The $0 Marketing Budget Lie | Hacker News Reader

The $0 Marketing Budget Lie

seanonstartups.co

1 pointares20126 comments

Seems like not picking. By $0 it's of course meant that you're not paying for clicks, salesmen, and paid PR. Marketing is never truly completely free. At the very least it takes time.

I was moved to write this after coming across so many founders that felt like paying for advertising meant they were failures. At the same time, I saw companies spending millions of dollars on advertising while claiming all their growth was organic. It seemed unfair that founders were trying to live up to a false role model.

I'm one of those people who say "$0 marketing spend," and I don't mean that it's bad to spend money on advertising. I've intentionally held back since I wanted to see if there was "natural demand" to validate my product before moving forward.

I'm curious - why hold back? Are you really testing natural demand or are you testing how strong your personal social network is? I fear that many founders aren't willing to do whatever it takes to get to a meaningful number of customers/users and see if "natural demand" takes over. Many products require thousands of customers for any organic growth mechanisms to kick in.

Good question.

One reason is that I am not independently wealthy and haven't raised yet, so I just don't have a lot of disposable income for this. It's still too early to self-fund a large marketing push on its own, though if the graphs continue it might be able to in 6-12 months.

The second reason is that yes, I did want to see if "natural demand" pulled at the product without me doing very much to promote it. I'd like to raise seed money, but I'm not excited about the prospect of raising a lot of other peoples' money and then finding out I have something nobody really wants. Good news is I've gotten enough signal to amount to a "yes, people do seem to want more of this."

Awesome, congrats! Sounds like you are on to something.

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