Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
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Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
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Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#2Yeah I should have started marketing two years ago, or at least show my idea to other people. I started that only after the first year, with a survey to find out if my idea is right (and it was). The thing about marketing, or anything that involves people from outside, is that you can easily motivate yourself by dropping details no one wants (saving time ftw) or add new ones if you see there's someone who's interested in this or that little extra.
Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#3Reason #3: The boy who cried vaporware. If you end up with a history of advertising vaporware, nobody will listen when you finally get it right.
If you are super amazing and you can get your first product to market, this obviously doesn't apply. But most people aren't. And most of those who do, they're just lucky.
Reason #4: Duke Nukem Forever will be out any day now. If you take too long to get it to market, your product will be a joke and people will lose interest.
Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#4Disagree: Technical and design execution matters a lot. Facebook was brilliant in both. While myspace pages were a mess and friendster was having trouble keeping the server up,
facebook out executed both.
If you don't have a good product marketing can't help you. Marketing can give you an edge over other equally good products but cannot guarantee success.
Dropbox / Tweetie (before it stagnated) / Minecraft etc succeeded because the product was good. Not because of marketing
Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#5Reason #3: The boy who cried vaporware. If you end up with a history of advertising vaporware, nobody will listen when you finally get it right. If you are super amazing and you can get your first product to market, this obviously doesn't apply. But most people aren't. And most of those who do, they're just lucky. Reason #4: Duke Nukem Forever will be out any day now. If you take too long to get it to market, your pr…
Reason #5: You're not at all sure what exactly the idea of the final product will be. You've got ideas bouncing around in your head and you want to try them to get a feel for what might be a real product.
Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#6Reason #3: The boy who cried vaporware. If you end up with a history of advertising vaporware, nobody will listen when you finally get it right. If you are super amazing and you can get your first product to market, this obviously doesn't apply. But most people aren't. And most of those who do, they're just lucky. Reason #4: Duke Nukem Forever will be out any day now. If you take too long to get it to market, your pr…
Can you think of a person who has been advertising vaporware that you would not listen to? I don't think that I can.
A similar claim is that people won't give a bad product a second chance, even after many years. But the point is, unless you launch like Cuil, you won't have many users in the beginning. So if some percentage of those few hundred people lose faith, it could be a small price to pay for the knowledge you will gain.
As for Duke Nukem Forever, if it came out today there would be plenty of interest. It might be considered a joke but that is only really a threat someones ego. Of course, it is a financial threat as well but that is because of the massive development costs, not marketing that back-fired.
Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#7Disagree: Technical and design execution matters a lot. Facebook was brilliant in both. While myspace pages were a mess and friendster was having trouble keeping the server up, facebook out executed both. If you don't have a good product marketing can't help you. Marketing can give you an edge over other equally good products but cannot guarantee success. Dropbox / Tweetie (before it stagnated) / Minecraft etc succee…
I don't think there is any mention of marketing at the cost of technical execution in the article.
If your market does not know your product exists, it won't matter how good it is anyway. I'm reminded of Hugh MacLeod's brilliant cartoon "Welcome to Nobody Cares": http://www.gapingvoid.com/11444661477.jpg
edit: I stand corrected. "technical execution is mostly trivial"? No thank you. I did not become an engineer to write wedding planner software.
Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#8"No, these days even technical execution is mostly trivial (with a few exceptions for apps built around unique algorithms). Far more important is marketing execution."
Can someone please smack this idiot?
Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#9Reason #3: The boy who cried vaporware. If you end up with a history of advertising vaporware, nobody will listen when you finally get it right. If you are super amazing and you can get your first product to market, this obviously doesn't apply. But most people aren't. And most of those who do, they're just lucky. Reason #4: Duke Nukem Forever will be out any day now. If you take too long to get it to market, your pr…
Can you think of a person who has been advertising vaporware that you would not listen to? I don't think that I can. A similar claim is that people won't give a bad product a second chance, even after many years. But the point is, unless you launch like Cuil, you won't have many users in the beginning. So if some percentage of those few hundred people lose faith, it could be a small price to pay for the knowledge you…
>Can you think of a person who has been advertising vaporware that you would not listen to?
Microsoft. I ignore anything they say until they have something I can actually buy. They've made too many announcements that were just never spoken of again.
Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding
#10After reading Zed Shaw's post yesterday about how "Long Beards" are getting marginalized by "Product Guys" I cringe when I hear bullshit like this:
Ideas (and in most cases even the code itself) is worth little. It’s marketing that makes the startup.
(Mind you, ideas are worth little, but the rest... yeah)