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Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

medium.dave-bailey.com

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Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#71

Post by SyneRyder »

WA wrote: post #41
SyneRyder wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You could repurpose emails and turn them into FAQ content (= small SEO improvements). I do that, but it also creates support enquiries for competitors products. I rank well for "how to install Photoshop Plugins", which means I get the emails for how to install my competitors plugins too :) Should be great lead-gen, but I've not found a way to convert those visits into downloads/sales of my own plugins. > Have you t…

> Should be great lead-gen, but I've not found a way to convert those visits into downloads/sales of my own plugins Ah I see. You've got some general advice content and people write to you about it. Since you obviously tracked conversion for that, I see these options: a) Answer those emails sincerely as a hobby b) Answer with a template only ("Please write to the creator of that plugin you found, they'd love to help…

Ooh, I hadn't considered monetizing the non-customer support. It's a long shot, but maybe worth an experiment. Thanks for the idea!

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#72

Post by kbos87 »

WA wrote: post #22
SyneRyder wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Nine years later, and still the stream of customer support requests has not relented!" 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 ho…

I sell B2C software with a subscription of 1.99€ per month. I have 7,000 active users. I get 5-10 emails per day max. Before I charged money for my software, I was afraid of the overwhelming flood of customer support requests . Except they never came. > even one short email enquiry would wipe out a dozen sales or more (if you put a monetary value your time) Per email, yes, absolutely. Sometimes I take 20 minutes to a…

In my experience, the amount of human touch you need to provide through support, sales, implementation - is more a function of your audience than anything else. Selling to software developers, you can probably get away with low to no touch across the board. Selling to SMBs who aren't all that computer savvy? Their default reaction is going to be to look for a phone number when they have a question. They may not even know what an FAQ is.

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#73

Post by F_J_H »

sparrish wrote: post #64
F_J_H wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, for the most part. This is what marketing agencies do. You still need to provide them with the talking points and value proposition so they have the background for drafting copy for the Marketing collateral, but once they have that they can do a great job at putting together a marketing plan and executing on it, assuming you found a good agency.

> assuming you found a good agency. There's the rub. How do you find a good one? We've spent obscene amounts of money on agencies that said they could get us growth but none made the needle move. Where are all these good agencies?

Yes, that's the rub for sure. The same question is also asked by non-technical people when trying to find a developer - how do you find a good one? So, I think you can follow some of the same principles: What projects have they done in the past? What results have they produced? Can you show some examples of your work? Can we speak to your references? etc.

Although it's not "turnkey" as the OP was asking about, you can do a lot of it on your own, or at least put together an overall plan, and then use agencies to fill the gaps. Just as with starting a start-up, there is a lot of great material and thought leadership out there on how to do it, along with a lot of practical advice.

Other than a few courses as part of my business degree, and working with marketing agencies in the past, I don't have a marketing background. However, I took a deep dive into marketing over the past 18 months, and we achieved some solid results. I spent a bit of time doing some research, came up with a strategy and overall plan, and then executed. Specifically, we put a content marketing program in place, along with some lead tracking tools, spoke at a few conferences, did some webinars, etc., all of which led to deals in the six figures. (In the B2B space.)

PM me if you'd like more detail re: resources.

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#74

Post by kbos87 »

shubhamjain wrote: post #25

I jibe with the article but I disagree that marketing is something that should be pursued from Day 1. As Jessica Livingston has noted umpteen times, the first thing you need is product that delights users. Marketing activities around an idea that might not have a useful market is a bit wasteful. I don't imply that marketing is pointless at early stage but time-consuming marketing channels (blogging, social media) are…

100% agree. As a marketer, the first litmus test I apply in evaluating a role is the level of product market fit a company has achieved. As a marketer, I don't have the levers to get a company past that hump if they haven't on their own. My expertise is in driving scale, not finding the initial seeds of value.

There are places that marketing can be done before product/market fit. If you are well funded and 100% committed to building for a certain audience, there is value in creating content and building a following. But this doesn't necessarily require marketing headcount.

