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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

#51

Post by dasil003 »

zeemonkee wrote: post #46
dasil003 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This attitude bugs me a lot. There is probably a path for every single person in this country to make a million dollars in the next year if they were just "savvy enough" to take advantage of it. It seems everyone wants to diminish Zuck's success by ascribing luck to it, but let me tell you something. Zuck executed the shit out of Facebook. Did the community and mindshare just come out of thin air? There's no good rea…

I'm not saying his success was due purely to luck, but that luck was a major factor. Being the right place and right time is a huge part of it. He was the right age, in the right environment, when the right technology reached the right tipping point and critical mass. I'm not disparaging Zuckerberg's ability or hard work. However many with greater ability and who have worked harder have failed because of circumstance…

But isn't it just a platitude you tell yourself to feel better that you will never be that successful? How can you be sure Zuck isn't better than those who failed? And how can you be sure those who failed didn't do something wrong? You see how pointless this is?

Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

#52

Post by SabrinaDent »

I'm not sure why we require 1,500 words to convey the very basic idea that you shouldn't build a product in a vacuum. This entire article could fit in a tweet:

Show it to the people you want to sell it to as you build it, and start building a mailing list before launch.

Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

#53

Post by [deleted] »

punnned wrote: post #31

"Ideas are worth nothing" - it's a big statement and quite a prevalent view these days. I think it's true to an extent - a successful startup doesn't need an entirely new, innovative idea but at the same time a new, innovative idea doesn't necessarily result in a successful startup. I think what's more important is not the idea itself, but the angle you take to market your idea. And that is why the blog post has some…

[deleted]

Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

#54

Post by 8ren »

For every 1000 people who has the idea, one actually does it.

I think the really big differentiator is not how well you execute (in code or in marketing), but whether you do it at all.

If you're prepared to stumble-and-ratchet (ie. explore; try-fail-try-again; "pivot"; experiment), ahead of everyone else, you win.

The only exception is if someone is massively more skilled/knowledgeable/resourced/intelligent/determined than you. But a funny thing is... that for a new market-product fit, you are the expert, and the most skilled, because the only way to get the knowledge and skill is to stumble-and-ratchet. You are also most well-known in the market. It's really hard for someone to catch up.

Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

#55

Post by rergwergwerg »

grammaton wrote: post #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?

My pleasure, I'm shocked at how the HN community responds to that article.

Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

#56

Post by krakensden »

loewenskind wrote: post #15
coliveira wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, so your example just shows that you can be super successful using the vaporware strategy...

Their successful in spite of announcing a lot of vaporware, but their biggest win of all; windows was top secret until it was released, right?

My understanding was that the first release of Windows came a long time after the initial announcement, but it was a little before my time.

Microsoft's usual strategy, that no one has explicitly stated yet, is to try and discourage its customers from buying a product by promising the moon 'just around the corner' for a couple years. Microsoft is seen as a better long term bet, and this depresses sales even though it doesn't actually have a product yet, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy of the failure of its competitors.

So when people are angrily referring to Microsoft vaporware, that's what they're talking about.

Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

#57

Post by Poiesis »

patio11 wrote: post #17
wccrawford wrote: post #3

Reason #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 anyone recall the names of the two products I announced on my blog and then abandoned for various reasons? Was anyone here even aware that happened at all? Just failing isn't nearly enough to get people to remember you. You have to be truly epic to be remembered for that. ( How many enterprise deployments go years late for every Slashdot joke about Duke Nukem again?)

Only one I remember is Kalzumeus, which I think was a rental property management webapp for targeted for single-family residences as opposed to apartment buildings and the like. Was going to have awesome integration with Paypal. I could be wrong, that's from memory and I could be confusing you with someone else.

Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

#58

Post by kranner »

run4yourlives wrote: post #49
grammaton wrote: post #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?

Why? He's pretty much correct unless you are taking the statement hyper-literally. Few web applications are technological breakthroughs. You can find exceptions in things like Google maps and such, but for the rest of the startup scene, it is all about the execution and the marketing.

> unless you are taking the statement hyper-literally.

The burden to avoid or justify hyperbole is on the author.

There is much more to the startup scene and tech in general than the dime-a-dozen CRUD apps the author is implicitly talking about.

Re: Why You Should Start Marketing the Day You Start Coding

#59

Post by daliusd »

rwalling wrote: post #37
kloncks wrote: post #19

I absolutely hate hearing these things: Remember, ideas are worth nothing. And these days, even your code is worth very little. Alright, so creativity and idea-making worth nothing . Technical expertise to make it? nothing . Honestly, what's left? The business side of things? Maybe this article just bothered me because I was getting similar vibes to "you can just have an idea and hire some programming monkey to creat…

You realize the statements you've quoted are a 3-sentence tangent that has nothing to do with the point of the article, right? There's another 1500+ words that don't rely on this being true or not. Secondly, I didn't say technical expertise is worth "nothing." Of course it's worth something. But as developers, we need to realize that, except in rare exceptions, our code is worth a lot less than we think it is.

That's great article you have written and I personally really liked it. I will even take some ideas from it. I think you shouldn't pay to much attention to people who take everything as personal insult and fail to see behind their personal world.
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