almost production ready, but I have not even published performance benchmarks yet :-)

I would find helpful if author would outline how PR is done.

It's helps test the market.

Why spend two months building a product if you don't know it will be well received? To me, this is startup development done right: reducing the unknown, reducing the risk in the most efficient way. Even if it means showing a mockup of your service.

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