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#75

Post by laktek »

throwaway26960 wrote: post #61

Oddly enough, the only somewhat successful project ($20k/month peak passive income) I've ever had was when I didn't know how to code. I spent all my time on marketing and built the site in Wordpress + Plugins in 1 day.

Curious how was the long term maintenance of a Wordpress site? Like applying security fixes, etc.

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#76

Post by thetalkingcode »

TeeWEE wrote: post #21

Marketing is important, however more important is to build in a viral loop into your product, that for every new customer x>1 new customers are contacted. This is how social networks work, invite your friends systems, etc. However, even then marketing is still important. But too often marketing is seen as: Spend huge amount of money on ads. No: marketing is market research, choosing your target audience, branding, im…

and figuring out that particular viral loop in the product isn't easy. It takes lots of efforts from a marketer as well as an engineer to find out that one thing or pain point from which you get growth.

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#77

Post by yoshyosh »

MegaButts wrote: post #4
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #3

It'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…

As much as we wish this is true, the same thing happened when the Wright Brothers harnessed the power of flight. It didn't just spread like wildfire.

http://www.forbes.com/2003/11/19/1119aviation.html

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#78

Post by gnicholas »

> Great products deserve great marketing—Tweet this

For early-stage founders, this is a misleading suggestion. Yes, it's true that if you could have great marketing without any cost, you'd want to have it.

But this misses the point that if you put $5k into marketing every month, then you're putting $5k less into the product.

So the real question is, would you rather have a good product and great marketing, or a great product and good marketing? I will concede that some founders don't put enough emphasis on marketing, but quotes like this overlook the basic cost-benefit balancing act that early-stage founders live and die by.

Also, I cringe every time I see a "Tweet this" link. Especially in a piece about marketing, it reminds me that this guy wants to build up his personal brand, which is why he's blogging in the first place. I understand that, but this in-your-face reminder (3x in one blog post) makes the piece come across as less of a "I learned some lessons I want to share" post and more of a "I'm trying to build a brand so I blog a bunch, and this is what I came up with for a post."

It kills the authenticity and makes the whole thing suspect (and then when I read trite stuff like the above quote, that confirms that the information contained within isn't thoughtful—it's largely filler).

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#79

Post by nostrademons »

gnicholas wrote: post #78

> Great products deserve great marketing—Tweet this For early-stage founders, this is a misleading suggestion. Yes, it's true that if you could have great marketing without any cost, you'd want to have it. But this misses the point that if you put $5k into marketing every month, then you're putting $5k less into the product. So the real question is, would you rather have a good product and great marketing, or a great…

I think a better suggestion for early-stage founders might be to focus on information coming in rather than information going out.

You should do as much sales & marketing as you need to generate a reaction from your target users. Then pay careful attention to that reaction and adapt the product. The focus is always about learning rather than evangelizing - putting a half-baked product out there and then blasting the hell out of Facebook/Twitter/Medium/PR doesn't usually get you very many recurring projects, but putting a half-baked product out there, attempting to sell it to a few engaged potential customers, and then adapting it in response to their feedback might.

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#80

Post by gnicholas »

stevoski wrote: post #12

I built a desktop app (Poker Copilot) in 2008. I figured if I did it well, I'd have my own one-person software company supplying a steady stream of income with little ongoing effort. My product would be so intuitive that it wouldn't need a user guide. It certainly wouldn't need marketing because everyone in my target audience would spread the word that my product was what they needed! Ha, what a fool 2008 me was. Wha…

I'm curious to know if you've tried cutting down the customer support questions by offering different availability to different tiers of customers?

I spend a decent chunk of my time on support requests and have thought about this quite a bit. While the number of incoming support requests are evenly split across (1) people interested in purchasing, (2) people who have already purchased, and (3) people who are on our free tier, the latter group ends up having the longest support conversations.

I've thought about setting up an autoresponse that asks people to add their subscription ID to the email for priority service.

I don't know if this would work, backfire, or do nothing, and I'd be interested to know what others have experimented with.

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