Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by patio11 | Hacker News Reader

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A lot of software developers have critical priority inversion, focusing on initiatives which will almost never add value. Without specific reference to where Fogbugz was back in the day, I think a lot of software developers often prioritize improving the product when that should not be #1 on their list with where their business is right now.

In particular, if you have a working product which is salable, and you have a website which is getting 5 visitors a day, put down the IDE and start marketing. Better mousetraps do not automatically collect more mice -- you need to locate the mice, preferably a bunch of ones which enjoy eating whatever your bait is, and then put the mousetrap by them.

(There are circumstances in which development supports marketing -- working on your viral loop for certain species of web apps, or adding something which greatly improves your perceived value in your target market. Don't spend three months to add another bullet point to a web page nobody reads, though.)

Of course, you have to do some marketing. But I think that if you're investing time in marketing to be able to survive, then you're doing something wrong ... you either chose the wrong market, or your product is not good enough.

From my experience, improving your product (which is not equal to adding more features) is the best way to get new customers. That's because marketing that's not properly targeted is as good as no marketing, and let's face it ... technically inclined people suck at it. Even Spolsky, which is what I call a marketing drone, in his interview on "Founders at Work" confessed that they got more customers from incremental improvements than through marketing plots.

On the contrary, I think the main problem of software developers is that we rarely finish what we start.

Marketing is an engineering process. Technically inclined people do not have to suck at it. To the extent that many do, it is largely because they've been taught to undervalue its importance, treat it as an afterthought, and dismiss properly conducted marketing as something which is for weak and stupid people.

> dismiss properly conducted marketing as something which is for weak and stupid people.

I didn't say that. I think it's dismissed more because the majority of marketing campaigns send out a dishonest message, and because of that customers are getting more and more insensitive to such campaigns.

And I also don't think it is an engineering process in the traditional way (although it's fashionable for everything that has a feedback loop to be called engineering these days). Marketing is more about social interactions, being more inline with humanities / social sciences ... and it takes a certain kind of skill-set to be good at it, and I've seen too few technical people being good at it.

You're thinking of advertising rather than marketing as a whole.

Think of marketing as the social component of design. You wouldn't start coding an application before you had at least a rough design of what its functionality would be, right? So why would you start designing a product before you identified who is going to use it and what they will be using it for? Marketing answers those questions.

In rough, marketing identifies your market: Who will be using your product and why. Your application / business is then built using that knowledge.

"From my experience, improving your product (which is not equal to adding more features) is the best way to get new customers"

How can customers find your product and understand what it does if you build stuff and don't market it?

> How can customers find your product and understand what it does if you build stuff and don't market it?

I already said that ... you have to do some marketing, but you shouldn't depend on investing marketing resources for survival. That's a big difference. Good products are their own marketing, and you can rely on a networking effect ... people usually tell their friends when they've found something hot.

And I'm not even talking about viral web 2.0 apps here ... I have a management app specific to pharmacy-shops (doing a couple of crazy stuff others haven't thought about) and it sells itself (I only had to do marketing for the initial 5 sells or so, and now after 4 months I have 30 customers ... which for the price I'm charging is really good).

1. You assume customers talk. Bad assumption in many, many markets. Why do you think chasm tells you to choose a niche with a network effect? Most markets aren't like this.

2. Network effects have specific rules to be useful. Most businesses can't take advantage of them, especially if they are charging money.

3. 5->30 is not a good basis to judge this on. You are still in the early adopter phase, and luckily for you this market must have a high word of mouth quotient.

The problem with just assuming things is that it stops you from looking objectively at your market, and you end up relying on luck. Most businesses I know want a repeatable sales process, not one based on faith.

It's not that easy. If you do marketing and other "business" type stuff, your body will demand some sanity and just good ole programming. I can completely understand people being "sidetracked" implementing novelty code they will never need. They're not wasting time, they're recharging their batteries: sometimes you just want to work on something tangible, verifiable, and get a quick satisfaction fix seeing it working.

Lately, most of my work is CSS, input validation, architecturing URLs, and reading as many web design "top 20" blog posts shopping for UI elements. Pathetic. However, between doing that, I have also written a completely unnecessary server-farm management package for my site, completely with load-balancing, health monitoring, backup, change propagation, hot configuration and other stuff I probably would never need (let's just say that if I ever needed it, I would also need a physical server rack.)

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