My answer is marketing, it is vital, and it would have been much better if we started marketing earlier.
Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
301–310 of 492 posts
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#302Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Build it and they come" works, for example Hotmail and Google did not invest into marketing initially. But it works in non saturated market with a few players.
Hotmail did a fair amount of commercials https://youtu.be/IQRZcfAwn0g
Also if I remember correctly every email sent from an Hotmail address had something like "this email was sent with Hotmail" at the bottom.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#303Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'll be that guy. Actually it's Always Be Closing. Obligatory Glenngary Glen Ross scene. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w7y6EOGY87U&t=104s
Depends on your product. If you're radio shack, sure, always be closing. If you're selling me an essential component of my business, and I expect to have a long term relationship with you... concentrate on the relationship and trust. I worked for a small startup that won a HUGE contract because the big guy stopped supporting them to their satisfaction. We twisted over backwards to support their needs and they liked t…
Agreed with the sentiment that there are different kinds of clients/opportunities and sales cycles. However the idea specifically in ABC is the 'close'. 'Closing' is the act of securing payment from an entity. I've seen a lot of 'sales guys' who talk about how hard they're selling. But ultimately getting the money into your bank account is the real goal. Everything else is derivative.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#304Hired a business consultant. Built systems for sales, marketing, etc. Had real goals. Everything about growing a business is hard. The easier part was the actual consulting work. Still hard. We sold after building for 9 years with a good exit.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#305I think for me it has been a couple things:
1. Focus: Adopting management by objectives and concentration exclusively on them
2. Hiring: Spending more time finding top talent through referrals and being more prepared for interviews
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#306Marketing. The one thing I pushed off for as long as possible. Because it was always easier to build more, than it was to go into marketing / sales. No clever tricks, or growth hacks. Me and my cofounders just connected with everyone we could on LinkedIn, twitter, discord, etc. and talked to people about the product: https://rysolv.com/ . In fact, part of the reason we delayed marketing was looking for some clever wa…
Another thing Paul Graham wrote:
> Our startup spent its entire marketing budget on PR: at a time when we were assembling our own computers to save money, we were paying a PR firm $16,000 a month. And they were worth it.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#307Marketing. The one thing I pushed off for as long as possible. Because it was always easier to build more, than it was to go into marketing / sales. No clever tricks, or growth hacks. Me and my cofounders just connected with everyone we could on LinkedIn, twitter, discord, etc. and talked to people about the product: https://rysolv.com/ . In fact, part of the reason we delayed marketing was looking for some clever wa…
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Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#308Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a lot of people discover it the hard way and most still haven't Some of it may be "morality" component, for lack of a better word. Some people want the world to be one where people and ideas advance on merit rather than via popularity or "knowing the right people", and act upon that hope subconsciously or as a justification for avoiding unfamiliar risk. I'd wager it's also a bit more common among software developer…
Every job sooner or later is a sales job. If we're not teaching this in the education system, I'd argue we're doing a poor job of teaching morals in the education system - although the American system - at least in the better schools - does a much better job of this than systems in Asia.
Agreed. Life in general is sales. Job interview? Sales. First date? Sales. Sales is more than "Here's my product/service. Give me money". It's the art of getting someone to do what you want. I can only speak to American culture, but I feel like most people feel icky about that because the first thought that comes to their mind is the car dealership guy that's trying to sell you garbage like gap insurance that you don't need. Kind of like networking, it feels by definition manipulative when it doesn't have to be.
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#309Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hotmail did a fair amount of commercials https://youtu.be/IQRZcfAwn0g
Also if I remember correctly every email sent from an Hotmail address had something like "this email was sent with Hotmail" at the bottom.
Also email services advertise themselves in the email address!
Re: Ask HN: What made your business take off that you wish you'd done much earlier?
#310It might sound dumb, but monetizing my site was the stepping stone to make it take off. I run a solitaire website called https://online-solitaire.com/ that ran for a few years without me earning any money from it. I kind of thought that no-one earned money from banner ads anymore, so I didn't even bother with them. One day I decided to try it out and earned around $1000 the first month. That gave me the boost to spen…
That's crazy.