Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products • Hacker News Board

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#81

Post by Emc2fma » Wed, Feb 22, 2017, 7:09 PM UTC

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…

What's your product?

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#82

Post by matheweis » Wed, Feb 22, 2017, 7:14 PM UTC

As a founder myself I find it's more about the difficulty in finding a marketing strategy that has an effective ROI without increasing your burn rate to a point of failure.

The article implies that all marketing will be effective, or at least that you can easily have a positive ROI just by hiring a marketer.

This is not necessarily true, especially with the limited capital that many bootstrapped startup may have available.

Experincing negative ROI (or even hearing experiences about that) seem more likely candidates for why it isn't done than the "Myths" listed here.

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#83

Post by stevoski » Wed, Feb 22, 2017, 7:37 PM UTC

gnicholas wrote: post #80

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 f…

We only have one tier of customer :)

It's an old-school desktop app with a 30-day trial period, a single payment to unlock the app, and a major new version released every two years available for an upgrade fee to existing users.

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#84

Post by DiabloD3 » Wed, Feb 22, 2017, 8:11 PM UTC

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #60

tomeehan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of SaaS businesses offer priority support for paying customers. As a SaaS founder — I've always felt it's a bit of an odd value proposition — "pay me more, and I'll fix my flawed, buggy software".

It works better with the Red Hat model: "Here's some flawed buggy software I wrote. Pay me and I'll make it work for your use case." There's a small incentive to write deliberately obscured code, but I think it gets outweighed by maintainability concerns.

Seems to be better known as the Sun/Oracle model.

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#85

Post by erichocean » Wed, Feb 22, 2017, 9:09 PM UTC

Read The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-By-Step Guide for Building a Great Company by Steve Blank — it teaches founders how to achieve product-market fit.

Once you have that, marketing is easy and cost effective. Until then, it's usually a waste of money.

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#86

Post by brilliantcode » Thu, Feb 23, 2017, 4:29 AM UTC

matheweis wrote: post #82

As a founder myself I find it's more about the difficulty in finding a marketing strategy that has an effective ROI without increasing your burn rate to a point of failure. The article implies that all marketing will be effective, or at least that you can easily have a positive ROI just by hiring a marketer. This is not necessarily true, especially with the limited capital that many bootstrapped startup may have avai…

THIS.

The WHAT is driving me nuts. I get the WHY and HOWs of numerous marketing channels and methods.

Pretty much what happens when I start blogging. I put a lot of effort but even the blog post itself must now be marketed.

Put it in on HN, Reddit and it feels like playing lottery...

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#87

Post by tibs4eva » Thu, Feb 23, 2017, 4:29 AM UTC

Great write-up. As a marketer (independent consultant for years and now founder of a digital agency), I cannot tell you how many times I have had to tell clients, "If you build it, they will not come" if they do not know your product even exists. Even so, many technical startup founders still place marketing low on the list of things to focus on early on. And I'm saying this as someone who started out on the tech side and moved to the business and marketing side later.

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#88

Post by Nomentatus » Thu, Feb 23, 2017, 6:53 AM UTC

dwenzek wrote: post #16

> Someone with less understanding of how a product actually works is often better equipped to communicate what it does than someone stuck in the weeds. 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.

My best takeaway, too.

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#89

Post by hinkley » Thu, Feb 23, 2017, 7:02 AM UTC

Mathnerd314 wrote: post #60

tomeehan wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of SaaS businesses offer priority support for paying customers. As a SaaS founder — I've always felt it's a bit of an odd value proposition — "pay me more, and I'll fix my flawed, buggy software".

It works better with the Red Hat model: "Here's some flawed buggy software I wrote. Pay me and I'll make it work for your use case." There's a small incentive to write deliberately obscured code, but I think it gets outweighed by maintainability concerns.

And the Apache Model: Write awful, placeholder documentation, then get an O'Reilly book deal to finally explain yourself and your code.

Re: Why Founders Fail To Market Their Products

#90

Post by grammarnazzzi » Thu, Feb 23, 2017, 6:23 PM UTC

It surprises me to see so many comments about this article. I couldn't get past the grammar problems in the first paragraph. The most compelling thing at the beginning of this article is the stock photograph of a pretty girl seemingly praying in a coffee shop.

"Founders predictably underestimate the importance of hiring marketers."

They do? Who are these founders? Founders of what? And who are these people predicting the estimations of these founders? How did you learn of these predictions? Are the predictors publishing their founder predictions somewhere?

"As a result, many startups don’t get round to marketing their product until it’s too late."

I realize I'm being pedantic now, but "get round" threw me for a moment. It's another break in the flow of reading his message. I wondered what's "get round" mean? Is that like getting fat? Like getting "round about the middle"? Oh. he means "get around to". Googling "get round" returns 400k results. Googling "get around": 55M. I guess some people do say "get round." 1 out of 137 people. Word choice matters.

"This happened to me and I’ve thought long and hard about why this happens."

What's he referring to? What is "this" that happened? I had to stop and reread the previous sentence to figure out what "this" and "happened" refers to: "startups don’t get round to marketing their product until it’s too late." So a start up didn't get round to marketing a product. Okay, so I guess that implies that a startup was lazy and irresponsible by not getting around to marketing a product. In short, the problem is that something bad was done to a product. That's what happened to you? Inflicted upon you? David Bailey is a product and a startup didn't market him responsibly.

I stopped reading at this point. He put so little care into editing and proofreading his article, I figured he probably put just as little effort into crafting a meaningful message and formulating logical conclusions.

I guess I'll never find out what the pretty girl is praying for.