Ask HN: How to Market Before Building? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: How to Market Before Building?

#11

Post by dotMartin » Wed, Dec 04, 2024, 12:27 PM UTC

Instead of traditional pre-launch marketing, create what I call a "problem community" first. Find where your future customers are already discussing their pain points (specific Reddit threads, Discord channels, LinkedIn groups) and become the go-to problem solver there. Instead of teasing your product, document your journey of understanding their problems.

For example, if you're building a creator tool, spend 30 days publicly interviewing creators about their workflow headaches. Share insights generously. When people see you truly get their problems, they'll naturally want to know what you're building. I've seen this create waitlists of thousands before a single line of code was written.

Martin Newsletter: www.dotmartin.io

Re: Ask HN: How to Market Before Building?

#12

Post by achempion » Wed, Dec 04, 2024, 1:46 PM UTC

If you can deliver something that has value, it'll find its way.

Re: Ask HN: How to Market Before Building?

#13

Post by carlosjobim » Wed, Dec 04, 2024, 3:17 PM UTC

Make a high quality website and submit it to Google. It still works very well.

Re: Ask HN: How to Market Before Building?

#14

Post by bruce511 » Thu, Dec 05, 2024, 4:14 AM UTC

So you might be wording the question wrong. The key is in "how to market" - the state of the product us irrelevant.

In other words, if you can't figure out how to reach the customers before you have z product, you're not going to be able to figure it out after you have a product.

Since marketing is harder to figure out than code it makes sense to do that part first, not last.

Then if you fail to find the market, you haven't wasted time building the product.

To answer your question; A) identify the market. B) figure out where they hang out C) go there D) talk to them