Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products
medium.dave-bailey.com
Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products
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Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products
#2I would say that one of the most common problems is unrealistic expectations placed on Marketers for highly technical products. Successful technical companies realized long ago that they must use teams which combine skills to tackle individual projects in Marketing & Advertising. There is some magic combination of experience, luck, and process - and usually many projects in parallel are required so that ineffective approaches can be quickly discarded and another tried. I've been involved in successful marketing efforts - and the failed ones were usually doomed from the start by executives with unrealistic expectations - resulting in process and organizations which can't work.
Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products
#3It's almost pathos at this point in the hacker community that if you do any marketing or promotion you're a shill and wantrepreneur at best and a charlatan and huckster at a minimum.
I know I used to feel this way before I really tried to launch a product. Now I know that there is no such thing as a product that is so good that it sells itself. In fact the best technical solutions I've seen have failed because the market doesn't care about perfection, it cares about mind share.
There is still a stallmanesque anarchist quality to some engineers that view commercial success as tainted. I think I can appreciate that in some philosophical senses, but let's not get too high on our horses.
Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products
#4It's almost pathos at this point in the hacker community that if you do any marketing or promotion you're a shill and wantrepreneur at best and a charlatan and huckster at a minimum. I know I used to feel this way before I really tried to launch a product. Now I know that there is no such thing as a product that is so good that it sells itself. In fact the best technical solutions I've seen have failed because the ma…
While this is almost always true, there are exceptions to this rule. If you're working on something that is inherently press friendly, you don't really need to market it. You have the first real self-driving car and you just drove from New York City to Los Angeles? I'm pretty sure that will get you whatever press you want. And then of course there's WhatsApp, which was so focused on solely their product that they had no address or phone number for investors/media to find them. Yes yes, the exception does not make the rule, but they are still important data points.
That aside, 99.??% of startups will need to market heavily to compete successfully.
Edit: And I just noticed the (Software) parentheses in the title. I guess you can replace self-driving cars with advanced AI, say the first AI to pass the Turing Test.
Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products
#5It's almost pathos at this point in the hacker community that if you do any marketing or promotion you're a shill and wantrepreneur at best and a charlatan and huckster at a minimum. I know I used to feel this way before I really tried to launch a product. Now I know that there is no such thing as a product that is so good that it sells itself. In fact the best technical solutions I've seen have failed because the ma…
While this is almost always true, there are exceptions to this rule. If you're working on something that is inherently press friendly, you don't really need to market it. You have the first real self-driving car and you just drove from New York City to Los Angeles? I'm pretty sure that will get you whatever press you want. And then of course there's WhatsApp, which was so focused on solely their product that they had…
Like you said though, it is limited to a very few exceptions. Not every company that receives press grows as desired.
I was co-founder at a project that has received 10+ newspaper articles (progressively better placed) and growth kept declining over the months only to become negative.
However, I obviously understand that one can never look at these factors in isolation and that there are multiple variables on which growth depends. I would also not consider press to be a part of marketing really.
Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
While this is almost always true, there are exceptions to this rule. If you're working on something that is inherently press friendly, you don't really need to market it. You have the first real self-driving car and you just drove from New York City to Los Angeles? I'm pretty sure that will get you whatever press you want. And then of course there's WhatsApp, which was so focused on solely their product that they had…
Like you said though, it is limited to a very few exceptions. Not every company that receives press grows as desired. I was co-founder at a project that has received 10+ newspaper articles (progressively better placed) and growth kept declining over the months only to become negative. However, I obviously understand that one can never look at these factors in isolation and that there are multiple variables on which g…
I guess an important caveat for the exception to the rule is the product has to be so good that it just automatically makes money. A true self-driving car has an obvious path to profitability. A social media platform that is an existential threat to Facebook is an obvious target for an acquisition.
Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products
#7I call it the "Build It And They Will Come" Hollywood myth.
Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products
#8If you have the product on the app marketplace and it's growing and generating money, there's no reason to bleed money. And it's absolutely no reason to shut it down. Make your operations more efficient. That will also help when scaling up.
Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products
#9Lately I started to understand more and more about the benefit and importance of marketing and starting to market early. This article summarizes the benefits in a clean and easy-to-read items.
I think, hiring a marketer is a big problem. Let's say you are a group of engineers building a good product and you know you need to hire marketers. The questions are, how do you hire a marketer? What criteria do you seek in a marketer? How do people become marketers? One obvious choice is trying to find someone who marketed a similar product before but it is not always easy. I think this is also the case for hiring sales people.
Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products
#10i have built products that went to millions of users, zero marketing. If the product is inherently viral, you don't need to market. Othwerwise, you do.