Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

Ha, what a fool 2008 me was. What I didn't realise was that my two main tasks for years would be marketing and customer support.

Coding new features (of which many were requested) and fixing bugs (of which there were many) had to be scheduled around the twice-daily customer support windows and the marketing efforts.

Nine years later, and still the stream of customer support requests has not relented! Nine years and still I'm focusing on marketing one day a week!

And of course, there are still bugs.

I had a niche product that went "viral" within its small community. We immediately had people trying to imitate us, and most failed so badly that their products didn't work at all and any gains they made were quickly rolled back; ultimately, these copycats only served to promote our actually working product further, so they were net good things.

A few key people who controlled large platforms in this niche spurned us, presumably because they intended to copy our featureset at some point, and actively removed any reference to our product. Despite this, we had continual growth with relatively small marketing budgets.

After about a year, a competitor whose product occasionally worked emerged and despite being much worse than us along every conceivable axis, they cannibalized our niche market within 2 months using spammy marketing tactics (astroturfing, fake followers/likes, SEO link rings (now called "Private Blog Networks" in SEO parlance)). They also forged alliances with some of the niche platforms that refused to allow discussion of our product (though these companies ignored similar offers when I tried to make them). The new competitor eventually spammed so thoroughly that they caused a PR issue for a large company whose data this sector depended on. My company and all others that occasionally functioned in this sector, which at this point included me, the spam company, and 3-4 atrocious copies of the spam company, were all shut down by legal threats from this large company.

The point of this protracted story is that it seems that any business that could go from 0 to millions would be immediately bombarded by imitators, spammers, and copycats, whose superior marketing game would destroy the original company as long as they can imitate 10% of the necessary core functionality. Did you have defenses against this? If so, what were they?

This is so true!

Yet, it took me a lot of time to understand this. Maybe because this is not always easy to see that the shift perceived, between what I said about my product and how my interlocutor reworded it, is in fact a move from details to the product's essence.

I wish I could upvote this more than once. Customer support burden is always underestimated. It's time consuming, especially if you want to do it properly & not just outsource to someone overseas following a script. Even releasing something as freeware is likely to cause an unintended stream of support enquiries. I have no idea how the folks selling 99c apps manage it, even one short email enquiry would wipe out a dozen sales or more (if you put a monetary value your time).

Kudos on charging a sensible price for your app & upgrades! I imagine at that price point it's okay if a sale incurs a support ticket or two.

Surely the "inherently viral" aspect of a product is a marketing strategy? (albeit one that is open to optimism)

This seems to be a larger part of the problem; one developer's marketing strategy is another's "just build it this way".