Not at all. I'm not very good at it, but I really like the process of marketing. It's like a fun puzzle to figure out ways for people to find out about/buy the things I build.
Ask HN: Do You Despise Marketing?
11–20 of 42 posts
Re: Ask HN: Do You Despise Marketing?
#12It is a category of false information. I block it.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Despise Marketing?
#13Given the replies I think it would be wise to instead perhaps use a different term to distinguish it from the sort of area bill hicks was known to loathe. A term i used to see used back in the day was 'shameless self promotion'.
Personally, 'despise' is perfectly descriptive. Fortunately I've always done dev-related stuff as a tinkerer's hobby, unfortunately my discomfort at shameless self-promotion will likely mean I won't be quitting my day job anytime soon.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Despise Marketing?
#14I despised it because I sucked at it but as a SAAS founder, I realize that without good marketing, business will die. So I stopped hating it and am in a mission to take it head on which means learn, learn, learn.
Ok, no one wants pushy newsletters, influences and all that crap. But if done right, they also work to an extent. However, the most critical aspects of marketing are things like copywriting, landing pages (in SAAS world), good organic content that is researched and is specifically for your target audience (good SEO) etc.
If you are a founder, you cannot leave it all to pros especially early on. You need to learn some basics and go from there. I was on the hunt for that special digital marketing massiah for my company for a while when I finally realized that I need to learn more first before I go find that magical person.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Despise Marketing?
#15If we didn’t have things like copy writing, influencers, and landing pages, we’d be worse off. I empathize that marketing can sometimes feel borderline manipulation but ultimately the market will test you and your product to see if it lives up to what’s said/written. if we didn’t have marketing, we’d have a discoverability problem for which alternative solutions would probably have the same issues as marketing.
i mulled over this for a minute because i can't really find fault with your comment, but at the same time i look at the state of things and it seems far from ideal, or even acceptable.
my guess is there's a factor that affects the system you described: centralization. it's something i think about alot when i sort of try to look back and remember how i stayed on top of so much content back in the pre-web-2.0 times. i remember something like you describe - lotta reading copy, sure, and landing pages definitely, but the huge difference in my mind is how 'influencers' were more of a complex ecosystem of people who just sort of passed interesting links to other people. i dunno.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Despise Marketing?
#16I dislike that people think that landing pages and good copy == marketing. Those are tools that sometimes apply to good marketing, but marketing itself is just getting the right message to the right people. That can be honest communication, just saying that you have a product that solves a problem. It doesn't have to be a landing page... it doesn't even have to be online. Talking is marketing. Radio is marketing. Print is marketing. Conference booths, giving out business cards, sharing your story.
Even online, your web site / landing page are not your marketing... they are where your marketing sends people to convert them into leads to hand-off to sales.
If there is anything I do despise, it is the attitude of "If you build a landing page, they will come."
Re: Ask HN: Do You Despise Marketing?
#17No, because I believe you need it if you want your work/product/service seen and used by others. Relying on pure word of mouth doesn't work, especially not in the kind of timeframe needed for a company to stay solvent.
I also feel SEO gets an unfairly bad rap. Sure, it has been abused by dodgy sites, and those sites have indeed hurt Google's search results... but many strategies in white hat SEO basically boil down to 'write/create content people want and get it in front of them in logical ways'. A lot of times, good SEO and good usability/accessibility/design go hand in hand, since most of the things that help a site rank also tend to help the user as well.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Despise Marketing?
#18I despise deceptive marketing
Re: Ask HN: Do You Despise Marketing?
#19I used to think of salespeople as slimeballs who would lie, cheat and steal to push something over on you. Any time anyone would try to sell me anything, I'd immediately become defensive and just get out of the conversation as quickly as possible.
Then I became an enterprise SaaS PM and started working on the other side of things with some really fantastic sales reps. I came to understand that, as with all jobs, there's a tremendous amount of variance in the quality of sales reps, and the good ones are actually really good. A great sales rep is an expert on her market and has a breadth of knowledge about the problems people face related to the product she's selling. She's not trying to push something you don't need; rather, she's trying to understand exactly what your problem is and help to resolve it. Obviously she's being compensated in the process, but a great sales rep selling a good product isn't going to waste time trying to foist that product on people who don't need it when she could spend her time much more productively.
A recent example of a time I really appreciated being sold to: I was looking for someone with conversion rate optimization expertise to redesign my ecommerce site, and I posted a job on Upwork. I got a lot of quotes and spoke to a few of the ones that sounded the best, and the third guy I spoke to really took the time to understand my goals, my company and my financial situation. Instead of trying to sell me a $5000 redesign of the site, he said for $350 he would review my analytics, ads and site itself and offer feedback on how to improve it from a CRO perspective. That was exactly what I wanted, but I just didn't know it was a thing. I didn't need to pay someone $5k to do a redesign - I just got a premium Shopify template and implemented it myself, and it looks great. I was really just looking for CRO advice, and because he had the domain expertise and took the time to understand my business, he was able to offer the right solution. That's what a great sales rep does.
Marketing is very much the same. A lot of it sucks because people take the shotgun approach of spamming everyone everywhere all the time and hoping a few people buy what they're selling. That doesn't mean marketing is bad, though. Once I was trying to figure out what to buy my girlfriend for Christmas, and an ad appeared on Facebook for a behind the scenes tour of the red panda exhibit at the SF Zoo. Unfortunately we broke up right before Christmas, so I ended up going with one of my buddies, but it would've been the perfect gift! That's what good marketing is - finding the right person at the right time and solving a problem.
So yeah, a lot of marketing sucks, but that doesn't mean you have to do sucky marketing. Instead of trying to play SEO games, you can just write really high quality content on relevant topics that will actually help people and make them see you as an expert. You can use influencers as a channel to reach the appropriate set of folks for your product, who will be happy to have it. There's lots of ways to market well, and I encourage you to figure out the ones that work for you before dismissing the whole concept.
Seriously, I do hope you figure it out. If you have a great product that will help people, it deserves to be marketed.
Re: Ask HN: Do You Despise Marketing?
#20Done correctly, marketing is the act of giving value (usually in the form of information or opportunity) in order to capture value. It's reciprocal at the most basic level.
Unfortunately, too many folks have figured out that they can strip mine the audience by minimizing or ignoring the first half of that transaction.
I can't really despise marketing since I've spent 30 years in and out of it. But I can damn well despise bad, selfish marketing that doesn't even try to deliver any value.